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So I used to buy this snack all the time in Japan. It's
basically just like a salt flavored rice cracker but
there's always one thing that I'll never be able to get over
All of this plastic
for this much food.
And it's not even the worst culprit in Japan.
I feel like online recently there's been a very noticeable
change towards people being a lot more eco friendly. Plastic
bags are no longer available.
...saving one point seven billion of them from ending up
in landfill.
...a dollar for a reusable bags... plastic straws
are being phased out at Starbucks.
You can't use plastic bags! In general I just feel is that
people a lot more self conscious of single
use plastics. But in Japan. It's a whole nother story.
Anyone who's visited before will know what I'm
talking about.
Straws are everywhere, individually wrapped snacks
a custom, bento boxes is a standard lunch option, vending
machines are on every corner, everything is wrapped,
sometimes twice and you're always offered a plastic bag at
a convenience store... no matter how small your purchase.
Someone posted on their blog recently that they once
received a single strawberry as a gift and it was wrapped with
five individual pieces of packaging. It's not at all
surprising that Japan comes in second in the world in the
amount of per capita generation of single use plastic trash. In
fact Japan produces more plastic per capita than all of
China and the rest of Asia combined.
And once you notice it you can't unsee it.
That's probably come to your attention that I'm currently
outside my apartment right now but I do actually really need
to get grocery shopping. It's the middle of the day I've got
a mask. Hopefully it won't be too busy.
A lot of the snacks like this are in a pack of about 12,
I guess.
But each individual snack, is wrapped in more plastic.
It's insane. It's really really
Why. All of this, for seven cherry tomatoes. Can't even
make this shit up. For what purpose do you need to
individually wrap a lime?
Don't people have sinks at home ? Why can't they just wash
their vegetables? So I've been thinking a lot recently about
why this is still a thing in Japan. Like why why are they
still individually wrapping bananas and I've put it down to
a few things. The first of which being: convenience. It's
pretty common knowledge at this point that Japan is king when
it comes to convenience. There's around 50,000
convenience stores and over 5 million vending machines in
Japan and in cities like Tokyo when it's got a really high
population density even in really quiet areas there's no
lack of customers.
A lot of those people are commuting to work and they're
staying there for really long hours so it's actually pretty
common for business people to buy their lunch and dinner from
a convenience store rather than making it at home and then
bringing it to work.
Most large train stations will also sell a large variety of
bento boxes which is kind of like a Japanese lunchbox I
guess and they sell them specifically for people that
are going to be riding on the shinkansen or the bullet train.
So it's become somewhat of a tradition in Japan.
If you take a stroll through any Japanese supermarket you'll
notice one very obvious thing.
The serving sizes are so small. This is the largest carton
of milk, the largest loaf of bread, and the largest tub
of yogurt I could find in my supermarket. Some items that
would normally be in a can or a jar is instead in smaller
plastic bags and even items that could have been sold in a
larger can for a larger serving size is instead sold in the
same small size cans as before but just grouped together by
more plastic. And by now it's probably no secret that the
serving sizes in Japan are a lot smaller than they'd be in
the US for example. And there's a number of different reasons
for that which I won't get into here,
but one of the main reasons is that Japanese kitchens are
generally quite small. They don't always have the space to
store large cans of food or giant boxes of cereal. So the
smaller sizes just work better for them. I find that when I'm
in Australia I really need to go grocery shopping like once
every two weeks, maybe? But in Japan it's like twice a week
at least. But convenience stores and supermarkets are
everywhere here so it's not like it's a big deal anyway so
convenience wins again.
Another reason that I could find for the packaging that
stems from their culture is that in some cases the
packaging becomes part of the presentation.
