Won't Miss #537 - mold

The wall behind my washing machine - it turned nearly black with mold that grew in warmer months and died in colder ones then came back around again the next year.

During my first year in Japan, one of my coworkers told me about how mold seemed to spring up everywhere in his apartment. He told me that a pair of shoes that he left in his genkan (entryway) had even seen a crop of the stuff take up residence. When I expressed that that sounded incredibly gross, he said it was no big deal and that "mold is a gentle creature" and he just wiped the stuff out of his shoes.

My previous post reminded me of something I would have rather forgotten. That is, the ease with which mold tended to take hold in Tokyo. I can speak for every single place in Japan, but I can say that mold seemed inescapable in the humid sub-tropical weather there. It did not matter how well we ventilated our home. In fact, it was so poorly insulated that there was no way to make it anything but drafty both against the summer heat leaking in and the frigid cold in winter.

I grew up with relatively humid summers in Pennsylvania, but we never faced the sort of mold that I encountered in Tokyo and I absolutely do not miss it.

Will Miss #32 - such nice, clean people (reflection)

As I mentioned in the "won't miss" portion of this two-part post, Japanese people aren't necessarily as clean as their reputation would lead one to believe. People litter, and there aren't as strict laws in place to punish them for doing so in Japan like there are in the U.S. More than one student would complain to me that people would throw their trash bags out their car windows on the highway and there was either no law to stop them, it was not enforced, or the punishment wasn't severe enough to cause people to dispose of the trash properly. 

The main difference between Japanese folks and Americans on this front is that the Japanese were meticulous about keeping the spaces around their businesses or homes clean. They'd take matters in hand and pick up after others. This kept areas looking nice. Here in the U.S., there is often trash in the streets in front of stores, and it can remain there for a long time because no one picks up after passersby who litter. 

I still miss the fact that Japanese people had an ethic which said that it didn't matter who created the problem when it came to litter or dirt. Regardless of who messed it up, someone would clean it up.

Won't Miss #444 - dani bugs

Obviously, this is a spider, not a dani bug. Strangely enough, they didn't feature animatronic dani bugs at the local tanabata festival. This was the closest I could come to a picture of an annoying insect that infests your living space and bites you.

When I was a kid, we had problems with certain types of insects, but never bed bugs or things that lived where we slept. Of course, it helps that my home culture didn't have a tradition of sleeping on the floor and that our floor wasn't made of straw. The creepy-crawlies creep and crawl less at higher spaces than lower ones, especially when you're talking about things which enjoy living in the flooring. In Japan, one of the things that loves to live in the traditional tatami mats is dani bugs. The dung (dust) from them causes allergic reactions and the bugs themselves can literally nip at your heels. They leave little red bites behind in pairs. Dani bugs are the reason why you see people beating the hell out of their futon and hanging them in the sun. One of the reasons that you have to vacuum (rather than simply sweep) tatami is to suck out these mites. They also require toxic sprays and bug bombs at regular intervals to keep them at bay.

I won't miss all of the activities that go along with keeping the dani bugs at bay.