Is Japan’s Spirit of Mottainai a Myth?

The year is 2002. The World Economic Forum, in association with Yale University and Columbia University, comes up with something called the Environmental Performance Index, or EPI for short.

The EPI quantifies the environmental performance of a country’s policies, combining 58 indicators across 11 categories such as waste management, climate change mitigation, and so on. Each country gets a global and regional rank, a suite of scores from 0 to 100 for each facet of its environmental policies, and a total score encompassing them all.

It’s a leaderboard, and the game’s win condition is having the best environmental policies.

As of today, sitting at the top of the leaderboard is Estonia, ranked #1 both globally and in Europe with a total score of 74.79. If you’re unfamiliar with Estonia, think of it as Finland’s little sister. It’s a lovely little country.

Going down the list, the global top ranks are all European countries. You have to scroll down to #16 to find a non-European country: Japan.

Ranked #1 in Asia-Pacific with a total score of 63.15, Japan is a rather interesting case to examine in the context of environmental policies. This is because of a Japanese concept known as Mottainai.

An Environmental Spirit

Mottainai (勿体無い), meaning “wasteful,” conveys a sense of regret over waste.

In his upcoming book, “Japan 2025 – the World’s Last Utopia,” author Felix Chan argues that Mottainai originates in Shinto. It’s the ancient animist belief that everything has a spirit, or kami, and so any form of waste is a spiritual sin against the kami. One must not waste a grain of rice, for example, as the rice has its own kami.

Recall the character of Haku from the 2001 film Spirited Away by the legendary Hayao Miyazaki. Spoilers for this 25-year-old film, and my apologies for making you realize how old you are. Haku is one of the many kami that our protagonist, Chihiro, meets on her journey. Specifically, he is the kami of the Kohaku River, into which Chihiro fell and nearly drowned as a little girl.

Although a fantasy story, the notion of kami being “characters” in life, with their own agency, personalities, and inner depth, is very much real in the Shinto religion.

It tracks, then, that a culture with such an outlook on the world would develop Mottainai as a concept and, centuries later, rank so high on the EPI.

Modern Regrets (Over Waste)

Chan’s book highlights a number of examples that showcase Mottainai in Japanese society today.

One of them is the parking tower, a building commonly found in metropolitan areas that serves the purpose of a multistory parking garage.

The way it works is that you drive into a garage with a circular metal plate on the ground. You position your car on the plate, turn off the engine, and step out. A robotic elevator then takes your car up to where cars are stacked vertically in a shaft. Your car is later returned to you rotated 180 degrees, so that you can get in and drive out without needing to reverse.

The purpose of these towers isn’t just the cool factor (though they are very cool), but to save space in an already tight urban environment. Since you don’t need to spiral up the building looking for a parking spot and make use of available space to actually park your car, these towers don’t take nearly as much space as your typical parking garage. To the Japanese, what you call “typical” is considered a waste of space.

A similar type of technology is used for bicycles. Many train stations have kiosks that take your bike away into an underground silo. On top of preventing theft and keeping them away from the rain, these silos keep sidewalks and surrounding public spaces free of bicycles. Once again, it would be a waste of space otherwise.

The final example is sushi conveyor belts. You’re probably familiar with sushi places where plates rotate around a slow-moving circle of random plates. It’s iconic, but also quite wasteful when you think about it: sushi dries up quickly and must be thrown away if no one picks it up, which naturally happens when the selection is random. This means a lot of sushi is then thrown away.

These days, however, sushi places prevent this waste by removing randomness. Instead of waiting for something you like and hoping no one picks it up before you can, you order your sushi from a tablet, and it comes directly to you via a robot that travels from the kitchen to dedicated seats. This sort of technological solution can only arise in a culture predisposed to waste reduction.

As environmental movements at the dawn of the 21^st century surged around the globe, Mottainai was adopted by Japanese activists for the cause.

A 2002 article by Hitoshi Chiba documented a number of grassroots environmental movements at the time and referred to them as the “revival of the Mottainai spirit.” This increased interest in the concept was later the topic of a 2014 paper by historian Eiko Maruko Siniawer, who wrote that Mottainai “reflected wide-ranging principles and beliefs that were thought to define what it meant to be Japanese in the twenty-first century.”

