Korea is Cleaner than USA, Dirtier than Japan

I may be biased by my happy life in South Korea, but still I think there are two things that Japan does better. Firstly, Japan excels at making foreign tourists feel like rock stars. Several years back on a school exchange trip to Hokkaido, my group and I received enough popular adoration to make us feel like the Beatles in their heyday. Secondly, Japan is immaculate. For instance, Sapporo may be the fifth biggest city in Japan with a population just larger than Manhattan’s, but when I visited there I saw neither a single plastic bag nor newspaper littering the streets.

Now, it must be said by way of comparison that Korean cities are by and large much cleaner than American ones. Or at least it’s fair to say that the dodgiest parts of Korea’s large cities are still much nicer than their American counterparts. Almost unimaginable in Korea are the dingy, urine stained shop fronts of San Francisco’s Market Street or the sprawling cardboard-house ghettos of LA’s Skid Row. However, almost everywhere you go in Korea you’re unfortunately bound to run into litter.

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Korea’s seashores are lovely–even picturesque in most places. That is, aside from the odd plastic, ready-made cappuccino cup floating in the water and the ends of spent firework poles poking up from the sand. Likewise, in autumn Korea’s beloved national parks fill with glorious colours. Unfortunately, they’re mirrored in miniature by gold, red and green candy wrappers littering the hiking trails.

The problem of trash is more obvious in towns and cities. There, undeveloped plots and other small patches of earth are frequently turned into family gardens. That’s quite nice. What’s less pleasant is that these gardens also tend to gather litter, blown by the wind or dropped by passersby. This week, I decided to pick up the litter and make my own little garden in the empty plot next to my house. Just a couple of hours later, I had gathered 24 pounds of garbage. This included seven pounds of recyclables and 251 cigarette butts (something inspired my to keep count). It did not include the used futons still heaped dejectedly in one corner of the lot.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one out there with tongs and trash bags. Korea has developed a unique solution to its litter problem: platoons of middle aged ladies. Here, it’s not uncommon to see ajuma’s (literally “aunties” since it’s polite in Korea to call others by family titles) in organized groups along the streets picking up litter together. At Gyeongpo beach, one of Korea’s most popular seaside destinations, these women are likely the only force keeping the sand from becoming lost altogether under rubbish from careless beach-goers.

In all other respects, Korea is a beautiful country. If only all of its citizens would treat it as such and think before dropping trash on the ground, it would be a splendid country. A few public service messages to this effect may also go a long way toward improving Korea’s lackluster tourist industry. There’s no better way of attracting foreign tourists to a beautiful countryside than to safeguard the beauty of that countryside. Besides, it’s less work than making everyone feel like rock stars.

Image credit: WanderingSolesPhotograp hy via Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.

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