Culture of Cleaning

 

 

One thing I’ve always noticed in my visits to Japan is how clean, orderly, and safe it feels. People in Japan seem to take great care in maintaining their environment. Though I’ve heard that keeping up such neatness and organization can be quite stressful, this is something that I wish were a bigger part of cultures all around the world.

I bring this up because a park where I regularly go jogging is also a popular place for events, and these events highlight to me some of the issues we have in Malaysia in keeping our public spaces clean, organized, and most importantly, safe.

I’m sure people much smarter than me have come up with reasons for how our cultures have become so different in this sense. I imagined at some point in the past that, because of the tropical environment we’ve become used to the idea of heavy rain washing everything clean for us.

Not to say that no one cares about keeping our public spaces clean and safe here. The park in the picture above is mostly clean within a few days after any event, and the local city council has in recent years done more to encourage cleanliness in public spaces. There were also several pictures that went viral last year following some protests in downtown Malaysia that showed participants cleaning up after themselves on a massive scale.

But clearly, we could do more to care for the cleanliness and safety of our public spaces in Malaysia.