A report on a room where several tons of garbage had accumulated and been left in a six-mat room… Characteristics of the room owner revealed when we infiltrated the work of a cleaning company.
A garbage mansion filled with an unbelievable amount of garbage and a terrible smell. Many of you have probably seen news reports of problems with neighbors. Recently, however, “dirty rooms” in apartments and condominiums where a large amount of garbage has accumulated have become a problem.
One of the most popular YouTube channels, “Partners’ President’s Office [Gomiyashiki Specialty Partners],” has been cleaning up many dirty rooms that cannot be entered through the front door, and they clean up more than 3,000 trashy houses and dirty rooms a year. They clean more than 3,000 trashy houses and dirty rooms a year.
Are there really this many trashy houses and dirty rooms in the world? We followed the president’s office of Partners [Gomiyashiki Specialized Partners] to the site and interviewed the owner about the characteristics of the site and the circumstances of the owner of the dirty room.
The request this time was for a room in an apartment in Tokyo. It was a 6-mat room with a loft and a bathroom. When we arrived at the site, seven staff members and a four-ton truck were waiting for us.
Surprised at the harshness of the smell, we looked inside the room and found that the garbage was piled up to waist height, so much so that we could not see the floor. Mr. Tsuyoshi Ishida, a cleaning staff member, walked over the garbage with a familiar look, checking the inside of the dirty room,
He said, “With this smell, I wonder if there are more convenience store lunches. The amount of trash and smell in this room is about a 3 on a scale of 10, and we should be done in about 5 hours.
He then instructed the other staff members to prepare garbage bags and cardboard boxes for sorting the garbage, and began the cleaning work.
As I watched them cleaning the room, I noticed that the electricity in the room had been turned off and a large amount of vermin feces were stuck to the walls. As the work progressed a little further, we found a large number of remote controls for air conditioners and televisions, which made us wonder, so we asked Mr. Ishida about them,
When we asked Mr. Ishida about it, he replied, “When a house is trashed, the remote controls go under the trash, and you can’t find them. When that happens, it is faster to buy a remote control than to search for it, so they buy a remote control of the same model and use it instead.
The answer came back.
Most of the trash removal is done by hand, and when the large commercial trash bags are full, they are taken out to a truck parked outside. When valuables and expensive alcohol were found, they were sorted and put into cardboard boxes for the client’s identification.
The cleanup was completed about four hours after the start of the work. The amount of trash that had accumulated this time was about half of a 4-ton truck.
After the work was completed, Mr. Ishida was taking a break before heading to the next site. When I asked him about the characteristics of his clients, he gave me a surprising answer.
Many of our clients are in their 30s and 40s. The ratio of men to women is about 4 to 6, with a little more women than men. I have the impression that many of them are busy with work, such as teachers and nurses.
Many of the clients have serious personalities and are very polite in their communications and request letters. I think most of them are too busy with their work and the garbage has accumulated little by little and they can’t do anything about it, so they ask us to do it.
Stress from work and personal life causes them to place a low priority on tidying up, and they end up with a messy room.
We were able to speak with the client on the phone this time, and when we agreed on a date and time, the call came in right on time. The client on the other end of the phone was a man who said he worked in the restaurant industry. We asked him how the room had become a mess and why he decided to ask us to clean it up.
He said, “The place I was working at when the room became a mess was a place with long working hours and severe power harassment. While I was working there, I was dumped by the girlfriend I was dating at the time, which made me sick, and I couldn’t clean up the mess. After 10 years of such a life, I ended up with a dirty room.
The reason why I decided to ask Garbage House Specialist Partners to clean up the mess was because I was getting married to a different woman than the one I was with at the time. From now on I will be careful not to let this happen to me.”
For this cleanup, the fee was a little lower because the schedule was coordinated with a nearby dirty room cleaning service, but it still cost several hundred thousand yen.
Many people who have experienced living alone have probably had the experience of accumulating garbage and throwing it all away on the next collection day. When the mind becomes tired, it becomes impossible to clean and throw out the trash.
Of course, this is a personal problem, but the structure of modern society that creates excessive stress may be the cause of the increase in trashy houses and dirty rooms
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Filming: Takero Yuzumi Interview and text: Hirokazu Ueno