Kichiku no Susume Volume 1

Kichiku no Susume Volume 1 - Chapter 1

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Chapter 1: Treasures You Can Find in Trash

Trash Picking: Eco-Friendly Recycling

Food

While I’m not exactly starving, it’s notable how much perfectly good food you can find in the trash. Especially when someone’s moving–people often find it too much of a hassle to take everything to their new place and just dump the entire kitchen into the trash. Soy sauce, sugar, salt, pepper–if they look okay, they’re probably fine to use (says the irresponsible monster).

Back in the early 80s, when I was living with a woman, I changed jobs (as usual, I got fired for punching the factory foreman). We had to survive on a 7,500 yen paycheck for fifteen days until my next one came through. Back then, we had about eleven pounds of stale rice bought from a supermarket sale, and we were lucky enough to find dried goods like instant ramen, ochazuke seasoning, and fried rice mixes in someone’s moving dump. Somehow, we managed. There was a blessed vending machine nearby that would spit out change if you kicked it hard enough. And if things got really bad, I figured I could rob someone to make ends meet–I was prepared.

Strangely enough, I never felt destitute. If you approach dumpster diving with the recycling mindset, your mood shifts. Instead of feeling miserable, you might actually enjoy scrounging to survive. Dumpster diving is an act that awakens that deeply ingrained hunter-gatherer mindset that’s present in all of us. If you think about it like that, maybe you guys’ll start scavenging for food, too?

Whether something’s hygienic or unhygienic is mostly subjective anyway. I read somewhere that the mouth is teeming with bacteria and germs, practically no different from a sewer. If that’s true, then tongue kissing is like exchanging sewage between two sewers, no? After all, humans are just shit-producing machines that keep shitting out waste as long as they live. If everything that passes through your mouth eventually turns into shit, then why not just eat shit from the beginning? Doesn’t make a difference in the end. When you put it that way, scavenging for leftovers is no big deal in the grand scheme of things. Right?

Manga

One of the basic treasures you can find through dumpster diving. Beginners should start by roaming the streets at night, aiming to procure weekly magazines like Shonen Jump or Shonen Magazine from street dumpsters. If you create a dumpster diving routine and diligently patrol it, you’ll inevitably discover dumpsters where the same types of manga are regularly discarded. By consistently picking up magazines from these spots, you’ve essentially earned yourself a free subscription. Thanks to this, I’ve covered nearly all the major titles from shonen and shonen-ai magazines. My main trash subscriptions include:

Spirits, Shonen Jump, Young Magazine, Shonen Magazine, Shonen Sunday, Young Jump, Morning, Shonen Champion, Young Sunday Big Comic, Superior, Action, Action Pizza, Big Comic Original, Comic Guys, Young Champion, Young Animal, Super Jump, Business Jump, Mr. Magazine… Add in the monthly issues and special editions, and just from magazines alone, I’m easily picking up and reading over 200,000 yen’s worth a year. That’s about three million over the course of fifteen years. It seems like I made quite a profit. But when I really think about it, manga isn’t exactly something you need to read to survive; it’s pretty much irrelevant. Considering the time I spent on it leaves me with mixed feelings.

There was a consensus around the pretentious that manga was something you’d just pick out of the trash, but since the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack, trash cans at train stations have been closed or significantly reduced in number. More people are taking home the manga magazines they buy instead of tossing them after reading. This has resulted in a steady increase of manga litter in residential streets.

Manga magazines are usually thrown away in bundles tied with plastic string, tossed into paper bags with newsletters, or just left haphazardously left lying around. They’re incredibly easy to spot from a distance. Because of that, stay calm when you pick ‘em up. Check the issue number first. If you take home a copy you already have, you’re left feeling disappointed–it’s like buying the same book twice (even if you didn’t pay for it). That’s not good for your mental health.

As an added bonus, there are other places where you can find manga magazines besides trash cans and train station garbage collection points. They might be, for example, carelessly left near vending machines or payphones just past the station ticket gates, tossed into the baskets of abandoned bicycles, or stuffed into trash cans in front of convenience stores. Anyway, you should try thoroughly searching your local train station. Looking at your city from that perspective might reveal something new to you.

You might just find an issue of Ladies’ Comics. It’s a manga magazine packed with erotic stories featuring sexual content that rivals men’s magazines. Now these… when they do end up in the trash, they’re usually sealed in paper bags and disposed of in bundles. I guess these women worry about being viewed as attention-starved spinsters or something. I don’t believe that to be true, though. There’s this single hairdresser in her thirties living in my apartment building (who looks exactly how you’d imagine she does), and she regularly disposes of a decent stack of the more extreme issues of Ladies’ Comics, which is a huge help. I really owe her. I kinda wanna slip a special “Sex Discount Coupon” under her door as thanks (though that feels like social welfare). When you take a good whiff of the pages, they have this subtle, kinda… wet-panties smell. It’s probably just my imagination, but…

Women’s Magazines

The women’s magazines I’m talking about here are mainly ones read by young women–things like anan, Ryuko Tsushin, or ELLE. You might wonder why a low-life factory worker like myself would be reading them, but I’ve actually been picking them up quite frequently. I have a friend who lives nearby and works in fashion, so I pick ‘em up for him. These days, even a single magazine costs a ridiculous amount of money (seven hundred yen is more than my lunch money!).

Now, when scavenging through residential areas at night, women’s magazines are far easier to find than those sleazy men’s magazines that might be used for… well, you know. The only hassle is that magazines like MORE and with are ridiculously heavy. If you find a whole stack, you’ll have to go home and dump whatever you have then go back and pick them up. Changing the subject, from my years of observation, girls who toss tasteful magazines like ELLE or Marie Claire also seem to throw away their underwear–elegant, stylish pieces that look almost new–without a second thought. Probably means they’ve got money to burn.

