Anyway you want it

Transitioning to living in Japan can be pretty difficult. Japan is a land of unspoken rules and customs stretching back hundreds of years. If you do something wrong either no one will tell you about it for six months, at which point you'll find out they've been whispering about it behind your back the whole time, or someone will make a huge scene over how horrified they are that you're doing such and such. My coworkers and I once waited in the local gym's entrance for a taxi and I accidentally put my toes, encased in my outdoor shoes, on the carpet in the shoe changing area. The gym employee immediately charged at me from 15 feet away and my coworkers freaked out because about one square inch of outdoor shoe had touched the carpet you stand on for changing your shoes to go to the changing room where you change your shoes again before using any of the machines. Japan is very serious about purity and impurity.

Shoe rules are pretty easy to get a handle on. You get used to bowing when everyone else bows. It starts to feel weird if you don't clap your hands together before a meal. It doesn't strike you as odd that everyone backs into parking spaces here or that there are sixteen different cloths for cleaning, one for the floor, one for desks, one for your hands, one for your hands after you wash the dishes, one for the dishes, one for the glasses, one for the pots, etc. I'm not exaggerating that, by the way, there really are that many cloths at some of my schools. There's one set of rules that almost every foreigner has trouble with:

The Trash System. (dun dun duuuuuun)

You see, in Japan, throwing something away is pretty close to quantum physics. It is so complicated! First of all, the trash is divided into many different sections. Burnable trash, non-burnable trash, various recyclables, large trash, and large electric trash (like TVs) are just a few of the categories. The categories depend on where you live and what kind of trash processing is available. Since I live on an island we don't have as many categories as the places on the mainland, but we still have seven different categories. Some places have over twenty categories. This means that throwing things away is ridiculously complicated. Usually there's a nice color-coded pictographic chart that gives you the basics, but you will inevitably have something you need to throw away that isn't on the chart, and nothing is more fun than having to ask your coworkers how to throw away a dead battery. It took me three tries to get that answer (non-burnable) because the first two people I asked just offered to take my dead batteries and throw them away for me. You have to know what category everything goes into, and where or when to throw it away.

You see, Japan doesn't have one trash day; it has a million color-coded trash days. Burnable garbage is picked up maybe twice a week, recyclables are twice a month, large trash is once a month, you have to drop Styrofoam off at a specific part of the supermarket, milk cartons are every Monday, and so on. Some people get so intimidated by the entire system that they end up inadvertently hoarding recyclables because they're afraid they're going to put them out on the wrong day or in the wrong place. It can get really frustrating if you happen to be out of town the one day a month that a specific day of trash is picked up. I don't want to plan my life around trash pickup!

There are two upsides, though. Once you master the system you feel like a genius, and when you return to your home country it's actually relaxing to take the trash out because you only have to do it once a week.