At the end of a shopping trip you’ll usually end up with lots of plastics! In order to manage this, recycling rules in Japan are detailed and you can often find recycling bins in stations or near vending machines.
Last, while strolling the alleys and narrow residential streets near my dorm in Shinjuku, Tokyo I would sometimes pass by a decaying or abandoned old home. This was something I thought I’d see in Japan’s countryside but that I never expected to see while living in a city like Tokyo. These abandoned homes often go unnoticed because they’re tucked behind or overshadowed by the larger buildings nearby. However, most of these old homes become abandoned because the homeowner is usually an elderly person who has passed away but doesn’t have any remaining relatives to give the property. Japan has a rapidly aging population, and I felt sad to see some of these abandoned homes on my way to class.
In 1995, during the Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe, Japan freeways toppled over because of a design flaw which made the structures vulnerable to stronger quakes. Learning from this incident, Japan updated its construction methods to prevent this from happening again during a similar or stronger earthquake. On March 11, 2011, a Magnitude 9 underwater earthquake caused a huge tsunami which overflowed seawalls to wipe out entire eastern coastal towns, killed many people, and caused the explosion of a nearby nuclear reactor. During this incident, known as the Touhoku Earthquake, many people lost their lives because they thought they were protected by the seawall. Japan realized again that construction should have been designed to handle the most extreme circumstances.
