Explore everyday life in Japan
Having grown up in the United States, I never realized just how special having a clothes dryer was. I also didn’t know that many people around the world, most perhaps, don’t know what it feels like to take their laundry straight out of the dryer and put their clothes on when their shirts, pants, socks, etc. are still warm and soft and radiating the smell of fabric softener sheets.
In Japan, there are clothes dryers, but they don’t generate the heat that clothes dryers in America do. Often, these clothes dryers are single units that double as both a washing machine and a clothes dryer, and generally, it takes hours for them to dry even one piece of laundry.
For this reason, even though it is still a luxury to have a clothes dryer in Japan, it is, for the most part, useless. Unless you find yourself in an emergency, where you must have something dry in a few hours, you will most likely be hanging your laundry either somewhere in your apartment/house to dry, or outside. Which, of course, depends on the weather.
Japan being a country of four seasons and all kinds of weather, knowing what the weather brings is very important for getting your laundry done. So, how do you know if today will be a good day for doing laundry? Well, beyond using your own good judgment, you can watch the news.
Every morning, during the daily forecast, there is a segment dedicated specifically to laundry drying weather conditions across the country.
Will it be rainy? Will it be damp? Will it be too windy? All of this is not only talked about, but is shown to viewers through easy to understand symbols that forecast the laundry drying conditions for three days: a double circle means your laundry will dry very quickly, a circle means that it will dry fairly quickly, a triangle means that it will take time but, most likely, your laundry will dry, and an X means that you had better hang your laundry inside on your curtain racks or some kind of laundry rack because no matter how long you leave it outside, it’s not going to dry.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.