Ohayo! Shuushuusha (Good morning! Garbage truck!) おはよう！しゅうしゅうしゃ

Text : Fumiko Takeuchi 竹内文子

Illustration : Mamoru Suzuki 鈴木まもる

Published : 2015

Personal recommendation : 3-5 years old and up

Our family loves the illustration of Mr. Mamoru Suzuki. Though there are numbers of Mamoru Suzuki’s illustration books available, my boy loved this book when he was about 3 and I have some personal attachment to this book, I would like to pick this book today.

This book is basically about daily work routine of garbage truck driver to collect city’s garbage in Japan.  Several example descriptions are as follows

• How they start working early in the morning
• How they effectively collect garbage in timely manner
• Once they notice person with garbage bag is running to the collection point, they wait for those people
• How they pay attention to park the truck in busy street with lots of traffic to avoid accident/congestion 
• How they check the semi-transparent garbage bag’s contents from outside of bag to make sure the incombustible items are not in “combustible-item only” garbage bag and leaves note if indeed mixed.
• How they pick up the large item such as furniture by crane to help out
• How they gather all the collected garbage at incineration plant 
• How they clean the truck inside out daily to prepare the next day’s work 

As you might guess, this isn’t really typical “story” for Children’s books, but with Mamoru Suzuki’s pretty realistic illustration of truck detail, I sort of consider this book as half “Picture book” and half “Children’s book”.  Yet, since all those text description was nicely done by Fumiko Takeuchi, this book makes the readers appreciate all those garbage truck driver’s effort to keep the town clean daily. So in a sense, I felt like I just watched the documentary program for Children after reading this book.   Since Japan in general is known as “Clean country”, we should not forget and also need to teach Children that there are reasons and hidden heroes for that!  This book can also teach non-Japanese how we should take out garbage by separating all those detailed categories like combustible/non-combustible/paper/can/bottle/plastic etc by each designated-colored semi-transparent bag.  (Color designation varies based on each town/community FYI)

As a bonus track (?), last page shows the mechanism of garbage truck inside in illustration. (=and this was my boy’s favorite part of the entire book actually. 😊 )   

You can purchase this book here. 　広告はこちら

おはよう！しゅうしゅうしゃ [ 竹下文子 ] 価格：1100円（税込、送料無料) (2021/11/6時点) 楽天で購入

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