Technically you're supposed to wait around and consume your product at the shop where you've bought it, but I didn't have any objections to doing one-in one-out, so as long as I bought a new drink I just dropped the refuse from the last one at the store where I bought the next one.
IDK man, I was just there for 2 weeks in Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo, and there were so few publicly accessible trashcans that I started considering photographing the handful I saw (2-3 next to drink vending machines, and one (1) large one in Shinjuku's main luxury-tourism thoroughfare) for their shiny rarity. At one point we were joined by our third member, and we warned them first thing "there are no trash cans in Japan!" and sure enough, about 2 hours later, they were clutching an empty beverage, looking around futilely for somewhere to throw it out...
I was there for a month, a year ago, but this is all just anecdata.
It's well known there isn't an abundance of public rubbish bins, but there are plenty that are adjacent to where you are likely generating rubbish (or recycling) - eg. konbibis.
I suspect spending all your time in the frustratingly tourist-dense triad likely skews your experiences of the country. I haven't been to Kobe, but it's doubtless similarly afflicted, and presumably has responded in a similar way.
The absence is well-known and described in places like Wikipedia. Also, how many major capital cities in Japan should I spend time in before it's not 'anecdata'? Should I get a sample of another 10 or 20 Tokyos before you're satisfied?
FWIW, I did a LLM research report about numbers, and they pulled up some interesting cites: https://gwern.net/doc/japan/2026-11-03-gpt6astra-japansmissi... Places like Osaka have deliberately removed their city trashcans (from 5000 to zero since 2007, while Kyoto apparently got rid of 500 recently), and the vending machine trashcans are inadequate because they're only supposed to be for bottles but of course pick up a lot of other trash because what other option is there, while konbinis report problems with people using their tiny little trashcans a lot. There's also some interesting dynamics here where the overuse of trashcans becomes the justification for removing them, thereby externalizing all the costs onto people (especially tourists, according to the Japan Tourism Agency's regular large-scale surveys, where a shockingly large percentage single out trash cans as a problem in their visit).
> but there are plenty that are adjacent to where you are likely generating rubbish (or recycling) - eg. konbibis.
As already noted, I didn't see many adjacent to konbinis. (Inside them, sure, but that is definitionally not a 'public rubbish bin'. That's a private one, and we felt awkward just going into stores to use their trash. Similar to using a store's restroom without any intent of shopping there. Some "plenty"!)
> I suspect spending all your time in the frustratingly tourist-dense triad likely skews your experiences of the country
Yes, I expect it skews my trash bin prevalence too high. Because tourist-heavy places should have more, not less.
Sorry, when I said 'adjacent to where you're generating waste - eg a konbini' - I meant the konbini bin itself. So, adjacent to _you_ (and your new rubbish) - not adjacent to the store. I could perhaps have used the word proximal.
AIUI the history is a bit murky, and it's mostly fiscal, but with some terrorism response - the sarin gas, and then other cities having attacks, and bins being seen as a safety risk.
Here in AU we had a famous (because they're so rare) bombing in the 1980's (the Hilton bombing, for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting) - about which much has been written. I think about 20 years ago, give or take quite a few, there's been a move to transparent public rubbish bins, and I'm sure the placement, shape, etc of those has been considered by planners with those risks in mind.
A related domestic anecdote - from the same era - one of our more interesting politicians in Sydney set about removing public bins, on the premise that their presence increased street litter (you see people put rubbish on top of a full bin, and it's blown away a few moments later).
Back to Japan - it seems to have been mostly a response to citizens avoiding rubbish collection fees at home by taking household waste to public bins. I don't know if that can be correlated tidily to higher density ~= higher tourism areas?
In any case, while we travelled there, it was rare that we had a problem with rubbish, but we were prepared -- we either followed the locals' habit (eat/drink where you buy and immediately ditch in their bin) and/or we were invariably carrying daypacks so we could take waste back to our hotel.
> Yes, I expect it skews my trash bin prevalence too high. Because tourist-heavy places should have more, not less.
I understand why you might think that, but I would suggest that it's not a universally agreed argument.
> So, adjacent to _you_ (and your new rubbish) - not adjacent to the store.
Yes, I figured that is what you meant, which is why I then explained why it still sucks. What if I don't want to eat something entirely then and there in the konbini I bought it...? What if I have trash from some other source?
> it seems to have been mostly a response to citizens avoiding rubbish collection fees at home by taking household waste to public bins.
Yes, that was highlighted in the LLM report. And is an example of the perverse dynamics and poverty mindset, where an entire society is distorted in the name of conservation, where the high usage of trash cans becomes a reason to not have them. (I am still thinking about the multiple 3/4-star luxury hotels I stayed in which provided some of the lowest-quality gas-station-tier toilet paper I have ever used - a false economy all the more unjustifiable given how little toilet paper a guest would use thanks to the wonderful bidets!)
