By Meg Murphy, RocketNews24

Last week, a young high school girl from Saitama Prefecture received a certificate of thanks from the chief of police for her efforts to clean up litter from a portion of prefectural highway in her town.

On the evening of December 21, Risa Yumoto, a first-year high school student at Konosu Prefectural High School was riding her bike home from school when she saw a bunch of old newspapers and paper advertisements scattered around approximately three meters of highway. At first she passed by, but as the thought of doing nothing got to her, she turned around and returned to the site.

She began stuffing the litter into the front basket of her bicycle but soon ran out of room, so she went to the nearest convenience store, bought some trash bags, and returned to continue collecting garbage. The road gets a lot of traffic, so Risa had to wait in between signals to dash into the road and gather more trash.

Around 5:20 p.m. the police station received a call asking for someone to help a lone high school girl picking up trash along the highway. By the time help arrived, Risa had filled three garbage bags, totalling 10 kilograms of paper litter. She had just started thinking about how she was going to haul all of the garbage home when help came, and she began crying in relief.

Risa is part of her school’s basketball club, and along with their morning practice the girls do things like picking up trash around campus to help keep their school clean. “We do it at school, so it was just common sense to me,” she said of her decision to stop and clean up the highway.

Risa was presented with her certificate of thanks from the city’s Chief of Police, Tomotaka Shimura, on Jan 4.

Source: Yahoo! News Japan

Read more stories from RocketNews24. -- Japan’s secret garbage problem–and what you can do to help -- Divine prevention – Japan using Shinto symbols to combat litter and public peeing -- Cat Robo: The automated cat toilet that frees you from ever having to sift through kitty litter

© Japan Today