Obviously, girls who toss magazines like anan and Cutey tend to throw out clothes that match the styles featured in older issues of those magazines. The smell of underwear or pantyhose isn’t really that different whether it’s from a woman reading anan or with. Stinky stuff is stinky, and stuff that isn’t, isn’t.

Women’s magazines, like manga magazines, are often tossed in a bundle or stuffed into paper bags. A key point about when they get thrown out is that it’s deeply connected to the phases of the moon. For some reason, it’s always a full moon on the nights I find huge piles of women’s magazines. After gathering stacks of them on the street at night, I glance up at the sky and there it is–a big, round moon smiling down at me. I’ve had this experience countless times. But I’m no intellectual, so I won’t dwell on it. Truthfully, I kinda know the reason, but it’s a secret for now. Keep rummaging through trash and soon enough, you’ll figure it out too.

General Books/Comics/Paperbacks

When treasures like these end up in the trash, they’re overwhelmingly often tied in bundles with string or neatly packed into paper bags, making them an easy find for beginners.

The natural enemy of paper trash is, of course, rain. However, don’t get discouraged. You should still dumpster dive even if it’s drizzling. While tied bundles are probably ruined, books tucked inside garbage bags have a good chance of being salvageable even after getting a little wet.

Furthermore, if these treasures are clean and in good condition, they’re not only enjoyable to read yourself but can also be sold to a used bookstore for some cash. Gathering a decent number to sell at flea markets is a good option, too. If you talk to the people running flea market stalls, you’ll find that they’re dumpster divers, too. That makes perfect sense, since nowadays, a huge number of perfectly fine books end up discarded as trash.

Lining up all the books you’ve collected and looking at them is interesting; you can see the tastes and preferences of the person who read them. Still, the paperbacks most likely to end up in the trash are bestsellers. Even now you can occasionally find Yoshimoto Banana’s Kitchen and Murakami Haruki’s Norwegian Wood at garbage collection points. But even I don’t bother picking them up since secondhand bookstores just give you a dirty look if you bring them in.

Discarded manga often pile up in huge quantities, sometimes discarded in cardboard boxes, making it a hassle to carry home. I keep the interesting ones for myself and sell all the boring ones to a secondhand manga store in Nakano.

With paperbacks, I often pick up multiple copies of the same work by popular authors. For Murakami Ryu and Murakami Haruki, I unintentionally ended up with nearly their entire paperback catalogue. I gave away or disposed of the hardcover editions I originally owned (most of which I’d scavenged for). Thanks to that, my room has a little more storage now.

Just the other day, I picked up a paperback copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Slow Learner. I didn’t realize what a coincidence it was, but I found it “secretly” at a garbage collection point in the “lowlands” during a “light rain” (probably because the “entropy” was high). The fun part about scavenging books is that you can get books for free that you’d absolutely never pick up otherwise. My interest in humanities texts as a factory worker started about fifteen years ago when I found a highbrow magazine called Yu from Kousaku-sha. Had I not found that, I’d probably still only be reading S&M magazines. So there you have it– the world of literature came to me through trash. Checking out the books I’ve picked up in my room feels similar to the excitement of opening a blind bag. For instance, yesterday I found a hardcore book tackling the issue of “comfort women.” It’s the kind of thing that I, a devilish bastard, would never in a million years think of picking up at a bookstore. Yet, finding it in the trash makes me more inclined to read it. Strange, isn’t it?

Someday, I’ll probably find this very book of mine at a garbage collection point. If it emerges from a trash bag, I plan to kiss and sign it as a memento. I’ll note, “Late at night, on the Xth day of Yth month, at the garbage collection point in XXX-chome.”

Change

Born in the 1950s, I find it utterly unbelievable that young people these days treat one and five-yen coins like trash. I often find change at the bottom of a stationery-type trash bag. Why is that? Over ten years ago, when I first picked up change from a trash bag, I was shocked. “Well, that’s Tokyo for you,” I thought. This phenomenon started becoming noticeable during the bubble era, but even after the recession hit, it never stopped. From the moving trash of college students and musicians, from the non-burnable trash of office ladies and single salarymen, from the indiscriminate trash of freeters–the amounts weren’t huge, but coins were plentiful. Then, last summer, I finally found three hundred-yen coins at the bottom of a trash bag. Man, what a culture shock… I guess I really am a born-and-bred poor person. I kinda hated myself for it. The trash bag also had things like the box for a Famicon game and an elementary school notebook, so there’s no doubt a kid had done this. I couldn’t bring myself to spend it, so I put it in a convenience store donation box as part of my hypocritical charity act. If it had been 30,000 yen, though, I would’ve run straight to the pink salon in front of the station.

It is what it is, I guess. To kids these days, a hundred-yen coin is probably worth no more than an arcade token. Their sense of money is fundamentally different from mine, as I was raised to waste not even a single grain of rice. This isn’t an issue that should be discussed in terms of right or wrong, however. To add insult to injury, last fall I found a tin piggy bank stuffed full of one-yen and five-yen coins among the moving trash of a Chinese exchange student. Do exchange students have so much money that they can afford to throw it away? If I can find this much, then the whole of Tokyo must be full of change. I bet a lot of loose change is being hauled right now to Yumenoshima. An era where loose change is treated like trash–well, whatever.

The key to finding loose change is moving trash packed with stationery from young folks. Another method is feeling around the bottom of garbage bags. Sometimes arcade tokens are in there too, so don’t get your hopes up if you feel something flat and round.

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