Trash on Tsushima’s beaches

The island of Tsushima(which was featured in the Rude Koreans post), Japan’s closest territory to South Korea, is having a problem. Its once beautiful beaches are covered in trash. Since a lot the trash has Korean markings it is generally assumed that the trash must be drifting over from Korea. The Asashi Shinbun reports that a program has been organized in which Korean students come to Tsushima to help Japanese students clean up trash.

The municipality gathered up about 6,000 plastic bottles in 2001. It spends between 3 million yen and 5 million yen a year cleaning the beaches of unsightly trash.

The surf, however, keeps bringing more in. For island residents, it has become a futile game of cat-and-mouse: As fast as they clean, the beaches get covered again.

Adding to the problem is that the government has nowhere to deposit the garbage it gathers, not on Tsushima at least.

In fiscal 2005, it forked out 15 million yen to collect and ship the trash over to a dump on the mainland.

When South Korean Pak Pyong Jun, 36, arrived in the former town of Kamiagata, Tsushima, as a coordinator for international exchange in June 2001, he was shocked at the garbage.

No one back home had seen first-hand what a beautiful beach looks like when it is covered in plastic bottles and cans marked with Korean Hangul characters.

Back in South Korea, Pak showed photographs of the litter to his friends, and called for student volunteers to join an organized cleanup operation.

In May 2003, responding to Pak’s plea, about 160 students from the Pusan University of Foreign Studies arrived in Tsushima. Together with 250 island residents they picked up 150 tons of garbage, everything from Styrofoam containers to bulky electrical appliances presumably dumped by island residents.

The operation was a resounding success. The next year, a total of 780 volunteers from the two countries joined in; in 2005, there were 850.

Such an act of cooperation is truly praiseworthy. We can only hope that the Japanese and Korean media, which seem to be interested in reporting negative news, will give more coverage to this event.