WORKING IN JAPAN: PT. 24

A world without cleaners

So, people drop and throw away things on train station platforms: tickets, hand towels, candy wrappers, receipts and bottle caps, gum, cigarette butts, shopping bags, umbrellas. You sweep it up then come back an hour later to find more. Return after a day and it’s exactly how it was. A piece of trash is like a politician. You get rid of it and the next day there’s one just the same.

When I started as a cleaner, the detritus surprised me. Not because it keeps coming back… I always knew that it came back. I’m not stupid. What I didn’t realise was how QUICKLY garbage accumulates, and how constant the effort required to remove it.

Pushing my broom about, and emptying the bins, I imagine a world without cleaners. It would be a messy place, a rancid vista of old tissue mountains, irrigated by dumpster juice rivers. Morale would fall apart as people carried their groceries through greasy, cruddy streets, forlorn and resigned, one hand gripping a handkerchief to keep the stink from their lungs.

Disease would rampage, picking off the old and the immunocompromised, followed by everyone else as fresh strains of virus brewed and bred in the mouths, fur and faeces of proliferating rodents.

Bugs would rule the city, nesting within piles of discarded, rotten food. Restaurants, markets and hospitals would sit in front of mounting jumbles of soiled plastic and biological matter that reeked in the sun. To avoid degeneration into suppurating mutants, citizens would flee to the countryside, where they would form roving vagrant armies commanded by sadistic warlords.

The military would be summoned to maintain order, but would be bribed into battle by feuding tribes in a contest for arable territory. Targeted by arsonist gangs, the frames of farmhouses would smoulder in the night like a dying constellation. Explosions, guns and screams of pain would echo pre-dawn during sneak attacks by hungry raiders. Vehicles would fall fuel-less and quiet. Zoo animals would escape and eat each other. Mass graves would scar the landscape.

Obviously, that’s not what would happen. Way before things reached that stage, people would start picking up their dirty Kleenex. And organise garbage removal. And perform other community-minded obligations related to quality of life and disease prevention.

But, and this is the point, I have come to appreciate, more viscerally than ever, how much rubbish humans generate, and how much of it they throw on the ground. It requires an army of workers, moving day and night, to prevent society from transforming itself into filthy mayhem like some sort of masochistic, over-indulged pig with an arsehole at each end.

I can attest from delightful experience just how many men see train station bathrooms as a shitted underpants repository and can certainly guarantee that, absent intervention, these public facilities would swiftly transform into storehouses for the stained intimate garments of our less considerate fellows. In short, I knew we would be fucked without cleaners, but this job has taught me how fast it would happen.

I’m not saying cleaners are superheroes, but it is a physically demanding job with rather low pay. And you encounter a lot of dirt, and shit, and soiled underwear. Sometimes your feet hurt and your joints ache and, in my case, you might have banged your head a few times on the odd low doorway and diagonal ceiling girder.

And what I am saying is not revelatory. We all know the moppers and wipers are needed and that, without them, floors and toilets would be scuzzy. But participating in the work has intensified my awareness of this perspective, and I figure that increased perspective cannot hurt.

Also, if I am honest, it kind of annoys me the way I am treated by some of the train passengers. Most people are friendly, and many will move out of the way when you need to come through with a cart, or if it’s time to polish up the steel barrier they’re smack in front of. Some of the older generation, especially the ladies, will greet a member of cleaning staff with ‘gokurosama desu’, meaning, loosely, ‘I appreciate your work’, or ‘Thank you for working’.

But there are people out there who don’t want to move an inch for you, or will treat you to an apathetic glower if you approach in any way.

‘Excuse me, sir… Pardon me, madam… But you appear to have a dirty look on your face,’ I should say, ‘Perhaps this horrid, dusty cloth of mine could improve the situation.’

And some will look through you like you aren’t really there. To them you are a non-human, a shape, or an item of maintenance equipment. To them, service workers are like bees: admittedly vital but you wouldn’t want one touching your arm.

Anyhow, enough of my bitter ranting… today was a day off and tomorrow I’m back on the job. I have a sliver of Tokyo to sweep.

Part 25 can be found here.

The previous part of this series is here.

In addition, I am working for a smidge over minimum wage right now, and would appreciate any downloads of my awesome book Meet Mark, which is very courteously priced on Kindle.