The garbage bag trashing culprit was my landlord.
This has me feeling extremely uncomfortable. I’m going to talk to Chalice and Hannah as soon as they get back, and to my boss at the BOE after work on Monday. I sent Lindsay (now back stateside) an e-mail, and she also says that it sounds really unusual and that I should tread lightly. I feel weird going to ask him about anything now–like paying my rent today, for example–because why would he trash my bags? He claims that it happened while he was cleaning the landing, and he admitted it without any regret or embarrassment, but couldn’t he have knocked on my door to ask me to bring my bag inside (I was making enough noise outside that he totally knew I was there), instead of slamming my trash bags around and letting it all scatter to the four winds and waiting to say anything until I went downstairs to talk to him about it? Or couldn’t he have, you know, moved my bag out of the way of his sweeping/cleaning? And he did the same thing to Chalice!
I’ll post a longer recap of the weekend later. Louise is still here (her train to catch her shinkansen tomorrow leaves 10 minutes before the one I need to catch to go to school)–it’s pouring rain today, though, so that’s put a damper on our plans to wander around Ikeda up around the Yoshinogawa (River), but we’ve done plenty of other walking (including hiking Bizan in Tokushima yesterday) to make up for it. With the exception of this really strange and unnerving garbage situation, this has been an awesome weekend.