Ridgeline subscribers —

A funny thing happens when a Snickers bar goes from whole to eaten — the wrapper transmorgifies from useful to toxic. Suddenly, this thing that was keeping germs and dirt off your chocolate sugar log is now “useless” and with this comes the heaviest burden a modern person unencumbered by genocide or famine can hold: garbage responsibility.

I have taken visitors for many walks around Japan. Around Tokyo, sure, but also around the hinterlands. Some days we carry bentos arranged by the previous night’s inn. Nice little cardboard or plastic boxes with rice balls and pickles and maybe a piece of grilled fish. Yum. Oh, how grateful we are for those meals up in the mountains, bright sun shining down upon us, surrounded by chirping things, dramatic vistas all around. We eat and feel the food turn to fuel and our spirits are lifted. And then, when the eating has finished a strange, pathological, entitled shift takes place: Certain travelers among us become obsessed — obsessed — with finding a place to dump that now empty bento packaging. The thought of returning it to their pack (though it is now the exact same thing as it was thirty minutes prior, simply … lighter) is unbearable. Garbage? Back in my pack? To be carried forward? No. No this is not an option. Their palms sweat. Brows glisten. Anything but having to carry garbage. We walk and they hold it in their hands like nuclear waste. I plead with them: Just shove in your pack, but they are deaf to reason. I’ve had folks run through fields because they spotted a farmer’s garbage can a hundred meters out. (Please don’t do that, I whisper, as they rush off like a broken algorithm.) Others have defied physics — compressing it to can size and shoving it into the rare recycling container for a vending machine. WhY arE tHeRE nO gaRbAGe cAnS?!, they wail. (Because we’re on a mountain. But why are there vending machines?! Because we’re near a service road for loggers.)

The first time I walked into a random shop in Tokyo and asked to throw away something (a Starbucks cup, perhaps? an item I did not buy from the shop itself) was twenty-five years ago. The owner looked at me like I had just asked him if I could jump on his desk and take a shit. I’ve never bothered a shop with my garbage since.

In Kamakura, Starbucks has big signs instructing non-Japanese customers to please not leave their take-away cups in random locations. (Apparently this was becoming endemic.) There are no garbage cans in Kamakura, and, indeed, if you are buying a coffee to go, you will be responsible for that receptacle for, potentially, a very long time. This is your grandé-sized hair shirt to bear.

This obsession with the immediate “unburdening” of a thing you created is common in non-Japanese contexts, but I posit: The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage. Garbage responsibility is something we’ve long since abdicated not only to faceless cans on street corners (or just all over the street, as seems to be the case in Manhattan or Paris), but also faceless developing countries around the world. Our oceans teem with the waste from generations of averted eyes. And I believe the two — local pathologies and attendant global pathologies — are not not connected.

The modern condition consists of a constant self-infantilization, of any number of “non-adulting” activities. The main being, of course, plugging into a dopamine casino right before going to sleep and right upon waking up. At least a morning cigarette habit in 1976 gave one time to look at the world in front of one’s eyes (and a gentle nicotine buzz). Other non-adulting activities include relinquishment of general attention, concentration, and critical thinking capabilities. The desire for deus ex machina style political intercession that belies the complexities of real-world systems. Easy answers, easy solutions to problems of unfathomable scale. Scientific retardation because it “feels” good. Deliverance — deliverance! — now, with as little effort as possible.

Personally, I don’t love carrying my garbage around with me, but I recognize that it wouldn’t exist without my intervention. Nobody ran up and asked me to hold an empty cup. I thoughtlessly bought something. Thoughtlessly consumed it, and now I have to hold onto the detritus for a little while? Great. It’s easy. Easy to embrace that modicum of responsibility for your own waste. This is my protest song, the world’s lamest: I will attend to my garbage without complaint. Maybe give it a try next time you’re in Japan? It’s very exciting — to realize you will not be killed by your garbage, that holding a Snickers’ wrapper will not drain your crypto reserves, that not having piles of everyone else’s garbage all around is quite a nice bonus when walking through a city. And it might just keep you from buying unnecessary junk.

Otherwise, if you must dispose — just please don’t stick it in a milk flap, and leave those poor farmers alone.

My new — 99% rant-free — pop-up, About a Nightingale, starts on Sunday. Sign up here, ya dingdongs.

C