click to enlargeThere has been an elephant in our apartment for the last week or so here in Kutchan. Our elephant was closer to an actual elephant however. Ours was big, smelt and we had no idea what to do with it. It was our trash.

In Japan, waste is categorized into organic, combustible and non-combustible, and then an array of recycling sub categories. It is a seriously mind boggling exercise to sort trash here. Pleading forigner ignorance wasn't going to be an option for us becasue we had a trash flowchart in English. While it generally made sense, there was still a lot that didn't.

Determined to do our part and attempt to assimilate and respect the Japanese way of doing things, Stevie and I rolled up or sleves and went through all our trash that had been put into the "deal with later" bin more commonly know as the back deck.