Japan "is enmired in waste." Naturally — what industrialized or industrializing nation isn't? It's a ubiquitous problem urgently demanding an elusive solution, studied accordingly by chemists, biologists, environmentalists, economists, urbanologists and so on. Peter Wynn Kirby is none of these. He's an anthropologist.
What can an anthropologist teach us about waste? That its definition and the responses it calls forth are not universal but in large part culturally determined, Japan's being rooted in notions of "purity" as old as Japanese civilization itself.
What does "purity" mean? An answer would help us answer a related question: What does "pollution" mean? Ancient Shinto beliefs held that purity was violated by sickness, menstruation, childbirth, physical injury. These were the "pollutions" of primitive Japan, seemingly irrelevant today, and yet primeval thinking can be oddly tenacious, as Kirby's study of what he calls "Azuma Disease" shows.