The Yin and Yang of Doing Laundry

Japan is filled with all sorts of bizarre discrepancies between modern and traditional, brilliantly designed and barely functional. Take this for example:

This is my bath water heater. This heater is attached to my bathtub in order to heat my water. It is powered by gas; to get hot water I must turn on the gas, turn the large dial to the left and push it down, crank a small handle about 10 times, hold the dial down until a small triangle indicator turns completely red, then turn the dial further to the left. The dial at the top directs the water to the shower attachment or the tub facet and the dial on the far left adjusts the temperature.

This is all brought to you by the country that invented Western-style toilets with heated seats, bidet attachments, ass dryers, and white noise machines. These beauties are commonly found in public restrooms next to the other option, the Japanese-style toilet, which we English teachers affectionately call the “squat and spray.”

I like my bathroom; the toilet is in a separate room and I shower outside of the tub before getting in to soak. The water can be reused and reheated by a hole in the tub that circulates the water through the heater. The sink, shower, and tub are conveniently all in one room and thus the floor in this room is the shower floor.

Laundry is very interesting. My washing machine has a brilliant feature called “leave it to me [omakase]” that determines the exact amount of water necessary based on the clothing weight. But if I want to wash with heated water I must hook up a bizarre bonnet-like hose attachment and connect it to the tub heater. In Japan clothing is all air-dried. I was very annoyed with this at first, but found it takes very little time to hang clothes on a square-shaped hanger with lots of clips on it, and there is no danger of shrinking anything.

I pay very little for gas or electricity with some inconvenience. Houses and offices do not have central heating or air conditioning and it is done with electric, gas or kerosene machines and sealing off the room with sliding doors. My bills are lower than they were in America but I had to use the bathroom with my coat on in the winter and could bathe only at the hot spring, it was so cold in the non-heated rooms.

In general the house is designed for energy efficiency and it shows with monthly bills of about $12 for water, $13 for gas, and $55 for electricity. I’ve heard numerous English teachers complain about high cost of electricity, but I shut off all lights when I leave a room, use a laptop, don’t own a clothes dryer or oven and rarely watch TV at home or use the microwave. Surprisingly, this life hardly feels different from before.