To the Dump, to the Dump, to the Dump Dump Dump!

Our work in Sendai began to peter out after the Sunday Ishinomaki soup kitchen operation. Nael and I had separate tasks for Monday, and it became my happy job to help dispose of all the garbage generated the day before. It actually ended up being a pretty cool experience.  I was helping two other AARJ workers with the job, a younger guy who knew a little English and an older Ojii-san (grandpa) who was wonderfully flippant and spoke at an unforgiving pace.  

After picking up the truck full of garbage, we drove to the rural outskirts of Sendai. As a general rule, in Japan I tend to have only a faint idea of what we’re actually doing at any moment in time, and today proved no exception. While I had initially thought we might be headed off to some sort of waste disposal site, instead we ended up at a small, abandoned elementary school. It turned out the school was one of AARJ’s storage sites for their many supplies en route to northern Tohoku, and we were there to use the field in front of the gym for the unpleasant job of sorting and rebagging all of the garbage before disposing of it.

Just before unloading the truck. [click to enlarge]

Despite our messy task, I enjoyed the chance to get out of the city. The quiet road and surrounding hills were suitable simulacra for Vermont, and even the acrid odors from the garbage made decent substitutes for the nasal delights of farm life (although it didn’t quite capture the full bouquet of horse shit). I almost felt at home.

The school had a ghostly sort of sereneness to it; tall grass had overgrown the baseball field where a catcher’s mitt still lay at home plate, and peering into the building I could see half-swept piles of dust and a few disconnected phones against the wall, as if the previous occupants had rushed out. The large clock in the schoolyard was broken, but at precisely noon an eerie, chiming melody wafted through the field to summon phantom children back to class. I wandered off for a few minutes to take pictures, and along the way I caught a little tree frog.

Silent recess. [click to enlarge]

Wuddle bitty fwoggy. [click to enlarge]

After reloading the truck we were off again. Several miles later we arrived at a massive building with a huge smokestack – an incinerator complex. All day I had imagined the place we would be dumping the garbage would be, well, a dump, but arriving at the building reminded me that outside of recycling, almost all trash in Japan, for better or worse, is burned. Inside, we backed up to one of the eight thirty-foot tall doors, which opened to reveal a massive collection pit for the garbage-to-be-burned (think end of Toy Story 3; there was even a claw at this one!). They put harnesses on us so we wouldn’t inadvertently fall into the pit, and then we began the merry process of chucking the trash bags we had labored over to their fiery doom. Satisfaction.

Ramp leading into the incinerator. [click to enlarge]

The Claw! [click to enlarge]

I don’t remember too much about that evening except that drunk udon happened, and I kept asking random Japanese servers about the names of pop songs on the radio while trying to hum them and sing the words I remembered. After all of this volunteering, I guess I have to do something to maintain my American image.