The Tera River in spring, with cherry blossoms just emerging.

In Japan, there are three acceptable ways to dispose of your garbage while away from your home:

1) Throw it into a public garbage can at a nearby convenience store or while passing through a train station.

2) Stuff said trash in your pocket and bring it home for disposal.

3) Toss it into the local river.

The last may seem surprising, given the good reputation Japan has for managing public litter. And yes, I’m being a bit cheeky when I say the third option is “acceptable” in Japan.

Part of the problem is likely how Japan structures its waste disposal system. But the country has an undeniable problem with river pollution.

At the Tera River near my old home in Tawaramoto, the garbage was hard to ignore. Carp, cormorants, ducks, turtles and minnows swim or float next to styrofoam chunks, half-sunken tires, plastic bags and old shoes.

Mats of plastic bottles and other buoyant trash collect in eddies and quiet pools.

The Teragawa, or Tera River, is the river closest to where I lived in the town of Tawaramoto, Nara.

About thirty feet wide at its widest point, it begins by branching off from the Yamato River in Kawai, flowing more than 23 kilometres before it terminates in a stagnant dead end in Yoshino.

The mausoleum of Emperor Sushun is built near its banks.

For slope stability and waterflow control the whole river’s banks are lined with concrete. As are many other Japanese rivers. It’s an unnecessary and near-criminal overstep, in my view, which has more to do with the power of the concrete industry in Japan than actual safety. But that’s another story.

When the river swells from spring rainfall, plastic bags and the assorted debris of human civilization catch in trailing tree branches on the banks. For the rest of the year they hang there like tattered flags for an undeclared nation of litterers.

Being the kind of person who loves seeing wildlife, I got a lot of joy of watching the river’s turtles sunning themselves on rocks or calmly swimming through the slow-moving water. I wondered how much plastic the river turtles had eaten over the years. And I resolved to help clean up the river.

However, the problem with picking up trash on your own initiative is that you have to dispose of it after you’ve finished collecting it.

Japan’s garbage system doesn’t make it easier.

Garbage and recycling is categorized according to type: burnable (food waste, thin plastic, paper etc), non-burnable (hard plastics, metal, glass etc), PET (usually plastic bottles), and cardboard and paper.

The rules are a little different for each city, but all foreigners concur that they are a pain in the ass.

If you put the wrong garbage in the clear non-burnable bags, the garbage collectors will tag it with a red sticker of shame. This means you are a) a baka gaijin and b) you have to haul the bulging bag back to your tiny apartment and wait another two weeks to try again.

Even if you meet the exacting standards, perhaps you have somehow missed or mistaken the collection day.

Do this a couple of times and your balcony will become piled high with rejected garbage, earning the enmity of your Japanese neighbours and driving down your self-worth as well as property values, probably.

So I was keen to gain some allies in disposing of the collected litter.

Our friend Kiyoko, who has lived in Tawaramoto for decades and knows a LOT of people in the area, reached out to the local community association leader on my behalf.

Unfortunately, she relayed, while “he admires your spirit very much,” the community leader was reluctant to help. The river’s concrete banks were steep and slippery. I might hurt myself! And the community association couldn’t risk that.

I admired the man’s immediate concern for my safety and the potential liability to the association. A lengthy career in insurance beckoned, if it hadn’t already. However, his concern did not help me.

Next stop was city hall. Kiyoko and I, or rather Kiyoko, spoke to a kind young bureaucrat who explained that the river’s cleanliness was actually a responsibility of the prefecture, not the city.

I had no idea if this was true, but the man offered to call the relevant department within Nara’s government for aid.

So the three of us waited on hold for several minutes, the young man smiling awkwardly, until he was connected to someone whose job responsibilities supposedly intersected with rivers and garbage.

Our young bureaucrat launched into a lengthy back-and-forth conversation explaining our proposal.

Meanwhile, my enthusiasm was dimming rapidly.

I’d seen this routine before.

The hapless civil servant, given an unusual request by a foreigner, would first say there was nothing he or any of his colleagues could do.

Next, out of politeness, he would consult with another bureaucrat, who would confirm that they were all, yes, completely powerless to help me.

