Inside a Japanese garbage house
Comedian Yoshio Kojima uses his celebrity charm to get permission to film inside a gomi yashiki (“garbage mansion”):
Kojima is greeted with a truly horrid sight. Garbage is everywhere, making it very hard to walk through the rooms. Some of the filth is old food that has long since rotted. The old woman who owns the house doesn’t seem to realize just how terrible it smells.
After finding out that she would like to eat yakiniku, Kojima is able to convince her that the big piles of trash make it impossible to hold a barbeque on her property, so she allows him to clean up the outside of her house.
Kojima assembles a team of not-so-popular comedians who are willing to spend a day sifting through garbage and they begin the task of cleaning up the woman’s driveway and lawn. As their cleaning progresses, the woman tries to stop them from throwing away some bags of obviously rotten food. Despite the random appearance of her garbage piles, she seems to remember exactly where she put everything, and she wants to save certain things.
During a bento break, the woman tells Kojima about her past. Apparently she was once married to a rich man and had a maid that did all her cleaning. However, her husband died when she was only 31-years-old, leaving her without enough money to keep the maid. Her life became very lonely, and sometime after that she began to surround herself with trash.
When they return to work, she becomes more cooperative in allowing them to throw away stuff. The team of comedians completes the clean-up – taking 5 hours to fill three two-tun trucks with garbage. Kojima holds the barbecue he promised and the old woman is happy (at least until Kojima and the TV cameras leave).
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