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UPDATE: Saturday, June 12, 2010      The Japan Times Weekly    2004年1月3日号 (バックナンバー)
 
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DOSHI DAYS

Being down in the dumps invariably cheers me up

By DAVID GILLESPIE

* This essay column is written by a longtime foreign resident of Japan.

There's an old joke about a woman telling a friend, "I always get a new hat when I'm down in the dumps." This earns the caustic reply, "I always wondered where you got them!" The humor, what there is of it, is generated by the double meaning of "down in the dumps," which could mean feeling depressed or literally in places where garbage is dumped.

I've yet to come up with a hat when raking about dumps, but I've certainly found a fair assortment of interesting or useful things. It must be admitted, however, that these positive classifications express my view and are not necessarily shared by others, especially my wife, Keiko, who tends to frown on such activities.

My father, on the other hand, was a proponent of "recycling" long before it came to enjoy its current vogue. I was brought up on the story of him transporting sheets of discarded corrugated iron for several kilometers on a barrow in the early 1950s to build a shed beside the first house he shared with my mother. He maintains that our family motto should be, "What are you doing with your old one?" meaning that when someone gets something new, we'd be happy to take the old one.

Having served my apprenticeship in my native Scotland, for example by building a bicycle from components collected from several discarded bikes, I found Japan to be a scavenger's paradise. I particularly liked the days when the large trash items were put out for collection, offering a smorgasbord of good pickings. Our living room is enhanced by a large glass carboy, a container that holds dried plants instead of acid and a wooden sake barrel for holding firewood. The last two items were picked up in Yokohama and came with us when we moved to Doshi a dozen years ago.

Out here I've collected several big pottery soy sauce jars from trash collection points by the roadside, but my wife hates me stopping my vehicle to retrieve such gems in public view. She prefers me to confine my recycling to a local construction company's dump as I'm out of sight there, behind their workshop and down a hole. As that firm remodeled our house a couple of times and we know the family, I have no trouble getting permission to take things away before they get burned.

The nearest I came to finding any headgear was coming across a discarded deer's head, complete with fine antlers, at that dump. After wrapping it in a plastic sack, I soon had my smelly prize home and started boiling water in a metal bucket over a fire in the garden. A few days earlier, I had caught a hen in the woods behind our house and was keeping it in a cage. So when my youngest son returned from school he thought the boiling water was for preparing the bird to eat. I had to explain about the deer's head and how I planned to boil it in order to remove its contents and covering hide. (Sadly, a weasel got into the cage and killed the hen, which is a predator's take on recycling.)

Anyway, I boiled the deer's skull for a few hours (which didn't create an appetizing aroma), then scraped the bone clean (which might also put some folk off their food), then used my electric grinder to cut a heart-shaped chunk of cranium around the antlers. With their eight tines, these antlers add a nice rural touch to the entranceway of our house.

Mind you, it's usually different types of wood I salvage from the builder's dump, but with the bursting of the bubble economy the quality has deteriorated. I can recall getting some attractive Canadian oak planks for a set of shelves outside our bathroom, but now it's down to pieces of rotten veranda for firewood. I'm always happy, however, to get something handy for free -- and to do my bit for recycling. Yep, there's plenty of goodies to be found in dumps, and I'm not talking through my hat!

If you have any comments please e-mail me at jtweekly@japantimes.co.jp

The Japan Times Weekly: Jan. 3, 2004
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