Well, actually, it’s more like “abandon your bike because you can’t be bothered paying to have it removed via the city garbage collectors” or “you’ve left it somewhere after one too many chūhais and have no idea where” and this is what happens in Tokyo:

iPhone photo and a few apps for the fake DOF and the cross-processing effect

You can hardly blame people because it’s actually possible to travel across the city on foot and/or by subway and not come across a garbage can. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve carried a PET bottle or an empty Starbucks cup all they way back home with me because I haven’t spotted a place to deposit it.

At first this seems very odd and somewhat ridiculous, but you then remember that after the famous sarin gas subway attacks, the “Subway Sarin Incident” (地下鉄サリン事件) as it’s known here, garbage cans were almost completely removed from every public area and subway/rail station in the city. Some have returned over time, but, the other truth is that garbage cans require effort to look after and, in a city of this size and population, even some convenience stores are now placing them inside the store so that passersby don’t deposit random garbage.

Of course, once the first BOSS Coffee can gets tossed into the basket of an abandoned bicycle, it’s almost like an automatic invitation to toss in another as people pass by (which, of course, leads us into the psychology of littering and whether or not there are any cultural differences in terms of littering , but let’s save that for another day).