> but we were prepared
Precisely. I was confused for the first week: "how does this work? How are the locals throwing their trash away away? Surely they don't just reorganize their lives around this limitation, and tolerate things that few other societies tolerate, and let an obsession with litter and recycling run their lives and dictate when and where they can eat or even just drink some water on a hot humid day? There must be some trick or convention I am not getting, maybe some trash cans hidden away somewhere under an unfamiliar appearance." And then I realized, "oh. They do. That's how it works." And I too reorganized my life to submit to the trash planners.
The answer to your first question is 'day pack or pocket'.
I find LLMs pay a lot more attention to speculative blog posts about these things, as they out-number actual policy rationale - in the case of the North Sydney (AU) removal of bins, there's surprisingly few resources still surviving (or at least indexed) outside of newspaper interviews, and so I'm not convinced we have access to the full set of motivations and results analysis.
I suspect the Japanese motivation is cleaner, as I noted, and you have also concluded.
I spent a fair bit of time on /r/JapanTravelTips as part of our planning - it's probably the third or fouth most talked about topic there, after 'where to eat in Tokyo' (sigh), and how to use a fast train.
In any case, daypacks are the answer to many challenges, including this one.
Personal anecdote, but I lived in Okinawa for two years, and can state that I _never_ saw a single trash can in the street. Inside buildings, sure, but not outside.
It’s rather obvious that if the dems take the senate and the congress next week, it will be fight for survival for the ruling top, with Trump at the top spot, as they will be looking at a very real possibility of getting trialed and jailed.
Given what Trump did when he lost the election, we can bet that whatever comes now will be way way more nasty and disruptive.
Then, if the dems don't win, it will imply a massive scale of election fraud, which too will stir sh*t in another, but equally significant way.
So one way or another, the market volatility is all but guaranteed, and a significant market slide is also very likely as people will be parking in cash/gold for a while. And weak tech earnings is just the right trigger.
I thought you were referring to Dems adopting an anti-datacenter stance.
A clamp on down on DC construction would basically slam the current economy into a wall.
Lots of people celebrate that as being some kind of end of AI, but it wouldn't be, it would ultimately just throw gas on the fire of "we need to cut heads, figure out how to get AI to leverage your productivity".
If the Democrats win they will of course impeach Trump, but he can't be convicted without 2/3 of the Senate, and the Democrats have no chance of attaining that in the Senate. So the only chance of Trump being convicted while in office is if the Republicans turn on him, which I don't see happening without something very dramatic happening, like him attempting (and hopefully failing) to use nuclear weapons against Iran.
The can of whoop-ass the entire Republican party is about to take at every level on every ballot in every state might just be sufficient to alert some Senators that it's time to jump ship.
Obviously Republicans will win a large number of these elections, but even their victories will be a source of great alarm.
Trump doesn’t lose support of congresspeople except those on their way out. I don’t suspect nukes would change that equation, despite wreaking havoc on markets and humanity as a whole. The right wing propaganda machine would find an angle (probably fear of imminent attack) to make it seem prudent and even heroic. The reins have been shredded for a long time and the horse just keeps running wild, cheered on by those who would have any power to wrangle it.
At what point do constituents of Republican Senators have an influence over them?
Democratic and Republican voters are suffering equally.
At some point of rising costs of living, Republicans will break with dying Trump. They’ll blame his old age, and as Lindsey Graham put it “that Hitler shit.”
It won’t happen overnight, but I would love to see the source on those figures.
Trump is cancelling rallies left and right in key states as we speak, because he has put himself and “that Hitler shit” on the midterm ballot, and it’s not going well.
The man claims he doesn’t know who David Duke or the KKK is, like we’re all that stupid.
All while he sends Americans to die in Iran for “nuclear weapons” while ignoring North Korea’s heist of $5B in crypto to do the same. Giving Russia billions of U.S. tax dollars for a few days worth of diesel just prolongs the Ukrainian defense against their invasion.
How’s the national debt cost per American trending since the start of the 2nd term? Has the massive taxpayer funded budget increase been worth ICE detaining 500 American citizens and killing at least three citizens without any shred of accountability?
You may be right that 75% of ~50% of voters approve, but the negligent spending without accountability will only be allowed to go so far. Fiscal conservatives will step in when their stock prices tank.
Reminder that while the election for the next congress is next week, the next congress is seated in January. The political agendas from that new congress will likely materialize after the results of the election as campaign promises conform to the political realities of who has a majority, and by what margin.
There's stack the CPU primitive, and there's stack the heap-allocated data structure. Goose's multiple stacks are the latter. Unrelated to OS-managed thread stacks. More like VM-managed thread stacks in Java and other bytecode languages, which also live on the heap.
This. The only mainstream alternative is Android, and I'm already "voting with my wallet" against Samsung, Google, and the rest for violating user privacy even more than Apple does.
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