Wrapping one strawberry in silicon padding inside of a
clear plastic case lined with decorative paper makes the
strawberry seem like it's in pristine condition, exclusively
hand-picked and extremely hygienic. All of the
things that would justify the probable ten dollar price
I don't actually know how much it is I'm just assuming but
honestly it wouldn't surprise me if it costs like a thousand
yen for that one strawberry
"We consider wrapping a part of the product. Of course it's
good to cut down on plastic bag use but we can't hand customers
a hot lunchbox or cold ice cream without a bag. That would
be unhygienic and very rude
Just like Shimamura san mentioned, hygiene also
plays a large role in Japanese society. The trains
are shockingly
people wear face masks even if they're not sick and hand
sanitizer is available at most businesses, even before
everything that was going nowhere right now. This is why
single use plastics like spoons, chopsticks and
straws are nearly always also wrapped in plastic.
Don't even get me started on the plastic bags. I mentioned
in my "Japan bingo Card" video that it's very uncommon to not
receive a plastic bag at a convenience store, but it
wasn't just there was a joke. In Japan in 2016, 30.5 billion
shopping bags were consumed in the year but this is only
accounting for large shopping bags given at supermarkets. So
once you account for the convenience store bags the
number is over 450 per person per year. And if you can't do
the maths already that's more than one bag a day.
Approximately 967 shopping bags are used every second in Japan
and in the time it took me to finish that sentence 4835 bags
were used.
"But Hannah isn't Japan like really good at recycling
though?" Well let's discuss shall we.
So right now Japan claims that they're recycling rate for
their end of life plastics is at a high of eighty five per
cent which sounds pretty good right? But recycling doesn't
always mean what you think it does. According to the state
minister for the environment Minoru Kiuchi san, around sixty
five percent of all the recycled plastic in Japan is
burned for energy and only around 27 percent of it is
actually recycled into other things. So that's what
they mean when they say recycling. And all of these
statistics are at least a couple of years old, it's
actually kind of difficult to
up to date statistics on this but this is what we've got
for now. Along with recycling Japan, like
most countries, exports a lot of their waste to
overseas countries. In 2017 Japan generated around 9
million tonnes of waste and about 10 percent of that they
sent to China which makes up for about 70 percent of all of
their exported waste. But in the same year China actually
decided to ban all imports of waste because they were trying
to remove as much pollution from the recycling process as
possible so Japan was left with all of this extra waste and
they had to find something else to do with it.
So instead they sent it to countries like Indonesia and
Vietnam but they're already dealing with their own plastic
pollution problem. Indonesia is second only to China when it
comes to dumping waste into the ocean. An estimated 3.2
million metric tons of waste is thrown into the ocean per year
around Indonesia and an extra 1.83 million metric tons of
waste is found around the ocean in Vietnam. If things continue
to go as they are, by 2050 it's expected that there'll be more
plastic in the ocean than there is
But hey at least the Japanese government announced they're
going to make the Olympic medals out of recycled
Groundbreaking. Okay but in all seriousness they are doing a
little bit more than that, but that was the only story that
was catchy enough to make it onto my Facebook timeline. In
2018 the government came up with a new strategy to reduce
the amount of plastic by 25 percent by 2030. One of those
measures was by asking grocery stores, very politely
mind you, to start charging people for plastic bags.
They've done a similar thing in so many countries around the
world but in Australia I think they charge it's like at least
20 cents? I think it's either 20 cents or $2,
I can't remember. Usually it's a much thicker bag and you're
supposed to be able to reuse it multiple times, but in Japan
it's the same regular thin plastic bag as always, and it
costs a whopping two
And most the time they don't even ask you if you want a bag.
They just add it automatically until you tell
them specifically,
"no I don't need a bag."Iin a regular grocery shop, this is
generally what I would buy. Mostly vegetable, some tofu and
a couple of cans. These are the only things that weren't
covered in plastic. And of the few vegetables that I found
that didn't have any plastic on it, despite having a "no
plastic bag" sign that I put on the basket, she still put it
inside an extra bag, including
this bunch of lettuce
that was already wrapped in plastic. I can't
make this shit up. As for the convenience stores, well
7-Eleven announced that they would completely switch to
biodegradable bags by 2030. Lawson aims to halve the use of
plastic bags at the register by 2030 and switch to plastic bags
made from sugarcane at certain locations and Family Mart has
already cut their usage by that 30 percent since the year 2000
by using thinner bags.
Dan that's a thin bag.
