Matt Alt: Why are some of Tokyo's public spaces still so trashy?

Tokyo has a reputation as one of the world's safest, cleanest, and  most efficient cities. This may be true with regards to real mayhem and violence, but crimes of the petty variety are a totally different  story.

And clean? Don't make me laugh. In fact, my wife and I learned this the hard way trying to tidy up our own little section of the city.

We live on the west side of town, in an urban suburb of sorts filled with trees and greenery. This summer, after seven years in an apartment, we started renting a wonderful little house right down the street. It's a great place. 

It also happens to be on one of the major pedestrian thoroughfares linking a popular park and several of the stations on our train line. Too narrow for any real vehicular traffic, yet wide enough for kids to run and play, it's a bright and cheery sort of place by day.

Under the cover of darkness, however, things change. The laughter of children playing in the empty lot across the street is replaced by the braying of drunken students and salarymen tottering home from a night on the town. By morning, all sorts of detritus appears.

The obligatory empty cans, bottles, and wrappers. Mysteriously soggy sacks filled with god only knows what. Once we even found an entire set of metal bookshelves, disassembled and left leaning against the wall right across the street from our house.

When you live in an apartment, you tend not to notice this sort of thing. But sacks of glop and makeshift libraries across the street from home sweet home? Unacceptable.

After several weeks of picking up what we could, we took it upon ourselves to launch a formal operation. This being the land of ninja, there was only one way to proceed: guerilla style.

So very early one morning, just after dawn, we snuck out and gentrified the lot.

We pulled up weeds. We swept up broken glass. We even paid out of our own pocket to have those damned bookshelves hauled off to the dump, as they were too big for the regular pickup.

We gathered and piled the crumbled remains of the cinderblock wall that had once ringed the lot into a semblance of order.

And then, on the offending corner most likely to be littered upon, we placed a little planter, filled with hardy flowers able to withstand direct sun. The crowning glory: a hand-lettered Japanese sign asking people to please not litter.

We retreated before the first salarymen awoke and spent the next week covertly observing our work. For a week and a half, we seemed to be in the clear. The litter disappeared.

Our little campaign to prettify our corner of the city was a smashing success, we said, congratulating ourselves as we prepared to mothball our ninja gardening outfits.

Until this morning.

No litter. But no planter, either. Someone actually came through in the middle of the night and swiped it. Could this have been some fit of pique by a would-be litterer denied? Yet the planter wasn't a particularly small affair.

You'd need two hands to carry it. And the sucker must have weighed 20 pounds. Not to mention the giant, plastic sign attached to it. We scoured the nearby streets for any sign of the missing flowerpot.

Nothing. We had to face the truth. Our flowered friends were gone. 

Part of me wants to believe it's sitting on some other corner, doing its duty to deter the accumulation of other carelessly discarded trash in another part of the city. Whatever the case, we're back to square one.

We can't give up, particularly when our battlefield happens to be two steps away from our front door.

That's when my wife hit on the perfect idea. Earlier, we'd found a bunch of the cylindrical lamp-holders used in track lighting behind some weeds in the lot. Why not convert them into planters?

That way, if anyone wants to steal them they're doing us -- and the neighborhood -- a favor by carting away excess trash. Now that's what I call fighting fire with flowers. Time to dust off those ninja outfits and wait for sunrise.