| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,400,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000)
Fiscal Year 2001: ¥1,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,800,000)
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| Research Abstract |
What people like and feel important depends on the culture, the natural environment and the history of an individual country. As result of a comparison of Japanese and German lifestyle the chase of Japanese for convenience can be distinguished. For example, the total number of automatic vending machines ranks highest in the world, and the power consumption of 1, 1 million kWh for this service corresponds to eighty percent annual output of one nuclear power plant.
When Japan and Germany is compared, the garbage problem caused by used packaging is always raised as an example. In Germany the garbage problem could be solved by introducing a packaging recycling system that is run by the private organization "Duales System". This success story is often raised as a point of complain and critique in Japan. But, the housewife in Japan has to go shopping every day to buy the ingredients for preparing dinner, and she prepares a variety of other dishes, also. Depending on the different cuisine like
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traditional Japanese cooking, Chinese and western dishes the ingredients vary remarkably. Furthermore, foodstuff can be bought at the local market, supermarkets, convenience stores that are opened 24 hours a day or even by mail-order or teleshopping. By the grace of the popularization of home delivery services of packages which guarantee the delivery the next day of order as well as the progress of freezing and vacuum packaging technology local foodstuff specialities from all corners of Japan can be obtained. For this reason a large amount of garbage is released caused by these daily consumption articles, which are unique for the Japanese environmental problem. By way of contrast Germany has not adopted a lifestyle that releases a large amount of consumption articles, which definers the German way to deal with environmental matters.
In addition, the decisive difference between Japan and Germany seems to be "entrance" instead of "exit". But for people in general the inconvenience caused by giving up a once admired and realized lifestyle is often unbearable. What probably can be learned from Germany is the ability to deny the use of products in daily life, which are felt to be unnecessary from individual viewpoint in the sense of "entrance" oriented measure, instead of looking at recycling technologies and laws, which are "exit" driven. Along these lines the basic idea to emphasize the aspect of "reuse" as it is clearly stated in the Japanese basic act on promotion of the establishment of a recycling-oriented society fits very well. The research work raises different examples, which corroborate this finding. Less
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