February

Perhaps one of the first things you realized about domestic life in Japan was that everything you knew about laundry had suddenly changed. In Japan, the washing machines are much smaller and use only cold water.  Yikes!  To really blow your mind… Japanese folks also do not generally separate colors… maybe the first few times, but after that, it all goes in the soup. While automatic clothes dryers are standard in most ex-pat homes, the rest of Japan has to make do with a shared solution; it’s called the sun. We line dry here, it works…really! Some people do have electrical dryers, but they are unusual, and from what I hear they do not work very well as they tend to be combinations of washer and dryer units. Since you might not be familiar with cold water washing we thought it might be good to give you a quick overview! One good point of using cold water rather than warm or hot is that you save on your power bill; another is that you prevent about 400kg of carbon pollution that would have been created. Line drying saves about 12,000 JPY a year, and over 1,200kg of carbon. Between the…