When you walk around the residential areas of any Japanese city you can’t help but notice the laundry hanging outside to dry. Many apartments have small balconies and everyone of them is bound to have a clothes line or hooks where the owner dries their clothes, bed sheets, and linens. It makes for a very colorful scene, like bright flower prints hanging in the air.
As I mentioned previously, the average Japanese apartment is pretty tiny (1,300 sf) and that doesn’t leave a lot of space for a washer and dryer. One of the ways the Japanese address this space issue is by having much smaller washers and dryers compared to those in other developed counties — the average capacity is about ten pounds — but being ingenious folks, the Japanese have invented a tiny washer/dryer combo. Having such limited capacity means that a washer is running constantly, doing multiple loads.
According to the website Taiken Japan (Explore Japan), “Most apartment balconies come equipped with two metal “arms” affixed. These “arms” are pulled up and out, and have regularly spaced holes into which long metal poles are inserted. These poles are usually from three to five meters in length, and 2.5 centimeters in diameter. They’re called either “sao-take”, as in bamboo pole, the original old type, or “monohoshizao”, which means a pole for clothes. You may buy the poles at a home center or from one of the little trucks that slowly drives through the residential areas blaring a pre-recorded message to come out and buy laundry poles. Plastic clips keep laundry from blowing or falling of the poles. They come in various shapes and colors, with sizes ranging from small enough for lingerie to large enough to hold futons. Multi-slot racks for inserting clothes hangers make it possible to hang many shirts in a small area. Special hangers with clamp hooks keep everything securely attached to laundry poles.”
When its rainy, or in spring when the pollen level is high, or if it’s dusty outside, they hang their laundry inside to dry. And the Japanese have even developed a special detergent for clothes that are dried inside.
To save energy, the Japanese clean their clothes with cold water, and to save money on water, they often have a hose running from the bath and reuse the bathwater. That sounds a bit unsanitary to me, but you do what you gotta do, I guess.
For those who want to do larger loads, there are coin-operated laundromats. But most Japanese avoid doing their laundry in such places. And in a nation that prides themselves on being “crime free”, the one place where this does not apply is at a public laundromat.
Inna and I had accumulated a large quantity of dirty clothes by the second week and we toyed with the idea of doing our laundry at a public laundromat. But we warned at the hotel that if we did, we should not leave it unattended because it might get stolen. We found this a little hard to believe, but decided to use the hotel’s expensive cleaning services just in case.
Japan is a nation of contradictions, and one of the oddest was that you could park an unlocked bicycle anywhere you liked and it would not be stolen; you could walk through the seediest parts of Tokyo in the wee hours of the morning and not fear that you might get mugged; or you could forget your phone on a park bench and return for it an hour later and it would still be sitting there where you left it; but if you take your clothes to a public laundromat and step out for a quick bite while it’s running through the wash cycle, there’s a good chance someone will steal you stuff. Go figure.