Sure enough, after the polite young man concluded his conversation with the unseen bureaucrat, he turned to Kiyoko and explained apologetically that there was nothing the prefecture or the city could do.

Having seemingly exhausted my immediate options, I lapsed into uneasy inertia.

In some respects Japan does very well with litter. The streets of Japanese cities are usually very clean, astonishingly so by North American standards. There are few public garbage cans in streets and parks, forcing people to take ownership of their trash. If you throw trash on the street, expect cold glares from your fellow pedestrians.

But there’s no denying the scale of the problem with polluted waterways in Japan. The same social pressures and deterrents that marginalize litterers on city streets don’t extend to the overgrown banks of creeks and rivers.

The results are depressing. As trash-saturated as the Teragawa River is, I’ve seen many other Japanese rivers in the same state.

While writing this, I realized I don’t really know why people litter. It’s something that I never feel comfortable doing. But I think I’m a little atypical in how much attention I pay to wildlife and the living things around me. I know littering is bad for those creatures I love to watch.

Littering as human behaviour has been traced to a couple of causes: perceived permission/lack of consequences and lack of attachment or care for the relevant environment.

Well, the anti-littering signs along the banks of the Teragawa could perhaps be counted among the garbage polluting the river, as they are clearly non-functional. I never saw or heard of anyone being fined. So, lack of consequences, check.

Next, since the river and riverbanks are already strewn with garbage, people could take that as permission to pollute an already polluted environment.

In addition, people passing through the area might not care as much about the state of the neighbourhood.

And then there’s the “jerk” factor. Sometimes people just don’t care enough about the people and things around them.

Though I’d been living in Japan for well over a year, I still hadn’t made any move to act on my good intentions.

One day that changed when I was out for a walk along the river and saw two orange fuel canisters in the water. Bright orange fuel canisters. In the river.

I guess something snapped, because I waded into the water and grabbed them.

They were leaking, dirty water mixed with gasoline that sprinkled on my already-wet shoes and jeans.

The tanks had names written on them, so I chose to think the dumping was accidental.

Yet I hauled three more gas tanks out of the river in the two weeks that followed, each time incredulous someone could withstand the violent contrast of throwing a leaking, bright orange canister of fuel into a river lined with cherry blossom trees.

And each time I was angry. It felt like a line had been crossed.

One morning I saw large discs of iridescent silver scattered across the riverbed, flashing in the sun. Someone had dumped more than a dozen plate-sized LaserDiscs into the river.

I gathered them up and carried them home, strung out on a tree branch. I added them to the pile of river trash next to our apartment building’s garbage bin.

I called Kiyoko for help in disposing of them. She managed to get in touch with a young man at the city’s garbage collection department, who came by personally to pick them up from my apartment.

It turned out the city was more willing to help get rid of litter if it was a fait accomplit.

And it turned out I wasn’t alone in my desire to clean up the river. A short time later, during a run along the riverside road, I saw a group of men standing beside a dumpster bin full of dirty plastic wrap, old tires and other debris clearly pulled from the river.

I wish I’d stayed and asked them why they were doing it.

Later, a member of the English book club I volunteered with said she had participated in a community cleanup of the river further upstream.

So there were people who cared about the Teragawa, and they were acting on their concern. There just weren’t enough of them.

On a few mornings I was lucky enough to see a Japanese kingfisher. These birds are a little smaller than an American robin, with bright blue feathers and a golden-orange belly. It was a gorgeous bird, and I wished we’d taken better care of the river it was hunting in.

I watched it dive into the water after minnows, and each time I feared it would come up with plastic in its beak.

Of course, I comforted myself later, if the kingfisher couldn’t avoid plastic in the river it would be dead already.

It’s actually not a very comfortable thought.

I don’t live in Tawaramoto anymore. I suspect the Teragawa looks much the same as it did a year ago. But I hope that changes.

This spring I plan to volunteer for the Ottawa River cleanup. Canada’s waterways also have a major problem with garbage and littering. So I’ll join in the community efforts to clean up the river, and hope to contribute to the critical mass of people required to make sure it stays clean.

I hope the same happens in Tawaramoto.

Mar 12 Garbage disposal in your local Japanese river

Nov 16 Cellos, crimes, capers, action!