There is a Japanese word, mottainai, that carries the sense of regret over discarding something still useful, and a small mountain town of 1,500 people in southern Japan has spent the past twenty years building a municipal system around it, requiring resi

There is a Japanese word, mottainai, that carries the sense of regret over discarding something still useful, and a small mountain town of 1,500 people in southern Japan has spent the past twenty years building a municipal system around it, requiring resi

The town is called Kamikatsu. It sits in the mountains of Shikoku, the smallest and least populated of the four main Japanese islands, about an hour’s drive inland from the prefectural capital of Tokushima. Eighty-five per cent of its land is forest. Its population, by the most recent census, is approximately 1,500 people, distributed across 55 small hamlets at elevations ranging from 100 to 800 metres. For most of its history, Kamikatsu dispose…