On Japanese Laundry | 洗濯

Posted on August 31, 2010 by
Forgotten spirits get their revenge in Japan by destroying your laundry. Appeasing them requires vigilance, patience and a calm disposition.

Pro Tip:
To calculate the percentage of clothing your washing machine will destroy, you can use this metaphysical equation:

X = S + B / O

Here, X = items of clothing lost, S = number of times you’ve accidentally worn shoes in your own hallway, B = the number of times you stood in your bathtub to shower and O is the amount of money you’ve spent on omiyage.

The Japanese Laundry Machine As A Failure of Coordination
First, clothes go into a mesh laundry bag, then into the machine. Japanese washing machines use a grinding motion guaranteed to damage an item of clothing every time it’s used. Instead of having the machine destroy your clothing, you use a bag which destroys your clothing while trapping it in lint and dirty water. Soap goes into the machine and you turn on a hose which literally has no access to hot water. The soap doesn’t dissolve properly in cold water.

Then it’s meditation time. The water fills, drains, fills, drains as a stuttering grinding mechanism twists your clothes into cotton mulch. Make a wish, then walk to the other room and wait for the machine to finish its black ceremony.

When you hear the chime, open the lid and assess the damage. My first offering was an Oxford shirt, which had small strings ripped out of the collar. Wash 2 was more benevolent and merely smeared my favorite shirt with a flower-scented, yogurt-textured soap residue.

Swaying in Idyllic Zephyrs
Since there are no driers* in Japan, everybody hangs everything on the porch. I imagined the wind rippling through my clothesline, sending stray moisture gently aside as a benevolent, two-scoops-of-raisins sun warmed them.

In daily practice: You battle against constant humidity. I’ve lacked a towel for two days on account of flash floods. I live in perpetual fear of finding a cicada in my boxer shorts. Crows fly off with socks.**

Because nature here has human intelligence and hates foreigners, you must deal with clothing at the exact right moment. Waiting for your dry clothing to get “dryer?” Your greed will be punished with a flash flood. Hang too many clothes on the line and something will fall into the muddy gutter of your concrete porch.

The Correct Way to do Laundry in Japan
Apparently, the correct way to hang laundry in Japan is to buy clothes hangers – the same kind that you have in your closet – and hang them that way; then use clothes pins to keep the fabric stuck to the hangers; then use a special plastic thing to keep the hangers attached to the clothesline. They look like the plastic adapter you would use to play a 45-speed record on a 33-speed turntable, only bigger.

I am not sure whether this experience is universal or limited to my particular economic class in Japan. I’m well-off; some people have to run a hose from their kitchen into a machine which then leaks water all over their floor. If you are coming to Japan be warned: Laundry in this country is inexplicably difficult.

Footnotes below.
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Posted in Culture Shock, Weird | 8 Comments

On Sorting Garbage in Japan | 屑選別

Posted on August 27, 2010 by

In Japan, every town has its own series of hipster garbage bags for specific categories of trash. My town has four; others have more: Kamikatsu, in Shikoku, has 44.

The bags are labeled with descriptions of what goes inside of them. If there is ever confusion, a 7-page comic book explains what goes where and on what days. Special garbage pickup days are also announced by a mysterious figure using bull horns mounted on electrical poles.

Based on the drawings on each bag, the garbage sorting goes like this:


Pink: Canned goods, more canned goods; whiskey bottles and orange juice.


White: Fish Bones, Cleaning Fluids and Ladies’ handbags.

Yellow: Tea Kettles, Soup Bowls and hair driers.

(Photo too boring to show)
Green: Recyclable Plastic Bottles.

It took a week or two but I’m used to it. Japan burns all of its trash, so in my town the bags are sorted into burnable (non-toxic, sorta) and non-burnable (toxic, sorta) categories. This reduces the trash that gets set on fire in the sea, which is a major source of pollution. The do-gooders in Kamikatsu have gone so far as to supply each household with an incinerator that makes compost.

