Ehime Prefecture Students, Foreign Residents Unite to Clean Up Coastline; Students Enlisting Help of Restaurants, Tourists

By Katsuhiro Mori / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

15:22 JST, September 16, 2024

MATSUYAMA — Together with local foreign residents, members of the international understanding club at Prefectural Toon High School in Toon, Ehime Prefecture, are cleaning up the beaches. They pick up trash along the coast and are working on a system that allows tourists to easily participate, all to protect the region’s ocean.

On Saturday, five club members and seven foreign residents living in the prefecture armed themselves with trash tongs and collected plastic bottles that had washed ashore on the beach and rocks at Horie Beach in Matsuyama. After just about an hour, they filled around 10 garbage bags. “There’s always so much trash no matter when we come,” they said.

Pablo Cisneros, 29, a U.S.-born assistant language teacher at elementary and junior high schools in the city of Seiyo in the prefecture was one of the foreign residents who took part. He decided to join because he wanted to support keeping Ehime’s beaches clean.

The club began focusing on the issue of marine litter in 2022, when current club president Hana Watanabe, a third-year student, came up with the idea during her first year at the school. Watanabe said she was shocked as a child to see the large amounts of trash on the prefecture’s coastal areas.

Since then, they have done beach cleaning activities several times each year, and asked foreign residents to participate. They also partnered with an environmental protection organization in Okinawa to make it easy for visitors to stores and beachgoers to join in.

Coastal restaurants and other businesses have registered with the organization to cooperate with the cleaning efforts. For ¥500, they lend out gloves and give garbage bags to tourists. After collecting trash, the tourists return the full bags to the participating stores. The ¥500 fee helps cover the PR and operational costs of the campaign.

KaRuu, an international restaurant near Horie Beach, became the first business to participate in the spring of 2023 after the club reached out to local establishments in the Matsuyama coastal area. Restaurant owner Takuya Ito, 37, said: “The trash problem at the beach has always been concerning. It’s good to have more options to work toward solving it.”

The club members have been distributing flyers at commercial facilities to expand their activities. “We hope more people will lend a hand to help preserve the beautiful ocean for future generations,” said Watanabe.