frugalista japan

GaijinStuff is another site of mine that I started a few months before this one. It’s essentially a free classifieds site, but it has a specific category for “free stuff”. I’m hoping that eventually it’ll turn into the FreeCycle of Japan, with people listing everything to give away. It’s a little Kyoto-centric right now as it’s difficult to get free advertising across Japan, but you guys can change that. It’s super easy to use and only requires registration to list items, not to respond to ads.

Personally it’s been a great tool for me to get rid of junk that’s only really worth a couple of hundred yen, if anything. But by giving it away for free, I achieve a number of distinctly wonderful things:

• The item no longer goes into the trash. In some cases with large objects and appliances / electrical goods, this is actually a direct saving since you normally have to pay to have those collected and disposed of.
• Someone else will have use of the item, so the responsibility for all production waste and transport costs that it took to make that item can now be morally shared with another person.
• It means that someone will not be putting cash and profits back into the worthless consumerist system and giant corporations that drive our modern life. If enough people did this, they would realise the system needs to be rethought.
• I am connecting with people! When someone comes to collect the item, I get to meet someone. Maybe this will result in nothing more than “hi, here’s your stuff, take care now”, but maybe it will turn out to be a half hour thoroughly interesting conversation with a complete stranger.

Anyway, please go take a look at the site and browse the stuff on there. If you have anything you’d like to give away, it’s really easy to register and post your item so please do. It would also be a really big help if you could link to the site on your Japan related blog, or tell your friends about it. If you have any comments about the site, please write them on this page or email them to help@gaijinstuff.com

ps: the subscriber count is still too low to fund my first micro loan to a needy entrepreneur. If you’d like to help me reach my goal of 50 subscribers and hence fund my first micro loan of $25, all you need to do is subscribe to the feed using your favorite feed reader. If you have no idea what subscribing to a feed means, then click here to read all about syndication.