Real genuine plastic

The culture of convenience is the culture of disposability. KS looks at our fetish for instant consumer gratification and its consequences for the environment.

Loss Leaders
“What I think has been lost — and forever, as it can never return — is the Japaneseness of Japan. Manners, language use, as well as the physical things like the basis of culture. Things have become so un-Japanese.”
— British woodblock artist and Aichi resident David Stones
'05/9/24 Yomiuri Shimbun

Setting aside the subtle irony of that statement issuing from a person whose very existence in Japan may actually be contributing to the Japanese-ness he so laments disappearing, Stones' argument is one worth taking up, if only for comparisons' sake. Heartfelt paeans aside, the times truly are 'a changing; the popular image of Japan as the “traditional,” set-in-stone, Far Eastern-Shire is a stereotype going the way of … well, wood-block artistry.

While there is, of course, the throwback-quaintness of modern sumo tournaments, Kyoto's nostalgia-inducing “Old Japan” neighborhoods and the rich cultural heritage of the nation's onsen baths, there is also the fact that a hulking Mongolian and a Georgian expatriate seem to dominate most of the tournaments these days, that the city of Kyoto provides subsidies to city residents not to modernize their houses (the better to seduce tourists), and that one of the latest and greatest bath complexes in Kansai is not a natural hot spring, but rather a many-roomed (and entirely unnatural) marvel known as Spa World.

Consider the all-encompassing network of modern conveniences that makes up the day of the average Kansai resident — throwaway plastic umbrella bags outside of supermarkets on rainy days; convenience store clerks hurling themselves at light-speed toward their cash registers to assist waiting customers; train ticket stubs that are taken automatically for you after passing through your destination gate; cell phones that have more or less eliminated the need to actually learn the more-difficult kanji characters.

Corners are not so much gently cut as slashed; a conver-gence of services is thrust upon people to make life as easy as possible. Convenience is everywhere, and there is perhaps nothing in Japan so convenient than the ever-visible, omnipresent ¥100 Shop — brightly-lit wonder-lands of household goods, toys, stationery, gardening equipment and every other single item one could possibly think of cramming into a store. Though ¥100-shopping is enormously popular now, the beginning was a different story.

Crawling out of the rubble of the late 80s, when the Japanese economy collapsed in a whoosh of insolvency, companies such as Daiso found themselves in a world of financial trouble. Across Japan, amusement parks shuttered, golf courses went belly-up and many, many people — fully expecting to work for the same company until retirement —suddenly found themselves tossed to the wolves.

The time was ripe, enterprising minds surmised, for bringing words like “cheap” and “discount” back into vogue. Sensing a rare opportunity, Daiso chairman Hirotake Yano redirected his company's energies into the bright, well-lit ¥100 Plaza Stores that would become the end-all, be-all of thrift shopping in the “new” Japanese economy.

“There's no secret to my success,” Yano opined to the news program Nightly Business Report, “just offering good value, and I tell myself that if customers stop coming, I'd kill myself. That's how I stay focused on keeping customers happy.”

Though strong, resistance to the shops in the beginning — the common complaint was that the items looked cheap, or that they were only castoffs from other companies — was futile; the lure of cheap goods at a time when money for most was tight was (and remains) too much to resist. The company strategy — to buy in bulk, buy from countries that will make the items extremely cheaply and then pass the savings onto the consumer — seems to be working just fine, with Yano now actually cautioning against opening too many ¥100 Plaza stores.

DISCONCERTING DISCOUNTS
“Each Wal-Mart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community,” the late Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton was famous, without a trace of irony or self-consciousness, for saying.

There are, of course, the old saws about American retail superpower Wal-Mart paying hideously low wages, busting up unions (and, just to be on the safe side, the very idea of them) and sucking up a good portion of the retail oxygen in whichever neighborhood a new Wal-Mart store happens to land. Hypocrisy watchdogs also note that despite Wal-Mart's all-American milieu, a great deal of the items inside the store — bought in bulk, and bought from countries that will make the items extremely cheaply — aren't the end product of American labor. (The old joke about all of the American flags at Wal-Mart being made in China is, at least anecdotally, embarrassingly true.)

Just so, perhaps, the rise to power of the ¥100 shops, which also get a good number of products from foreign countries (these being China, Korea, and other Asian nations). While there has yet to be any major backlash similar to the quite-vocal opposition to Wal-Mart that exists back in the States, one of the smaller, but no less viable, complaints about Wal-Mart is one that could also hold true for hundred-yen shopping: the store items themselves, all affordability and convenience issues aside, are more than a little homogenous and as a whole, just not particularly interesting.

Buying in bulk, while lowering the purchase price considerably, also assures customers that the items they purchase will not be unique and will be easily found elsewhere; one can, for example, walk into a Wal-Mart in Phoenix and find the same cheap, heavily discounted item you'd spy in a Wal-Mart store in Houston, Oklahoma, Chicago or New Jersey.

(Sub in “¥100 Shop” for “Wal-Mart,” and Osaka, Fukuoka, Nagoya, Hiroshima and Tokyo for the former five, and one begins to get the idea.) It's a small concern, but again — and depending on one's concern level for cultural loss — perhaps one worth taking up.

For what it's worth, Wal-Mart recently finalized a monetary support deal with troubled Japanese retailer Seiyu and is exploring plans to enter the market here. While not a bad thing, pretty un-Japanese.

