Will Miss #536 - having a laundry hook-up in the apartment

The beige tray on the left (under the water spigot) was the home of my machine for more than two decades. You can see that there are disadvantages - mold developed on the walls behind and in front of it from moisture (both from the machine and the bathing area behind that door). Those trash bags were the things we were tossing out when we were vacating the apartment. It's not garbage so much as possessions that weren't worth carrying back to the U.S.

Prior to spending most of my adulthood in Japan, I had not lived in a truly independent fashion. I spent 23 years in my parent's house and then a year in California in my husband's best friend's house. The ease of living in a house was something that I took for granted. I had never rented my own place in the U.S. so I had no idea how that all tended to work when I returned to the U.S. at the age of 48. One of the surprises in store for me was that most apartments, at least in the Bay Area, don't have their own laundry facilities or a space in which one can set up a machine.* You have to rely on public or communal apartment (pay laundry) machines. Though the apartments here are bigger inside, people seem to prefer filling that space up with their crap instead of having the convenience of on-site laundry capability.

In Japan, there was space in my apartment for a washing machine. It had a plastic shell and a built-in drain. It was in the space next to the area with the tub and shower so I could recycle water from the tub if I wanted to by putting it in the washing machine. After spending some time back home dealing with the hassles of public laundry facilities which often consume my quarters without offering full service (either because the machines malfunction or the dryers are anemic), I truly miss having the ability to just toss my clothes into a machine any time I want. 

*Note: I know I can buy a portable washing machine and manually hook it up to a sink. However, this is not the same as having a dedicated space with a drain and water faucet. Lugging a machine back and forth and connecting it to the sink is not something I want to be doing - not to mention I'd still have to use the laundry room's dryer since there's no space for hanging clothes up to dry in most of the apartments here.

Will Miss #535 - laundry pole trucks

The sounds of Japan are something I miss as much or more than the sights. I was telling my husband at one point in the past month that I missed hearing the 5:00 p.m. "children go home" music that used to play near our home. It was always a little melancholy because of the tune, but also comforting in the way it was trying to let people know what time it was.

Among the other sounds that I will never forget and miss is the sound of the laundry pole truck driving by. The video above (embedded from YouTube - it is not my video) does a good job of letting you know what it sounds like as well as looks like. When I learned that there was a business which did nothing but drive around selling replacement laundry poles, I thought that was most peculiar, but the longer I lived in Tokyo, the more it seemed to fit their cultural ethos. They care about how things look and work, including the poles that they hang their laundry out to dry on. I should note that I lived there for 23 years and never once replaced my laundry pole. It looked pretty dirty and worn by the time I left, but never changed in functionality.

I miss the sound of the announcements when the laundry pole trucks drove around our neighborhood, and what the fact that such trucks did any appreciable business said about the culture. 

Won't Miss #46 - washing in cold water (reflection)

My old laundry machine in Japan - and it was actually a fairly modern one!

The first time in 23+ years that I was faced with an American washing machine, I was stunned by the buttons that allowed you to make choices about water temperature. I'm sure that our washing machine when I was growing up had such choices, but I frankly did not pay any attention to them at all. In my youth, laundry was hardly a primary concern - unlike now when it's something I have concerns about so that I don't end up ruining my clothes.

One interesting thing about the option to choose hot, cold, or warm water wash is that there is a risk of wrecking something. The default cold water wash in Japan meant things didn't get as clean as they might, but it also meant I never had to worry about mixing colors and whites because there was little risk that one would bleed into the other. In fact, I rarely sorted my laundry when I lived in Japan for this reason.

Still, despite the lack of risk of turning all of my husband's shirts pink by including a red shirt in the mix, I hated the way in which the laundry was freezing cold and wet when I removed it and had to handle it for prolonged periods of time in winter. With no central heating and very cold and wet things, this put my fingers at risk.

I still don't miss only being able to wash my clothes in cold water.

Random Memories #7

This beauty, so clean, fresh and lovely an appliance, was named the "Neo Queen", and was kept on a balcony that was favored by the more well-appointed cockroaches in Tokyo.

I have a lot of pictures of things which most people almost certainly do not have a picture of. For instance, I have a photo of the very first time I laid eyes on my husband, our first hug, and our first kiss. This was all due to the unique nature of our relationship, as my attentive readers may recall.

I also have a picture of many mundane things which people probably don't take photos of. Well, that's probably not true in the internet age when people blog about everything from how they cut their toenails to their first pair of jogging shorts. However, twenty-some years ago, people didn't take pictures of their new toenail clippers because they didn't have blogs to display them on and they didn't want to pay to have prints made to send to family about something so trivial.

