Litterbugs and Bad Drivers

This island is filled with both. And it's absurd. Yesterday I witnessed both, one on my way to work, and one on my way back.

Yesterday around 1 I was driving on the road behind our apartment, my typical route to work, when I saw an old man sitting in his car. This guy tends the garden/farm at the top of the hill. He isn't very friendly, but I smile and nod/bow at him when I see him anyway, just to be polite. Today he glared at me as I drove by. As I was driving by, I noticed a white plastic bag to my left. It's not uncommon to see trash up there, so I didn't think much of it. But then, after I went by, my eye caught something in the rearview mirror. It was a can flying through the air. He tossed it over the road and into the plants on the side of the hill. I couldn't believe my eyes. Here he is, eating at the top of a hill with a view, assumedly for the view, and here he is tossing trash on out like he was eating in a landfill. I started to think of the other times I'd seen him on the hill and how often there was trash near him. Once there was a bad of trash right outside his own car, like he couldn't be bothered with throwing it anywhere. I can't even imagine throwing trash everywhere like that. First of all, it's disrespectful, and second of all, this place is beautiful, so why would I want to deface it like that? I never littered at home either, in state whose beauty doesn't parallel this island's. It's just rude. I remember seeing people litter, one in particular, who would litter right on his own front lawn. I just didn't understand it. It hardly takes any thought or effort to get that trash to its proper place. Once here I was outside a convenience store and this guy was walking by with MacDonald's food in a bag. He was eating a burger or something in a wrapper, too. When he finished his burger, he just let the wrapper fly. I wanted so badly to say, "Hey you moron, where do you think that will go? Do you think that it is just going to disappear once it leaves your hand? Do you really not care, or are you just that lazy?" I mean, he could have wadded up the wrapper and tossed it back in the bag he was carrying, to be thrown out at his next stop. I realize trashcans are hard to come by in Japan, due to the meticulous sorting that must be done before trash can be put out for the collector, but any convenience store (and there are tons) has a trashcan outside for combustibles. It's just frustrating. When Jon and I went to the Hari boat races in Chinen, we filled up a couple grocery sized bags each of trash. People looked at us like we were nuts. When I told one of my teachers that I wanted to organize a beach clean up (not for any service hours, just because it needed to be done), she was like, "Kristin, you are very good person. I don't like to do things like that if I don't have to."

On my way home from work, I was following a rental car. I know it was a rental car because it had the "wa" kana on it. All "wa" cars are rental cars. These two young guys were inside, the passenger kept waving his arms outside and just being stupid, but whatever, they were having a good time and they weren't hurting anyone. Eventually a car pulled out in front of them when it shouldn't have. But that's what people do here. They drive around without seatbelts and their children playing around in the car, often standing up, and they pull out when it is unsafe to do so. So now this stupid driver was in front of the vacationing guys in the rental, driving very slow and braking at weird times. I don't know if the driver got annoyed that the rental car was on his butt or what, but it was annoying to watch from my car, one car behind the rental car. But, this was my route home, so I just had to wait it out. The idiot driver would speed up, slow down, and was swerving all over the lane. I started to wonder if there was a child or a drunk person driving the car, but I could see a child standing up in the back. By the time we got to the big hill I love to drive down, I'd had it. I was on the rental's butt, who was on the idiot's butt… But their driving did not improve. They took each turn under 20kmh, which is what they teach you in school, but nobody actually does it…. And they would break going into the curve, in the curve, and coming out of the curve…. Ugh! I swear sometimes I wondered if they were going to just stop completely… That's how slow they were going. And they didn't have a new driver sticker or an old person sticker on their car, so I don't know what was up! Anyhow, we got to the "T" in the road and they were turning left (the way I go). So I begrudgingly followed them. The rental car went straight, so then I was directly behind them, with a cab on my butt. He was annoyed too because he was part of the long line of cars that had built up since this whole endeavor started about 10 minutes before. So we were going along slowly (maybe 30kmh) and the cab sped up and got in the lane for opposite traffic. I sped up so there was no room to get in front of me and the idiot car, annoyed because I've been dealing with this longer than the cab. At the next chance I got, I passed the idiot driver, and watched the cab do the same thing after me. Frustrated about what had happened, but relieved to finally be out of it, I sped away without looking back.