It's well known there isn't an abundance of public rubbish bins, but there are plenty that are adjacent to where you are likely generating rubbish (or recycling) - eg. konbibis.
I suspect spending all your time in the frustratingly tourist-dense triad likely skews your experiences of the country. I haven't been to Kobe, but it's doubtless similarly afflicted, and presumably has responded in a similar way.
The absence is well-known and described in places like Wikipedia. Also, how many major capital cities in Japan should I spend time in before it's not 'anecdata'? Should I get a sample of another 10 or 20 Tokyos before you're satisfied?
FWIW, I did a LLM research report about numbers, and they pulled up some interesting cites: https://gwern.net/doc/japan/2026-11-03-gpt6astra-japansmissi... Places like Osaka have deliberately removed their city trashcans (from 5000 to zero since 2007, while Kyoto apparently got rid of 500 recently), and the vending machine trashcans are inadequate because they're only supposed to be for bottles but of course pick up a lot of other trash because what other option is there, while konbinis report problems with people using their tiny little trashcans a lot. There's also some interesting dynamics here where the overuse of trashcans becomes the justification for removing them, thereby externalizing all the costs onto people (especially tourists, according to the Japan Tourism Agency's regular large-scale surveys, where a shockingly large percentage single out trash cans as a problem in their visit).
> but there are plenty that are adjacent to where you are likely generating rubbish (or recycling) - eg. konbibis.
As already noted, I didn't see many adjacent to konbinis. (Inside them, sure, but that is definitionally not a 'public rubbish bin'. That's a private one, and we felt awkward just going into stores to use their trash. Similar to using a store's restroom without any intent of shopping there. Some "plenty"!)
> I suspect spending all your time in the frustratingly tourist-dense triad likely skews your experiences of the country
Yes, I expect it skews my trash bin prevalence too high. Because tourist-heavy places should have more, not less.
AIUI the history is a bit murky, and it's mostly fiscal, but with some terrorism response - the sarin gas, and then other cities having attacks, and bins being seen as a safety risk.
Here in AU we had a famous (because they're so rare) bombing in the 1980's (the Hilton bombing, for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting) - about which much has been written. I think about 20 years ago, give or take quite a few, there's been a move to transparent public rubbish bins, and I'm sure the placement, shape, etc of those has been considered by planners with those risks in mind.
A related domestic anecdote - from the same era - one of our more interesting politicians in Sydney set about removing public bins, on the premise that their presence increased street litter (you see people put rubbish on top of a full bin, and it's blown away a few moments later).
Back to Japan - it seems to have been mostly a response to citizens avoiding rubbish collection fees at home by taking household waste to public bins. I don't know if that can be correlated tidily to higher density ~= higher tourism areas?
In any case, while we travelled there, it was rare that we had a problem with rubbish, but we were prepared -- we either followed the locals' habit (eat/drink where you buy and immediately ditch in their bin) and/or we were invariably carrying daypacks so we could take waste back to our hotel.
> Yes, I expect it skews my trash bin prevalence too high. Because tourist-heavy places should have more, not less.
I understand why you might think that, but I would suggest that it's not a universally agreed argument.
Yes, I figured that is what you meant, which is why I then explained why it still sucks. What if I don't want to eat something entirely then and there in the konbini I bought it...? What if I have trash from some other source?
> it seems to have been mostly a response to citizens avoiding rubbish collection fees at home by taking household waste to public bins.
Yes, that was highlighted in the LLM report. And is an example of the perverse dynamics and poverty mindset, where an entire society is distorted in the name of conservation, where the high usage of trash cans becomes a reason to not have them. (I am still thinking about the multiple 3/4-star luxury hotels I stayed in which provided some of the lowest-quality gas-station-tier toilet paper I have ever used - a false economy all the more unjustifiable given how little toilet paper a guest would use thanks to the wonderful bidets!)
> but we were prepared
Precisely. I was confused for the first week: "how does this work? How are the locals throwing their trash away away? Surely they don't just reorganize their lives around this limitation, and tolerate things that few other societies tolerate, and let an obsession with litter and recycling run their lives and dictate when and where they can eat or even just drink some water on a hot humid day? There must be some trick or convention I am not getting, maybe some trash cans hidden away somewhere under an unfamiliar appearance." And then I realized, "oh. They do. That's how it works." And I too reorganized my life to submit to the trash planners.
I find LLMs pay a lot more attention to speculative blog posts about these things, as they out-number actual policy rationale - in the case of the North Sydney (AU) removal of bins, there's surprisingly few resources still surviving (or at least indexed) outside of newspaper interviews, and so I'm not convinced we have access to the full set of motivations and results analysis.
I suspect the Japanese motivation is cleaner, as I noted, and you have also concluded.
I spent a fair bit of time on /r/JapanTravelTips as part of our planning - it's probably the third or fouth most talked about topic there, after 'where to eat in Tokyo' (sigh), and how to use a fast train.
In any case, daypacks are the answer to many challenges, including this one.