On tiny plastic bags.

Dear Japan,

It's fine. Really.

I don't need you to put a plastic bag around my fruit. When I picked it up and put it in my basket, I chose not to bag it for a reason. When I get home I'm going to peel it/wash it/eat the dirt off it like an urchin anyway. It's fine. I promise.

I don't need you to put TWO layers of plastic round my meat and cheese, before you put it in a separate plastic bag. I understand. The juices of animal products are best kept separate from vegetable products, for reasons of safety and out of respect for the four vegans still alive and well in your country. Nonetheless, you're being a smidge excessive. I think the four vegans might agree, before they make the forty-minute trek across town to the one restaurant they know that doesn't put beef chunks in the vegetable soup.

I don't need you to wrap pharmaceutical products in a miniscule plastic bag, and then put the miniscule plastic bag in a paper bag. I don't need you to put feminine hygiene products in a separate bag from all the other pharmaceutical products in case they get tainted with Witch Disease. (N.B.: I also don't need you to get a matronly female clerk to push the young male clerk aside and take over when the feminine hygiene products need to be scanned. It's okay. Really. He will learn.)

I don't need to open a bag of sweets and find every sweet in there individually wrapped. It's okay if I offer someone a sweet and they put their hand in there. If their hand is gross, or they are of an age where their hand is very likely to be gross, I'll shake the bag over their hand until it comes out. We do it all the time back home. I swear it works.

***

I have six different waste disposal bins in my flat. Paper and card, plastic, tins, PET bottles, burnable refuse and non-burnable refuse. "Does this burn?" is the mantra of our household. I have thought more about which materials could be defined as burnable than most chemists and a good deal of serial killers. I do this because obaasan yell at you if you fail to separate burnable and non-burnable refuse properly. Putting recyclable material in non-recycling bins is punishable by staring and pointing, and littering is punishable by catapult. In short, you seem to put a lot of effort into the environment in this area. And the Kyoto Protocol was invented in Kyoto (I guess), so the environment definitely on the agenda. I'm here to tell you, you don't even need to deal with electric cars or whatever. You can fix the environment right now. Just stop putting plastic bags over everything.

It'll be fine. I promise. They're just cluttering up your house and mine; I've got a whole shelf of them in my kitchen. And I can only draw faces on them so many times before I get bored of pretending they're my ghost friends.