Look, honestly it's great that they're trying to make changes
like this and I'm not just going to completely disregard
all of their efforts because like "Oh they're still
individually wrapping bananas" because like yeah, obviously
for someone like you or I, wrapping a banana seems kind of
unnecessary and it seems like an obvious thing to cut
out but, I don't
maybe like ten years ago I might not have even noticed. I
it's really only been because of the recent push that I see
on social media and from big supermarkets making hard fast
rules like cutting plastic bags completely did I even care
enough to make this video in the first place. Drawing
inspiration from my previous video that I just did about the
psychology of panic buying, which you should totally go and
watch if you haven't already (seriously PLEASE WATCH IT,
I spent like 50hrs making that thing and the views are so low
lol.) Humans are incredibly social beings and we rely on
everyone else's actions to determine what we should do
ourselves in so many different situations.
And for most people we only start to make these big
inconvenient lifestyle switches like completely cutting out
plastic bags when you see other people doing it first. So while
on one hand it sucks when someone like roasts you for
taking a plastic bag from a convenience store but on the
other hand, next time you go you're probably a lot less
likely to get one. I do also want to make clear that I am
not saying that we should all just go zero plastic zero waste
and just like live out of a jar like that one person did.
Obviously these changes have to be very very slow and they're
going to cost a lot of money. And also there is a lot to be
said for the alternatives for plastic and sometimes it's not
as effective and sometimes it's even worse for the environment
than regular plastic. So if you would like a more nuanced
approach to that kind of side of plastic pollution,
definitely check out Kurzgesagt, I hope I'm
saying that right. Kurzgesagt's
video on plastic pollution it's probably the most well
researched well rounded video that you could watch on
the topic.
So all in all, changes are going to be slow and especially
in Japan, a lot of things are very slow, but I have started
to notice a slight push towards being more eco friendly. Do I
wish that Japan would do more? Yes of course I do. But big
decisions like that won't happen unless this support and
encouragement from other people to make it so. Even though
right now only 10 percent of people surveyed in Japan said
that they would even consider eliminating plastic bags in
the future. That doesn't mean that it can't change.
Living in Japan and seeing the attitude towards plastic, it
can be incredibly disheartening and it can be easy to lose
motivation to even care. And honestly even making this video
it was
frustrating as all hell because I've become so accustomed to
just being completely numb to it all because it can feel
stupid for even caring when it just feels like nobody
else does.
But ten years ago nobody cared, and then one person did and
then another person did, and then a couple more people did,
and now I care enough to make this video. So let's keep the
butterfly effect going, the domino effect? The... The
encouragement? I don't know.
I haven't got a poignant point to end this video on.
Nevertheless I hope that you enjoyed it and that it answered
a couple of your questions about plastic use in
Japan specifically. I love making these kinds of videos
and I find that there's so much more creatively fulfilling for
me but they do take a lot longer for me to make. So I'm
incredibly thankful for my patrons, thank you. Thank
you for supporting me so so so much. If you would like to
go and see extra content, live streams and all of my videos
earlier before anyone else does, go to
patreon.com/currently/hannah. I am also incredibly
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be sponsoring me. So there will be some bloopers coming up in
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Enjoy.
OK here we go, take one. Let's try not to fuck it up too much
because Lord knows, you always do. So I feel like-
Already fucked it up. I mentioned in my Japan bingo
video card- The. One I mentioned in my Japan bingo
card video. Yes. Much to think about. "But Hannah isn't
Japan like really good at recycling. Oh my God." Oh a
lot of sweat just like dripped down my back. Delicious.
They're already dealing with their own plastic
pollution problem.
Oh alliteration! By 2050 it's expected that there's gonna be
more fish in the ocean than there
People. Probably one of those one of those one of those one
of those one of those one of those one of those one of those
one of those and
previous video that I just did about the psycha- psychAlogy!
I'll keep this for the next party I go
In four years. Hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo. Oh it's see through!
It's kind of disgusting. I'm very impressed.
How about some global warming ASMR. How about that?
There you go. Oh there you are.
Don't mind if I