FRF '99 Camping Site The garbage thing [1999.8.1 10:51] This morning, as I walked along the path that connects the Green and White stage areas, I couldn't help but notice how little the path had changed since Friday. Normally, this wouldn't have been much of an epiphany, but when you consider just how many feet have tramped through these woods in the past 48+ hours, and what their owners have been carrying with them, you have to be amazed. Except for a stray chopsticks wrapper, the path and the surrounding brush were totally litter free. Staff people who have been handling the foreign guests told me that the most common comment they hear is how unbelievably clean this festival is. Even the original Woodstock, for all its much ballyhooed peace-and-love vibe, was generally agreed to be a pigsty when it finished; and I'm not even going to try to describe the kind of trashing that contemporary European and North American music festivals inflict on their respective environs. Some will say it's due to Japanese culture (the same foreigners are always amazed at the cleanliness of the Tokyo subway system, and they're right), but that kind of explanation goes only so far -- corporations and private citizens alike do a pretty good job of fouling the air and water in this country, and rather indiscriminately. I think a major shoutout should go to the environmental group A Seed Japan, who installed the huge plywood bins that are placed in conspicuous but not obstrusive locations throughout the festival grounds; and whose staff are also constantly passing out burnable garbage bags to festivalgoers. But in the end, it's probably both of these things and something else. Crudely put, as the old saying goes, you don't shit where you live, and I think the kids who have forked over their however-earned cash for the privilege of baking under hot suns and sleeping on unlevel, sometimes gravelly ground, understand that this is a place they would like to come back to some day, and that they don't have a right to if they leave an unsightly smudge on the spot they occupied. I know I want to come back. 1999.8.1 Reported by Phil 無断転載を禁じます。 They may not be reproduced in any form whatsoever.

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