Today I thought of posting a ‘life in Japan’ type post.

Washing clothes– whether you’re doing it in a hi-tech washing machine or beating them over a washboard– It isn’t all that fun of a thing to do. In Japan, the process is different for everybody, but it feels a lot like how you would wash your clothes normally in the states. 

In my case, I have a neat top loading washing machine. The water-in hooks up to a water faucet with a special hose. and the grey water-out is hooked up to my drain/sewer system underneath. The other way to do it is to hook up a hose from your kitchen sink to the washing machine then run a water-out hose from the washing machine to your kitchen sink basin (that actually, I’ve seen before and I even have a hose to do that for this machine too).

To work it, Press the big metal button up top to your right then make a decision to either load your clothes in, with detergent, and hit the blue start button OR; hit start, let it spin, then let it start filling up with water, before dumping detergent in, then your clothes… Often I don’t want to put soap on top of my dry clothes so I do the later.

Hot and Cold is up to you too. It’s faucet controlled so if you want a warm wash you gotta turn the hot spigot on.. For a cold wash, it’s the other way around. I first ran with all cold washes to save gas (my water heater is an on demand propane gas burner type)… but now I run washes with a 50/50 warm/cold mix.

Now my machine boasts it can dry too.. well if it can that’s news to me because my clothes are never fully ‘dry’ when I pull them out. Perhaps it’s my lack of kanji reading skills… but either way, when I pull them out I typically have to hang them up in my apartment on these cool rack thingies to dry my clothes completely.

If I’m washing business attire or jeans I might also iron them too depending on the wrinkle count ;).

Now once everything is up, my apartment can look like clothes boutique.. which is fine… but there you go– that’s life in Japan.

~J out

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