Day 4 - Attempts to Do Laundry and Make Rice

You would think that doing laundry should be a breeze, especially if you have a combination washer/dryer in your apartment. But for some reason, it took more than six hours for the machine to wash and dry my clothes.

I even stopped the machine early, because it was already 10 PM and I didn't want the noise to bother my neighbors. It didn't help that I had to stop the machine a few times because my long-sleeved shirts were getting tangled up with my jeans into a huge wet ball. Not good for drying. But at least I had fun trying to use the plastic clothes-pin contraption to hang laundry in the bathroom.

Japanese clothespin hanger, like a multiple-teated dog

compared to circular clothespin hangers used by

Chinese folks

In the apartment guidebook, there are pictures of all the electronic keypads and remote controls in the apartment, with translations in English. This includes the washing machine, but not the rice cooker (!). =( More on that later.

There are four keypads in the apartment, excluding the video intercom:

Kitchen keypad/monitor

Here you can control the temperatures of the shower, kitchen and bathroom sinks. There are also various light indicators so you know when the floor heater is on, if the bath tub is getting filled with water, and if hot or cold water is being added to the tub. Great for multi-taskers!

Bathtub keypad/monitor

Once you (or the person lucky enough to be bathing while you're cooking) are in the tub, you can add hot or cold water, adjust the water temp, reheat the bathwater, and call the kitchen keypad/monitor to find out when dinner is going to be ready. There's also a display showing "Anti Frozen Work Running," whatever that is.

Temp control for shower

You can also adjust the temperature of the water that comes out of the shower head. It would be nice if there were a keypad for this too, so that everyone in the household can set their own preferred temperatures. Here, I'm thinking of my mom, who likes scalding-hot showers. I don't know how she doesn't get third-degree burns every night.

Keypad in half-bath

In the half-bath (where the sink and toilet are), you can control the ventilation, heating and cooling of the bath/shower room, change the direction of airflow, reheat bathwater and hang laundry to dry. But, you ask, isn't that just a matter of hanging wet clothes to the shower rod? Oh no, my dear reader. Here, when you press a button, hot air comes out for three hours. Yes, three hours. Not very time efficient, but ok once everyone is done showering, right?

It's also a nice way to warm up if you've been outside in the freezing cold. Tokyo rarely goes below 32 F, so those in the residential construction business in the American Northeast need to be looking at this option instead.

Thermostat for floor heater

I like the heated floor option. Every other floorboard becomes warm, which is nice for people who always have cold feet, despite wearing socks. Again, why we don't have this in the States is beyond me.


Finally, there is a heater/air conditioner whose temps you can adjust, and which has buttons for negative ionization, dehumidification, "sound sleep" and "healthy air-conditioning." Maybe I'll try pressing "sound sleep" next time I have insomnia. It also has an oscillating vent/grill option that "waves" up and down to disperse warm or cool air so no one gets too hot or freezes.

I guess temperature control is really important for the Japanese, and should be more of a priority in the States, especially since we women always feel too cold.

But despite all these thermostats, I'm not impressed by their ability to regulate the temperature of the water. Besides the showerhead one, which is fine, I often find myself using very cold water to wash my face or to do the dishes, despite the water temp being set to 47 C (116 F).

Random Fact: There are 14 light switches in my apartment. Fourteen! In a one-bedroom apartment! And that's not counting the lamp. When I was living in my studio apartment in Flushing (of the same square footage as this 1-BR), there were three light switches.



Last week or so, before I got here, Koko told me he spent about 2.5 hours trying to figure out how to use the rice cooker because there wasn't a diagram of the control panel in the apartment's guidebook. He wasn't sure if it was cooked, because it looked and tasted strange (but possibly also because of the seasoning that he had added to the rice). He ended up throwing the whole thing out.

Today, it took me about 15 minutes to figure out the controls and options. You may laugh, but on the three rice cookers I've ever used, there was only one button. Yes, one button, which changes the mode from "keep warm" to "cook," and the hardest part was remembering to flick the damned switch before cooking your side dishes.

Good luck finding where "brown rice" is if you

don't know kanji and don't have a translator

I looked carefully and saw "white rice" in Chinese characters, which are called kanji in Japanese. Sometimes the meanings are different. (For example, the word 手紙 "hand paper" means "toilet paper" (shouzhi) in China, but "letter" (tegami) in Japan). 


Thankfully, they're the same in this case. So I thought, there must be a "brown rice" option, since that's what we had. If you've ever tried to cook brown rice like you would white rice, you know that you'd end up with a lot of crunchy bits that you'd have to either throw out or turn into congee.

I used google's translator and found some characters that matched, so I pressed the button on the control panel until the arrow pointed at "brown rice," which I now know is genmai. I'd always thought genmai was some kind of tea, because I drank that very often when I was in NY. But it makes sense now, because genmaicha was "brown-rice tea," specifically, green tea with toasted brown rice and popcorn. Sounds weird, but it has a nice nutty flavor to it.

I figured the big red button was "cook rice," but googled it just to make sure. It turned out the character used on the rice cooker wasn't for "cook" but for "steam." I have no idea how I figured that out, but I did ended up translating English to Chinese and back to Japanese again  for that one. So yes, I pressed "steam rice" and was good to go. The display said 18:16. I thought it was kind of a strange amount of time to cook rice, but what did I know about electronic-display rice cookers?

Then I noticed that, rather than counting down, the time was moving forward! I kept looking at the machine every few minutes until 18:32 when I finally realized that it was just a regular clock, and it was telling me in military time that it was 6:32 PM. I am lost and confused in Tokyo, indeed.

As I prepared the side dishes, I glanced nervously at the rice cooker. Was it going to cook the rice after all my googling and guessing? After some time, steam came out of the holes at the top of the rice cooker, and now I knew the rice was definitely cooking. There was a countdown timer at the end though, which was for T minus 11 minutes. Dinner was finally ready.

Woodear mushrooms with onions, fermented-rice-

and-miso-marinated fish, and brown rice