Smoke on the Water
There is, on the splash page of the Osaka City Environmental Management Bureau's website, a cheery-looking building that looks something like a pachinko parlor built inside a love hotel set inside Willy Wonka's factory grounds, designed specifically to be as jarring to the senses as aesthetically possible. This explosion of fun- looking pipes, bright, bouncy colors and Art Deco whimsy houses the Maishima Incineration and Water Treatment Plants, where the vilest rubbish and waste Kansai can dish out is collected, sorted, dropped into two massive inci-nerators, cooked at 950žC and sent back into the world as road pavement. (Tours available.)

Given the extremely bad rap garbage incineration has received in recent years, the Disneyesque grounds of Maishima may seem either a Nice Try or a loathsomely transparent public relations whitewash. (The official line is that Maishima Island, which houses a large sports complex, would have a received a lot of undue attention had Osaka actually won its 2008 Olympic bid.) While incineration was once a de rigueur garbage removal procedure for a wide swath of Japanese families, the grand discovery of — and subsequent horrification by — a chemical known as 2,3,7,8-TCDD has made the procedure far less palatable for far more people.

Readers may know Chemical 2,3,7,8-TCDD by its less-clinical name dioxin, a substance noted by the editors of the environmental tract Our Stolen Future as “the most toxic chemical on earth;” one that was “for the most part an inadvertent by-product of twentieth-century life, a contaminant created during the manufacture of certain chlorine-containing chemicals … [as well as] incinerating trash containing plastics and paper, and burning fossil fuels.

“However it happens,” the authors continue, “dioxin acts like a powerful and persistent hormone that is capable of producing lasting effects at very low doses — doses similar to levels found in the human population.”

Those aforementioned “lasting effects” stem from dioxin's unfortunate ability to, among other things: suppress the immune system; loosen the enamel in childrens' teeth; lower the sperm count in men; and cause birds to drop dead from the sky. (Readers may remember Ukrainian President — and dioxin poisoning victim — Vicktor Yushchenko's ravaged appearance during his 2004 campaign; less familiar, however, might be the story of Osaka's Toyona Clean Center incinerator, shut down in 1997 after the dioxin content of its smoke was measured to be abnormally high. Two plant workers sued for work-related illnesses.)

For their part, the machines of Maishima, according to the people in charge, house enough filters, scrubb-ers and cleaners to render any dioxin worries redundant; the smoke that pours daily out of the cheery smokestacks is as environmentally sound as possible. And it that sense — noting the many envi-ronmental deficiencies Kansai has — they are unique.

Everything in its Place
A number of home electronics and appliances — everything from DVD recorders to rice cook-ers to plasma-screen televisions — were recently added to the government's list of items regulated for energy-saving standards in one more effort to (finally) bring the nation closer to compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. “Under the Kyoto Protocol, Japan is to reduce its average emission of greenhouse gases between 2008 and 2012 by 6 percent from the 1990 level,” the Yomiuri Shimbun noted recently. “However, in fiscal 2003, the emission increased 8.3 percent from the 1990 level.”

Par for the course, perhaps. Despite signing (and hosting, for that matter) 1997's Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Frame-work Convention on Climate Change, Japan remains one of the most polluted industriali-zed nations on the planet. A very finite, very small parcel of available land, combined with all those ¥100 shop tchotchkes and all the handout tissue packs and all the excess take-out bagging from fast food restaurants and fliers and used train tickets and manga books and PET bottles exchanging hands every day, have created something akin to a garbage crisis in Japan. The trash has to go somewhere, after all; what happens when there's simply nowhere for it to go?

The answer, perhaps, is “everywhere”: refuse, if not out of sight, is at least pushed out of mind quickly for most people. Some is exported to places like Manila; some gets tossed, with the astonishing audacity of the truly selfish, into the nearest available body of water. Some is dumped into open-air gutters, or onto busy street corners, or on the grounds of recreational parks, or along the sides of hiking trails in rural areas; in a dramatic signal of environmental defeat, entire islands have been constructed out of garbage in the waters of Tokyo Bay.

Those looking for a window into the state of things in Kansai need go no further than Dotonbori Bridge, one of the hallmark tourist locations of all Osaka. Sitting below the amaz-ing swirl of lights and noise and Ferris wheels of the bridge and surrounding area is one of the most dramatically filthy bodies of water in the entire city, a thick, murky sludge of a river that laps sullenly against concrete embank-ments while reflecting the bright lights above.

The Asahi Shimbun recently described the Dotonbori River as “swamp-like,” and filled to the brim with “muddy water, broken bicycles and other refuse” that Osakans would do well to refrain from jumping into, Hanshin Tigers victories or no. (Scaling the transparent barri-cades that the city — at cost — installed after Tigers triumphant 2003 season to prevent just that thing, a lot of people went on ahead and leapt in, anyway.)

Despite the Protocol, improvement in regards to environmental concerns has come slowly. There are signs, however, that change is finally is in the air; people, at least, are finally showing concern enough about environ-ment — which is in itself a major step.

Recycling
Separating garbage is catching on in a big way, but the most interesting phenomenon nowadays is the advent of the Recycle Plaza. Most neighborhoods have at least one shop, where used lamps, fans, electronics and household furnishings can be found for cheap and given a second life.

Similar to the negative reaction early ¥100 shops had, recycle shops also had an uphill climb to convince the public that purchasing used (gasp!) furniture wasn't really such a Bad Thing. The ill reputation second hand-shopping had was, along with so many other things after the economy collapsed, reconsi-dered after it was found that people could both: 1) Make a decent profit reselling furniture and air conditioners and appliances other people didn't want; and 2) Stock their homes fairly cheaply, with pretty decent looking items, if they knew where to look.

There are many such resell shops in Kansai; just remember to shout Makete! (Discount!) when you spy something particularly cool. This is Osaka, after all.

Text: Jeff Lo • Photos: KS