Notably, Siniawer’s paper included the perspectives of other Japanese authors who believed Mottainai to be a Buddhist concept. This differs from Chan’s belief that its origin lies in Shinto, though both sides would likely agree it is inherent to Japanese culture either way.

Crunching the Numbers

Equipped with this understanding of Mottainai and its value in Japanese society and environmental efforts, let’s return to Japan’s EPI ranking.

As mentioned above, the EPI score is a total score composed of individual scores for categories and subcategories. The main three categories are environmental health, where subcategories such as air quality and waste management are found; ecosystem vitality, where various forms of biodiversity protection are listed; and climate change policy objective, which is exactly what it sounds like.

For environmental health, Japan ranks #19 globally with a score of 81.54. In most subcategories, it’s also noteworthy that Japan’s scores have improved over the past 10 years.

For ecosystem vitality, Japan ranks #39 globally with a score of 53.13. Here, the subcategories tell a mixed picture. Most that are related to marine habitat protection and fisheries, sustainable agriculture, and wastewater treatment show improvements over time. Others, such as loss of forests and the Red List Index (which tracks the overall extinction risk for species in a country) show a downward trend.

Lastly, for climate change policy objective, Japan ranks #18 globally with a score of 62.86. Here we can see that most of Japan’s objectives have improved greatly over the years, with the clear exceptions of N2O and F-gas emissions, which have seen the opposite trajectory.

Based on this brief overview, it’s apparent that Japan is doing better than most of the world, but has room for improvement. But numbers never tell the full picture, which is why we must take a step away from the statistics and see what these policies look like for the average person.

Everyday Waste Disposal

Japan’s recycling strictness is rarely apparent to tourists. If you travel around for sightseeing, you don’t get to see what happens to the trash you threw into your hotel room’s bin. Stay at one place for a few weeks, however, and you inevitably experience waste disposal the way the locals do.

Which is exactly what I’ve done on multiple occasions, so let me walk you through it.

The first thing to note is that Japan has a designated garbage bag system. Retailers stock trash bags certified and designated by the local government, meaning there is variation depending on which part of Japan you’re in.

Different types of waste must be put in different types of bags and placed outside for collection at different times of the week or month, and which types can or can’t be grouped together varies from region to region. It can seem overwhelming at first, with a lot of infographics explaining how to do it correctly, but do it once and you’ll rarely think of it again.

Incidentally, when placing the bags for collection, you put them under nets to prevent crows from getting into the trash and making a mess. This is why you would sometimes see filled water bottles waiting at the side of the street—they’re used as weights to keep the nets in place.

Though waste disposal varies by region, one consistent delineation is waste that can be burned and waste that cannot be burned. This is because of thermal recycling (also known as Waste-to-energy), which is the conversion of waste materials into usable energy such as heat or electricity. Of Japan's 72% recycling rate, about 60% is thermally recycled.

It’s clear that Japan’s environmental efforts aren’t just numbers, but everyday actions made by everyday people.

But now we must ask: can Japan do better?

Recycling vs. Production

The answer, obviously, is yes.

Go to any restaurant in Japan and along with cutlery and a glass of water, you’ll receive an oshibori, a damp napkin, wrapped in plastic. Go to a supermarket to buy fruits and vegetables—many are individually wrapped in plastic, some even come with plastic plates too. Want to get a pack of cookies instead? Each cookie inside is individually wrapped in plastic. Need shampoo from the pharmacy? The plastic bottle is wrapped in plastic.

Plastic within plastic within plastic.

In 2025, 5.3 million tons of plastic were consumed in Japan, making it rank #6 in total plastic consumption worldwide. In fairness, #1 is China with 55.7 million and #2 is the U.S. with 31.6 million, so the difference here is indeed great, but 5.3 million is still far too much plastic.

There are perfectly sound rebuttals, of course. In a high-humidity country, plastic packaging can reduce shelf life and food waste, as well as extend expiration dates. Hospitality and convenience are important in Japanese culture. But still, 5.3 million tons is a lot of plastic, and solutions to these problems already exist.

The bottom line here is that while waste management addresses the symptoms, waste production is the actual cause of those issues.

To its credit, Japan knows this. The Ministry of the Environment set a goal to reduce single-use plastics by 25% by 2030, and the Act on Promotion of Resource Circulation for Plastics came into effect in April 2022 with the specific aim, among several, of reducing plastic waste production.