Please take your terrorist trash home with you
I’ve noticed that most of the private railways in this area have removed all the trash cans from their platforms. Prominently posted signs and regular announcements claim that this is intended to reduce the threat of terrorism. I guess the idea is to keep terrorists from putting bombs in trash cans, but it just seems kind of silly to me.
Call me a cynic, but I think these train lines are just looking for an excuse not to pay someone to remove the trash each day. I’ve noticed, for example, that these same train lines have not gotten rid of their coin lockers, which would probably be as good a place for a terrorist to stash a bomb as a trash can, so I don’t see how it would foil any dastardly plot to blow up rush-hour commuters. (Besides, any serious terrorist knows that the JR Shinjuku Station would be the one to blow up—and JR, as far as I have been able to determine, is keeping its trash cans.)
What it does, though, is inconvenience the hell out of the passengers, who are now asked to take their trash home with them. So please buy a bottle of tea at the platform kiosk, but take the empty bottle home with you when you are finished drinking it. The same goes for the wrapping from your tuna sandwich and the plastic box your o-bento came in. Is that the idea? Nice. Maybe if I actually felt safer, I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t, so instead I just feel less like buying anything at the train station kiosks. I wonder how many others feel the same way. I bet those trash cans will come back pretty quickly if the kiosks notice that sales have slumped after they were removed—terrorist threat or no.
On the other hand, I suppose it would almost single-handedly do away with all the porn you see salarymen reading on the trains all the time. I mean, come on, you don’t really think they take those magazines home, do you?
