Dave Cahill

I love this photo - it’s exactly how I will remember this year - smiley, fun, good-natured students, and friendly, fun and helpful teachers (see the vice-principal on right). I have avoided mentioning the school’s name on this blog so far, but the whole year has been such an overwhelmingly positive experience that I want to mention it now. Thank you, Hokuto High School.

I want to thank everyone at Hokuto High for being such friendly and fantastic people. Even though I was only there for one year, they welcomed me like one of their own. Teachers chatted to me in the photocopier room, at sports days, in the corridors; students shouted “Hello, David!” every time they saw me at school, and ran over to chat whenever they saw me outside school.

The students were humorous and smart, and made me laugh with their work - here’s an example. The comic reads from top to bottom, right to left:

I also want to thank my friends, who have been great craic all year - here’s a last purikura of the group of 6 I hung out with most.

Sayonara, Japan. And thank you.

Damn you, purikura. Every time I fall for the wonderful promises on your curtain booths, and every time my hopes are dashed.

What promises? Let’s just take a sample.

So the DoLLs in black were going to invite me to the monogram dream, huh? Do you know how many nights I sat by the phone, just hoping the dolls would call? I may not know what exactly a “monogram dream” is, but as I have never been invited to anything by a doll, I think it’s safe to say you broke your word on this one.

Now that’s what I call a promise. 400 yen makes you the most superior being on the entire planet - sweet deal! OK, so in all honesty I didn’t hold out much hope for this one…

“Will bring more brilliant beauty to you, by glittering lame pens and new tools.” How many more lies could you have fit in one sentence, purikura? I became neither brilliant nor beautiful. The glittering pens were not lame, they were actually pretty cool. And there was not a hammer or a drill to be seen.

All of you out there on the interwebs, take heed. Purikura = lies.

That’s the Japanese abbreviation for the insanely popular Print Club (purinto kurabu or プリント倶楽部), photo booths where teenagers go to take pictures of themselves in strange situations.

Aaaanyway, in Yokohama a weekend or two ago, Cha and I gave in and gave it a go - we stabbed the pen at the screen a couple of times and pressed a few buttons, but couldn’t figure out how to draw on the pictures. That aside, here are some for your viewing pleasure:

UPDATE: Read more about purikura here: Broken purikura promises.

One of the first things you notice here is that there are no bins in the streets. You finish an ice cream and wander for hours with the sticky wrapper in your hand, eyes darting, searching for a bin that never appears. Why? Firstly, people don’t often eat in the streets here, but for me, that never explained the total absence of bins. Then I read this brilliant article, and it all made sense.

In Japan, sorting rubbish is big news. The article above does a better job than I ever could of describing it, but suffice to say that my old Irish habits of chucking everything in the one bag just don’t cut it anymore. Here’s a shot of 3 of the sub-categories into which rubbish must be sorted, according to my local rubbish authority:

So I tried to be a good citizen, and keep my burnables far away from my non-burnables, my PET bottles far from my cans, but a while later this letter came through the door of every apartment in my block.

After some fiddling on translation sites and scribbling on the letter, I realised it was something to this effect:

Some miscreant has been placing rubbish bags in the rubbish cage without writing their name on them. If this does not stop, we will be forced to open the bags and sort through the rubbish for personally identifiable material.

Jaysus.

So needless to say, I have been writing my name loud and proud on my bags since. But that wasn’t enough.

Bringing out my neatly labelled rubbish one day, I noticed there were quite a few bags in the rubbish cage. All mine. And all with little yellow notes.

Turns out my decision that plastics should go in the “non-burnable” category was wrong. Plastics, ladies and gentlemen, are burnable, and if you forget that, your rubbish will be left in the cage, covered in illegible yellow notes.

So after a long session rummaging through my last 2 weeks of domestic waste, I was back in compliance.

Then again, my situation is not the worst. I have heard of foreigners who no longer have the right to put their rubbish out for collection at all due to repeated sorting violations, and have to deliver their rubbish direct to the depot and have it checked for sorting errors while they wait.

This is the real reason why there are no bins on the streets here. If there were, do you think people would spend hours sorting their rubbish into several bags by category? Indeed not. Direct to the public bin, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Here’s a quote from the article above:

In Yokohama, after a few neighborhoods started sorting last year, some residents stopped throwing away their trash at home. Garbage bins at parks and convenience stores began filling up mysteriously with unsorted trash.

“So we stopped putting garbage bins in the parks,” said Masaki Fujihira, who oversees the promotion of trash sorting at Yokohama City’s family garbage division.

So there you have it. I’m a full-time rubbish sorter, with a sideline in high school English teaching!