Won't Miss #8 - vending machine blight (reflection)

As I remarked in the original post, vending machines are everywhere in Tokyo. I had also been told that, even in the countryside, banks of machines sometimes stood in the middle of nowhere. More than one Japanese person told me that they saw them as an incredible waste of energy. I wonder if, in the face of strict energy conservation after the Fukushima meltdown in the wake of the March 11, 2011 quake, such machines were removed. I know that vending machines in Tokyo were being frantically re-engineered to reduce their carbon footprint. This was something I heard firsthand from employees whose job it was to make such machines (such was the nature of my work in Japan that I had access to such people on a regular basis).

The truth is that, I think all cultures have various visual blight and wasteful energy consumption. Sometimes it is trash on the lawns of rural homes. Sometimes it's ugly newspaper distribution boxes. Sometimes it's graffiti on city streets and walls. Now, I think that banks of gleaming machines were really not such a bad thing after all. It could very much have been worse. The "worst" part of it all, in retrospect, was the valuable sidewalk real estate that they sometimes consumed in areas that sometimes were congested with heavy foot traffic. I now find that I actually regard the total suffocation of some areas with vending machines as a bit of nostalgia rather than see it as an annoyance. 

Won't Miss #457 - air conditioner energy wastage

A Roppongi Hills restaurant the summer of 2011, with the doors wide open to the outside and air conditioners blasting.

The summer after the Great Tohoku Earthquake, the number of people who were carted off to the hospital for heat stroke tripled. This was because the damage to the Fukushima power plant created an energy shortage and everyone was encouraged to reduce energy consumption by using their air conditioners at 28 degrees C. (82 degrees F.). Many Japanese people responded by not using their AC at home all in a spirit of solidarity. However, while average consumers were succumbing to the effects of the heat, businesses were doing what they have always done: leaving their doors wide open and allowing the cool air to blast out into the great outdoors. This act of energy wastage is done to make the business appear more inviting to consumers and despite Kyoto accords and pledges to reduce carbon footprints and the very real need to reduce energy after the earthquake, it hasn't changed.

I won't miss seeing doors of heavily air conditioned buildings wide open and bleeding cool air into the open in an act of stupid and pointless energy wasting.