In my town, the canned goods bag is for direct recyclables: Aluminium and glass. The fish skeleton bag is for “burnable” goods, so things like paper, certain kinds of biodegradable plastics and food waste. The Tea Kettle bag is for heavy plastics and metals which can be recycled or need to be destroyed in a special way. The boring green bag is specifically for plastic drink containers (But you have to remove the labels, since the labels are burnable). Cardboard boxes have to be returned to city hall, for some reason.

Different bags go out on different days. If you toss your trash improperly, the rubbish man has the right to return the garbage to your front hallway. Repeat offenders go to garbage-sorting school, something like a driver’s ed course only without the unnecessary excitement.

I live in an apartment building, so I’m not sure how anyone would be able to track the trash back to me. But I’m paranoid, because I’ve noticed a white moving van parked across from the rubbish bin on garbage days. I think it’s a stake out.

Also, binge-drinkers be warned: In 2008, a woman was sentenced to prison for disposing of her own vomit in a trash bag (Granted, she was a bulimic who disposed of 15 kilos [33lbs] in a single day). Since it’s all sorted eventually, the garbage-collecting folk aren’t interested in that kind of discovery, especially several days down the road. (Though I haven’t seen any clear explanation of what you should do with such a bag; I suppose burial is the best strategy).

The bags are about 350 Yen for 10; or about 35 cents US. They would also make amazing T-shirts. And check out GBA, a cool art collective in Japan that makes beautifully designed garbage bags.

Posted in Culture Shock, Weird | 2 Comments

On Noise Bursts and Japanese Television | 電視と噪音

Posted on August 23, 2010 by

My Japanese is horrendous, so I’ve had a lot of “arigatokudesai” moments (“Thank you you’re welcome!”) which can make a native speaker freeze (I presume out of fear of saying something equally nonsensical in English).

So at 6:00 p.m. when the city’s bullhorns played a tone and then spoke what was (for me) incomprehensible Japanese, it was totally creepy:

Typhoons were on my mind, so I turned to the TV. I inexplicably don’t have the national television channel (NHK) though a man comes to my door every month and asks me to pay for it. When I turned to the TV for information about a centipede invasion, two men wearing chicken masks were dumping eggs into ornate gift boxes set to a MIDI-synthesizer version of “YMCA.”

Other channels weren’t much different. One had a kind of crazy mix-of-mini-games where a male pop idol competed against teams of men dressed in Izod shirts, a bald man in a robe and a 1970′s-looking mom and her adorable 7-year-old daughter. The really galling thing is that the pop idol kept winning all of the challenges; after bowling down an obstacle course involving a curved wall, the pop-idol got so smarmy that he even high-five the little girl.

Japanese game shows seem to be modeled after “sports days,” in which competition is stripped of losers and everyone is awarded for trying. As a result, the games end up pure “fun” with no losers (and no prizes).

Based on my experience with Japanese TV, you are far more likely to see something as stupid as a guy getting electrocuted for $1 million in America. In Japan, the exhausting majority of prime-time (“safe”) TV is all about people enjoying themselves in the most boring way possible, including eating food (and marveling at how delicious the food is).

It’s kind of like watching reruns of America’s 1970′s TV, where game shows had celebrities and people watched to see celebrities have fun. It’s still part of American TV – it’s Jay Leno, David Letterman, anything “celebrity” driven. But those things have self-awareness now. Letterman’s TV jokes are jokes about TV. There’s a reflective self-awareness that seems to have been transcended or ignored completely by mainstream Japanese TV.

So while Japanese TV is garrish and ridiculous, it seems absolutely not “post-modern” at all, even if it looks like that from abroad. If there’s irony or cynicism about TV on Japanese TV, it’s not really coming through for me (though I also don’t have a clue about what they are saying. I study visual culture so I don’t have to learn languages).

