A question that I’ve been asked many, many times, but have, as far as I can recall, never posed to a non-Brit about my home country is: What has surprised you about Japan? In fact, I’ve been asked it so often that I keep thinking I should have an answer prepared in advance. Never having got round to doing so in the fifteen or so years that I’ve been living here, I’ve come up with the bright idea of using this blog as the vehicle for an occasional series that will one day become a veritable encyclopedia of surprised-about-Japan sample answers that may even help those of you who live here when you are, inevitably, asked the same old question for the umpteen zillionth time.
To kick us off, a topic that in the UK is called, for some bizarre and confusing reason, ‘washing,’ but in their wisdom, Americans refer to as the much more sensible and comprehensible ‘laundry.’ Specifically, I’m talking about the fact that (deep breath) every single household in Japan does the laundry every single day. (And: a fair number of those households do two or more loads.)
Admittedly, my mother was averse to all kinds of housework and the head of a single-parent family with only three members including herself, but I’m sure there were plenty of other families around us who followed the same routine of wearing many of their clothes (underwear excluded) for several days on the trot and only putting them in the washing machine once a week.
By the same token, Mrs M grew up in a family who ran a barber shop for a living, so in the interests of hygiene and consideration for their customers, all of the many towels they used each day needed to be washed (as well as tucking towels into my collar to catch falling strands of hair, when my father-in-law gives me a haircut, he starts off by massaging my head with a hot towel and uses another to dry my hair after shampooing it). But it’s not just the towels: Mrs M’s mother also washes every item of clothing that every member of the family has worn, and hangs them all out to dry on a spacious, covered balcony on the second (that’s American second/British first) floor above the dining room.
And now, in the Muzuhashi household, I have somehow been delegated with the responsibility of hanging the laundry up to dry after Mrs M has washed it: at least one load, often two, and sometimes three loads a day. As such, I’ve bought a very powerful dehumidifier (there’s so much pollen flying around for so much of the year that we never hang it outside – also, our balcony is only just wide enough to accommodate an anorexic model who’s holding her breath) and developed a meticulous routine for what to hang and where, so that everything dries uniformly and is ready to fold up and put away or use again by the evening.
Ideally, I’d like to go back to the good old days of my mum doing one load on a Saturday morning and hanging it over a clothes horse, where it dries at a more sedate pace and is ready to wear about two days later, but unless M Jr leaves one leg of her trousers inside out or a paper hanky in her pocket that explodes fiddly white fibres over the rest of the clothes and floor, I try not to complain. Instead, I treat it as a meditative, repetitive routine that gives me 15 or 20 minutes of quiet thinking time (20 or 30 if the day is a two-loader) each morning, as well as the satisfaction of knowing that I’m doing my bit around the house in a way that countless other dads and husbands in Japan do not.
