Kyoto: The City With No Garbage

A frontier psychiatrists Japan dispatch.

I'm joining you today, in writing, from Kyoto. This is an ancient city. It was the capital of imperial Japan. This capital predates the most urban place I've ever been, Tokyo, which became the capital after these Tokugawa Shogunate moved it westward, at the start of the Edo period.

Trains are the best way to get around Japan. There are also many of them. This makes some sense. The country is essentially a long series of vertically oriented islands, so there's not a lot of going east to west, it's mostly north to south. This also creates a natural, ordered vector of movement. You're either going up, or you're going down.

They are building that long city in right now- The Line. This is not a great way to organize a city —if you have a choice. A giant circle wouldn't be more efficient.

That being said, when you're not in urban planning, you don't have much of a choice.

There are no trash cans here in Kyoto. To an outsider, this is perplexing. It's not because there's no trash. I…