The siren, by the way, is a broadcast from town hall, warning the kids from other parts of town to scram. They play every day at 6, on the nose. The sirens are also used to tell people about town hall meetings and special garbage pickup days.

Posted in Culture Shock, Thinking, Weird | 4 Comments

On Japanese Insects

Posted on August 19, 2010 by
Regular blogging will resume on Aug. 25, God willing.

The Cicada
There’s a dead cicada on my porch, one of the sea of hummingbird-sized insects that came out of their hibernation to welcome me to Fukuoka. They’re loud, and while the guy hanging out upside-down on my foyer is cool, I live in fear of the day one of those sons of bitches lands in my hair.

The Cicadas (“Semi” in Japanese) have no mouths, but make a terrible rattling sound as soon as the sun rises. They stop in the rain, but in Fukuoka the rain is so loud that it doesn’t really matter. I’m up at 6 a.m. every morning because the semi are like roosters (though there’s also a rooster in my neighborhood).

One of the 7 books I own is a collection of Haiku, and the cicada features prominently in many of them:

Basho:
“They do not live long
but you would never know it,
that cicada’s buzz.”

Beetles
As I was sneaking around my apartment to find wi-fi, a small boy rode up on his bike and stared. I’m a cultural ambassador, so I said “Ohayo Gozaimas!” loudly. He smiled then ran away. Later on in the distance I saw him go to an open field with a big net and a plastic fish tank. When I came home the fish tank was on my doorstep, with two dead beetles in it. Apparently, they’re popular pets.

Japanese Centipedes
“Mukade” (Moo-kah-day) – the dreaded centipede – travel in pairs. Japanese people will tell you that if you kill a mukade, it will emit a fume telling other mukade to come to its rescue. For this reason, you don’t stomp on mukade, or crush it. You trap it in a paper cup and set it on fire.

There’s also a line of pesticide with wonderfully comitragic cartoon characters on them: A crying roach on one, a crying centipede on another. “Special pest killer for killing of annoying pest,” the package reads. But the crying insects don’t look annoying; they’re actually shown crying with handkerchiefs and music notes coming out of their heads. They could have their own theme park.

Japanese Cockroaches
Roach traps also overhumanize the killing of annoying pest. Roach motels look like a little town square with cartoon bugs in the windows, relaxing on vacation. Or you can get a smaller version with a mom and dad roach sending their kid off to school. After a week of use, these delightful flights of whimsy mask a collection of sticky roach bodies literally half-dissolved in a special kind of bug-acid.

On the up side, butterflies are common here, which is nice. They come in neon shades of green and blue, even.

I should also add that wildlife of any kind is rare. I’ve seen sparrows, herons, enormous crows and even wild hens, but only two cats in almost a month. Shaved dogs are everywhere, especially television, but that will get its own post.

Posted in Fukuoka, Travel, Weird | 3 Comments

Stereotypical Japanese Apartment Tour

Posted on August 10, 2010 by

A few corrections, now that I’ve been in Japan for a year:

1. This is clearly not a studio apartment.
2. That is not the city of Fukuoka, nor is the white dome the Yahoo! Dome, an error I now find hilarious. It’s a nice gym complex in a suburb of Fukuoka.
3. The laundry machine does, in fact, eat laundry, regardless of having a tumbler.

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Off the Grid in Japan

Posted on August 8, 2010 by

I don’t have Internet and I’m not sure when I’ll get it. This post is being written on an iPod touch, saved on my WordPress application, and sent when I manage to sneak under an old Japanese guy’s porch.

Most of my time spent off of the Internet has been spent trying to get on it; I even used electrical tape, a tea strainer, a USB cord and a pot lid to build a DIY satelite dish to get better access to my neighbor’s wireless hub in a bid to steal it less obviously. It’s not working.

Bear with me. Japan’s high-tech infrastructure is no match for it’s beaureacracy, but I have faith that I will one day have bedside access to Facebook.

Posted in Fukuoka, Homesickness, Preparations | Tagged | 1 Comment