Background
The Japanese love of wrapping
The Japanese love pretty packaging, but the boxes and wrappers all end up in ever-growing landfill sites.
Vincent Bongers
Thursday 6 February 2014
A boy playing on an installation by Japanese artist Hiroshi Fuji.

“You could compare them to ‘Sinterklaas’ surprise gifts”, explains Katarzyna Cwiertka, Professor of Modern Japan Studies. “They put a lot of thought into the presentation and whatever is in the box is less important.”

She shows me a white packet; the plastic exterior looks like hand-made paper and contains two little boxes, one gold, the other silver. She opens one of the boxes and takes out a tiny wrapped parcel. There is a biscuit inside. “They are all individually wrapped in plastic, that’s how it’s done in Japan. In Japan, people spend more on packaging in a year than anywhere else in the world.”

On Saturday 8 February, Cwiertka will lecture on the Japanese love of wrapping at the Founding Day celebrations hosted by the Leiden University Fund. “It’s a relatively new phenomenon that started in the eighties. Until then, Japan followed Europe and America, but the industry started to develop innovative packaging to extend a product’s shelf-life, for instance, or simply because companies could demand more money for their products. Wrapping is more of a status symbol in Japan than elsewhere. Dutch people who wander about Tokyo with a supermarket carrier will soon realise that it’s out of place: the Japanese prefer paper bags.”

Cwiertka fetches a postal parcel. “A new shipment has just arrived”, she says, showing me sturdy paper bags of the sort that, in the Netherlands, usually contain up-market chocolates or fancy silk scarves. “They’re very glamorous, but often there’s just something quite ordinary in them.” The paper bags come in different categories: “Bags with cord handles are preferable to ones with paper handles.”

Cwiertka continues: “Packaging teaches you something about the history of a country or a region. A striking illustration of this is the Eastern European countries’ current abundant use of plastic bags, while here in the EU we are trying to do away with them. I grew up in Poland, back in the days of the Iron Curtain. When I was young, people thought a plastic bag with a Marlboro advert on it was wonderful. You could buy them on the black market, and they weren’t cheap either. It was cool to own one and Eastern Europeans still need their plastic bags.”

The luxury Japanese wrappers are filed in the rubbish bin but Cwiertka is very interested in waste too. The Japanese are very conscious of the pollution caused by all the extra packaging. “The government does a lot of work on it and campaigns for the ‘three Rs’: Reduce, Re-use and Recycle. Reduction would have the most effect, but a manufacturer of plastics I was interviewing said: ‘Consumers are so used to these wrappers that it is almost impossible to reduce them.” However, recycling has been hailed with enthusiasm – you could almost say it’s an obsession. All sorts of metals and plastics are separated. It’s hard work and takes up a lot of space, even though the houses are tiny to start with. Because the bin bags are transparent, the neighbours can see whether you’re doing it properly.”

Cwiertka has been visiting Japan since 1988. “The Japanese have been into large-scale recycling for a long time; the Netherlands is quite slow on the uptake in that respect. But within Asia, there are huge differences. The streets of Singapore are very clean, but the households there don’t separate their waste.

“We don’t know precisely what happens to the rubbish that is collected in Japan, that’s something the Garbage Matters Project is looking into.” The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research awarded Cwiertka a 1.5-million Euro grant for her comparative research into waste in East Asia.

Nonetheless, it is clear that rubbish in Japan is collected with much attention to hygiene. “A friend of mine lives in nice apartment building in Tokyo. The place where you are supposed to leave the rubbish is so clean you could eat off the floor.”