Mottainai

もったいない (mottainai) is a regret felt toward waste, a concept deeply rooted in Japanese culture. It applies to everything in life: energy, food, water, garbage... It's the reason why most Japanese homes have small space heaters and A/Cs rather than central heating/cooling to save energy. It's why Japanese cars are tiny and fuel-efficient (lots of Priuses!). It's why garbage is sorted into I-don't-know-how-many types, all collected on different days. To reduce waste.

Before coming here, I knew that Japanese people were, generally, more eco-friendly than their Western counterparts. At one of my orientations (gosh, I don't know which one. They all blur together.) I learned the name. I didn't really understand how it would feel, though, until coming to live with my host family.

もったいない is very important to my host family. They attempt to waste nothing. When meals are made, they either eat every scrap or save what they can for breakfast or lunch the next day. Even a single bite's worth of potato salad is saved, appearing on the side for dinner. My lunches are always made from pieces of previous meals. My host mother saves all the plastic bags, from grocery-store bags to used Ziploc baggies (after being washed out, of course), in a drawer in the kitchen. The family is very particular about which trash goes in which bin, but I have yet to figure out exactly what goes where.

I love the idea of waste-reduction, of attempting to minimize what we take from the Earth and what we put into it. I've always tried to live consciously of my waste, to recycle what I can, and to not use anything excessively.

But at some point it gets exhausting.

I worry what they think of me, if I'm being too wasteful for their standards. I went out with my host sister, Sakura, and her friend and we ate curry and rice. We were given huge dishes, and I was obviously slowing way down with mine about three quarters of the way through. I had stopped for a bit when Sakura said, "If you can't finish, Hinano will eat the rest of yours." At first I was a little bewildered and thought, "Okay, I'll gladly let her finish it..." It wasn't until later that I realized that that's it; that's もったいない. I'm left thinking, "Oh, crap... should I have actually eaten the rest?"

I think もったいない is also why my host family has labeled me as a 少食家 ("shoushokuka", a light eater) and gives me smaller amounts to eat than the rest of the family (except my host mother, who eats nearly nothing), so no food is wasted. This was established on my first night here.

They put so much effort into it, even scraping and attempting to eat all the sugar that had fallen off a donut onto a plate.

Like I said, I have yet to figure out the trash bins. Just throwing something away becomes a big worry for me because I don't want to put it in the wrong place, and I'm left standing in the kitchen unsure of myself for a good while before making a decision.

I don't know if my family is extreme or normal by Japanese standards, having no other family to which to compare them. But I do understand that the sentiment at least is common to most households here.

It's both beautiful and draining.