Won't Miss #455 - cold water

Sometimes having to use a short title really forces me to mislead the reader. I know there is "cold water" everywhere in the world. In fact, there's more cold than hot because it comes naturally in that state. What I'm talking about is the possibility of warm water in places like public restrooms or even in offices. When I first came to Japan, some of my foreign coworkers told me that the places they lived in had no hot running water for dish washing in the kitchen. It wasn't until I returned to the U.S. and encountered hot water in "strange" places like publicly accessible places (markets, libraries, restaurants, and plain old public toilets) that I remembered that only being able to wash your hands with cold water was much more prevalent in Japan than in the U.S. It's ironic that you can often get hot water for your ass (via washlets), but not for your hands, in Japan.

I won't miss freezing my digits off when washing my hands in Japan.