Nearly one hundred plastic and glass bottles & steel and aluminum cans
Plastic shopping bags
Plastic 35kg fertilizer bags
Plastic foam bath mat
Broken plastic basket
Plastic sheeting
Plastic food wrappers
Styrofoam boxes
Styrofoam food containers
Styrofoam instant ramen cups
Cardboard boxes
Rusted out steel bowl
Rusted out push cart/seat walker
Etc.
There were so many layers of garbage, bottles and cans separated by topsoil and then more layers of trash very deep in the ground. I dug everything out by hand. I thought I would clean up a couple cans at the top of the hill, but the more I looked around the more I found. I ended up spending over two hours rummaging around the leaves and dirt even before I had breakfast this morning!
Once I filled my backpack basket, I quickly filled the two containers I fetched from home. Then, without fail, once one container was full I would serendipitously find another container or plastic shopping bag or plastic fertilizer bag, fill it up, and find another. There is still more garbage in the cemetery, that I was not able to pick up, because I was really hungry! I will have to go back another day or maybe even a few times.
All I did find in the cemetery were mountains of garbage; mostly plastic bottles from all the sake and shochu offered to the ancestors. One family would empty a bottle and throw it down the hill and their garbage would pile up around another family's grave. That family would do the same and toss their garbage down the hill to the next family, and so on and so forth, until the last family's refuse ended up in a small valley only to be washed out to sea by a small stream that swells in the rainy season and after snow melt.
What occurs to me, is that, if the islanders care so little about the cemetery where their ancestors are interned, a place where cultures usually show their greatest reverence, then how can we expect them to show any respect for the rest of their surroundings on the island. I think it will be very hard to influence and change this habitual dumping behavior for the better. Hard, but not impossible.