On Design-- Butter Tubs

Why are we looking at a butter tub?

The first time my parents came to Japan to visit me, my mother took one look at my butter tub and said, "As soon as we get home, I'm having your father nick all my butter tubs for me!"

...and she did.

 ...and he did.  And now my mom can just leave the butter knife in the butter tub and close the lid all the way so it doesn't fall off next time she takes the butter out of the fridge.




 Because it's never just the lid, of course--the buttery knife always hits the floor when you bend down to pick up the lid...

It kills me that they think of things like this--and actually make them work right.

Mata asobou, ne!

On Design-- Laundry Hangers

I know you're all secretly dancing in your bedrooms, seeing our socks and all--but this is about the hanger and the laundry poles.  I bring up this most mundane of subjects because my husband, recently talking about Arizona and using the drier at my parents' house, wanted to know why they even *had* a drier.  I said I had no idea why, since in the summer clothes dry even faster outside than in a drier (and don't shrink up to boot).  But... actually I do know why.  And it's to do with a certain rising level of suburban snobbery that has spread  across America that says "Heaven *forbid* anyone should see my laundry outside."  Never mind the energy savings, the ecological... logicality of it, the fact that practically the whole of the rest of the world does.  Ewww.  That's just so...countrified.  One of the longest comment threads generated (over 450) at a personal finance blog I read occasionally was over the blog author's intention to save money by hanging his laundry outside to dry.  I was both amused and dismayed by the number of commenters who were aghast at his entertaining the idea at all (American commenters, I should say--European commenters couldn't figure out why he was so hesitant to do it and so worried about what the neighbors would think).

I don't need to worry about it, though--there isn't an apartment anywhere in Japan (unless they are *very* tall) that doesn't have hooks descending from the ceiling of the back porch to hold long laundry pole for shirt hangers and multi-pinch hangers.  On sunny days everybody has laundry, futons, blankets, pillows out drying--and nobody thinks a thing about it.  There are, I'm sure, some slightly uptight housewives who take care to hang up the undies inside, but I'm not one of them.  It all goes outside.

*A Digression*
When Teddy was about a year old and had just learned to walk, he used to follow me out onto the porch while I pulled things out of the  laundry basket and hung them up to dry.  It took me weeks to figure out why I kept finding my underwear down below (four floors) on the ground...until I happened to look over at just the right moment and catch Teddy plucking my best pair of underwear (which I trust you can imagine for yourself) from the top of the laundry basket and sticking his little hand into one of the spaces between safety glass panels and poi!  Why--why!--didn't he ever once throw Papa's boxer shorts from our fourth floor balcony??


I love my laundry-pinchy-hanger-upper-thingies.  They have no particular name that I know of, but no matter.  They are unbelievably useful and save me a huge chunk on the electric bill every month. They are inexpensive, lightweight, fold-able, and easily stored.   And, after some initial resistance, I decided I prefer hanging it outside to listening to a noisy drier and the resulting shrunken sleeves and pant legs that fit when I bought them.  On a warm, sunny day when the Uguisu (Bush Warbler) has begun to sing, it's my favorite household task.

Mata asobou, ne!
(p.s.-- Full Disclosure:  During the Rainy Season, I do sometimes wish desperately for a drier and have used laundromat drier to get things dry that otherwise wouldn't dry out 'til August...)

On Design-- Pencil Cases

My kids' pencil cases for school in the photo above (Sugar Bunnies for Cici, Pokemon for the boys).  From the day Koshi started first grade (or rather, slightly before, when we got the list of things to get *for* first grade), I thought these were the coolest pencil cases I'd ever seen.  Seriously. 

...Look at this!  I'm slightly jealous of my own kids, they have such awesome, well-designed pencil cases.  I *know* I didn't ever have anything this cool when I was in elementary school...

...see how the sharpened pecils slide right down into their own little sleeves?  And how the whole piece lifts up (you can see my fingers over there, holding it up) for ease of putting in and taking out?  That way you can go to school prepared with nice, sharp pencils that won't break on the way to school--an important consideration for first graders:-))

And there's plenty of space for erasers, and even a built-in pencil sharpener that actually works well...

Can you see how to use the pencil sharpener?  You don't have to take it out to use it (though it comes out to dump out shavings)...

Ja jan!  There's a little door that slides to the right on the outside--just slide it over, and sharpen away!  Take that piece out and slide the end open to dump the pencil shavings

Teddy's pencil case..

...and that's not all!  That's Teddy's case above, and flipped over in the photo to the right.  The underside has storage for extra pencils, small rulers, erasers, or whatever.   (For the Sharp-Eyed Reader:  yes, Teddy has managed to lose his pencil sharpner out of this case, which is fairly typical...)
To be completely honest, though, I don't know how much studying I'd get done at school if I had a pencil case that fun...

Mata asobou, ne!