In my case, since I was half of a long distance relationship and my boyfriend wanted to show me his new environment, I have pictures of a lot of the things which I used in Japan for the first time. I have a shot of the first rice cooker, first mini gas "stove", first tiny refrigerator, and first annoying as hell to use washing machine in Japan. Though not earth shattering in their importance, even at that time these things (well, not the rice cooker) represented inconvenience which was above and beyond what I experienced in the U.S. 

The picture on this post is the washing machine in my boyfriend's apartment. Some of you may recognize it if you grew up in a home that lacked an automatic washer. These deals required you to manually add water (cold in Japan, of course) to the left side which had a tiny plastic oscillator that handled an extremely tiny amount of clothes. Once you put in sufficient water, which took forever and you had to watch like a hawk lest you overfill and have to drain it off, you added laundry and let it roll anemically. After that, you drained it like the slowest tub in the world and proceeded to manually add the rinse water and go through the weak agitation again. Finally, you dragged the sopping wet clothes over the a tiny basket on the right which would never balance properly as you attempted to spin most of the water out of the clothes.

This blue machine was the first one I used in Japan in 1988, but I also got one of my very own a little over a year later when I returned there in 1989. At that time, these were still pretty normal, especially for apartments. Even though everyone was using automatic machines back home for years before this, such labor saving devices were not de regueur in Japan. I'm not certain why that should be the case, but I can speculate based on things I observed and my personal opinions about the way in which women are regarded.

I read blogs written by several women who are married to Japanese men, and have heard a certain comment firsthand which reveals the way in which housework is looked upon. At least 4 women in relationships with Japanese husbands have said that, at one time or another, they said that they "washed the clothes and hung them out to dry". For those who don't remember from some of my posts (and it'd be easy not to remember with 972 posts in the can at this point), most people do not use or have clothes dryers." When women state that they "washed the clothes", their husbands say something to the effect of, "the machine washed the clothes, not you." Of course, the wives are upset that their efforts are belittled in this way, but notion among at least some Japanese men is that women are spoiled by such labor-saving devices and that it's hardly work at all when the machines are doing things.

Housewives in general are held in higher esteem in Japan, which is a good thing. However, because they are home all of the time, their individual efforts aren't always seen as valuable and their time absolutely is not. Labor-saving devices like dishwashers and clothes dryers aren't popular because women are seen as having the time to spend on such work. My guess is these pathetic washing machines (which are still sold in Japan!) stayed in use far longer there than in other countries because the laundry duties could be labor-intensive since it was perceived that women had the time to mess about with them. 

There are other possibilities, of course. One is that they were cheaper to make and buy and Japanese folks just preferred the extra work and crummy results (clothes came out very dingy from those things) to spending a little more. Another may have to do with size or shape. However, we used less space with our small automatic (4.1 liter) machine than we did with the semi-manual machine. In fact, we used exactly the same laundry area with an enclosed plastic base for both types. Yet another is that they use less water. Still, few people use them now so something has changed and I think it is the fact that more women are working now than 20-some years ago. 

At any rate, finding the picture of this machine reminded me of a lot of hated and time-consuming laundry duty in my early days in Japan as well as vivid memories of the unbalanced spin basket. Is it any wonder that I stopped wearing jeans after going to Japan? They were absolutely impossible to handle in such machines. 

Will Miss #82 - being able to hang out laundry

I've heard in America that some neighborhoods won't allow people to hang their clothes out to dry because of concerns that it'll look bad or lower the image of the neighborhood. Much as I hate having to hang out my laundry, I'm happy to be able to without a bunch of neighborhood busybodies getting their undies in a bunch over it spoiling the view. With current energy and environmental concerns, hanging the clothes out to dry when you can makes a lot of sense. If I had the space and the weather (which I don't exactly have in Tokyo), I'd be happy to do it all of the time.

I'll miss living in a place where the cultural norm is the environmentally best thing to do when it comes to dealing with drying clothes.

Won't Miss #82 - needing to hang out laundry

Few homes in Tokyo have clothes dryers so you have to hang out your clothes to dry. Even those that have dryers find that Japanese dryers use low temperatures and take hours to dry clothes. I know because I used to have one and it was almost useless. I've been told that they use low temperatures to stop clothes from shrinking. At any rate, nearly everyone hangs out their clothes because this is the only real solution unless you want to lug your clothes to a laundromat and use their expensive industrial-size dryers. The main problem with having to hang out clothes is that the weather is so unpredictable that they can be rained on at any given time and the balconies that shield them from rain are generally useless. Those same verandas are also pretty small for the most part so you have to do laundry every day or every other day to keep on top of it.

I won't miss trying to outrun the weather and deal with the small capacity of my balcony to dry my clothes.