Dougy Mak's Blog

I am getting pretty familiar and comfortable with my surroundings now. I noticed, I am skipping steps on the way up the stairs to my room, I am helping myself to the refrigerator, I can get around Tokyo on my own.. yeah…. Today was an ordinary day; A non-tourist day; A day with a Japanese family; A day with my girl friend and her family. We had sushi for lunch. Price was similar to San Francisco, but still a little cheaper. Today, I had kujira (whale sushi). I initially thought there was some really special taste; The whale sushi tasted like any other fish. The texture, however, was different. A little chewy like a slimjim. Just so you know, whale is not sold at every sushi restaurant here. They do not purposely hunt whales for food. In America, there is a lot of media attention around whale hunting and they do not really shed much light on the whole scenario, so it’s always up for interpretation. Some people believe the Japanese hunt the whales solely for food. Well, I was told they hunt the whales for research and use that same whale for food instead of putting it to a waste. Speaking of waste, the trash system here is very different. Instead of compost, recycle, and waste, the Japanese go further. They separate it into many categories: burnable trash, plastic, newspaper, magazine and other kind of papers, plastic bottles, glass bottles, cans, and hazardous. It is cumbersome. I want to help out by taking care of my own stuff, but I cannot even figure out where my trash belongs. It sounds easy, but let me go into detail. For a bottle, we have to take off the cap of the bottle for the plastic bin, take off the plastic cap ring of the bottle for the plastic bin (they have a handy scissor for this), take off the logo wrapper for plastic bin, and then the plastic bottle goes into the plastic bottle bin. One time, when my girl friend threw something away, her mom ended up taking it out of the trash and throwing it away in the proper place. Now, we save my girl friend’s mom from doing extra work by just placing the trash on the counter next to the sink. Every city is different though, some cities follow the compost, recycle, and waste system while others follow the cumbersome one.