On Design--Onigiri Technology

I liked o-nigiri the first time I ate one (I think it was kombu...),although I thought the nori was funny to eat--papery and dry.  It stuck a bit to the roof of my mouth, just the way I imagined paper would (if I were given to eating paper).  It didn't occur to me to wonder, that first time, how it was that the nori was dry and not wet from the moisture in the rice. 

I couldn't read yet, so I think I just randomly picked one off the shelf at the combini (=convenience store).
I thought it was hard to open the package. I couldn't understand why I kept tearing the nori when tearing off the plastic--I was sure I'd seen people eating o-nigiri, just like the ones I was buying, wrapped in neat triangles of smooth nori.  (Nori is "laver" in English, but doesn't everybody just call it nori?)

Then I noticed the numbers on the plastic.  1...2...3...duh.  The plastic was pre-torn around the number one--what would happen if I started tearing at the one?  Watch (Cici is camera-man this time):



When I finally got one of these open the right way, I stood there staring at the layered wrapper in one hand, and the crisp nori around the onigiri in my other hand.... and wondered who on earth had worked out how to wrap onigiri that way.

On Design-- The Magic Toilets of Japan

When O-Jiisan and O-Baasan (grandpa and grandma) had a new house built a year and a half ago, naturally it was outfitted with the latest in Japanese toilet technology.  Heated toilet seats have been around for a while (I seem to recall Madonna mentioning how taken she was by the heated toilet seats the last time she was on tour here), but lately the lid goes up automatically as you enter the WC.  The heated seat thing is basically a good thing, I think--and it certainly makes sense in a country where homes are not centrally heated.  Allow me to assure you that toilet seats in an unheated part of the house in January are... cold.  That's in italics because it looks more shivery than bold. 

Here's the Magic Toilet (which, I noticed on YouTube, apparently everybody who comes to Japan videos and sticks on YouTube, and I have now unknowingly joined the stampede):


The lights in the WC at my in-laws are also on motion-sensor, so at night they come on automatically when you walk in and go out after you do.  This seems like good design--surely it must save electricity if the toilet light is never accidentally left on.  Right?  Well, probably.  But the first time we went down to Kawana to visit them in the new house, Teddy (of course) went to the toilet at bedtime.  Teddy, being Teddy, was in and out of the Magic Toilet all day, watching that lid go up, and so he just had to make one last visit to ToiletLand before bed.  Except it was dark, and the motion-sensor light system was on. 

Five minutes later, the most frightening, bloodcurdling screams imaginable from the WC.  We all raced to the door--which he had locked.  "Teddy!  Teddy!   Are you alright?!" I shouted helplessly at the door, picturing aliens bursting from my son's stomach.

"Ku-ra-iiiii...." came the crying, trembling reply.  Dark.  He had sat so still on the toilet, that the motion sensors assumed no one was in the room, and out went the lights.  And Teddy was too scared to move, so they didn't come back on when he started screaming.  The sound shock waves weren't enough to turn the lights back on, apparently. 

"Move, Teddy!  Wave your hands around!  The lights will come back on if you move around!"  Since, of course, he couldn't unlock the door in the dark and he was sitting frozen to the toilet seat in fear, this was all we could do to help him help himself get the lights on.

And you'll be relieved to know, I'm sure, that Teddy is now a healthy second-grader, and seems not to have been permanently traumatized by the event.

Moral:  The people who designed the motion-sensor lights forgot about the people with constipation.

Mata asobou, ne!

On Design

Quite a while back  author Daniel Pink (A Whole New Mind, Drive, and others) visited Japan (and unfortunately my daughter got sick, or I'd have gone to hear him speak:((.    While he was here, he was struck apparently by what he saw as Good Design all around him, and posted a couple of times about it on his blog.  Things like... recycling in McDonald's (paper, plastic, and a drain to dump your left-over drink in before you throw out the cup), which made me smile because that very lack of recycling in the US drives me crazy every time I go home.  There were several other things he mentioned, which unfortunately I can't find because his blog doesn't archive that far back (I'm slow:))

This came back into my mind the other day, because my husband had me dig out my English copy of Drive--The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (he's trying to improve his reading ability--such a good boy!).  Which reminded me of my favorite example of Good Design in Japan--Genkans, which I wrote about when I first started blogging, and if it's alright with everybody I'll repost part of that entry here.  And if my Genkan were presentable, I'd post a photo...

Genkans Keep Your Floor Cleaner
Or:  Why My Mom Is Trying to Teach My Dad a New Trick

I was, and am still, endlessly fascinated by the homogeneity of Japan (at least as compared to the United States).  No major income gaps; no major education gaps; even more striking--no major manners gaps. 

Take shoes, for instance.  You will not find a person in Japan who would walk into a house with their shoes on.  This custom is reflected in the architecture-- all houses, apartments, Japanese-style inns are built with a genkan (entryway) with closets and shelves right there for your shoes.  There's also usually a step, so first you take off your shoes and then you step up into the house proper.  I have watched my husband ( a grown-up, for pete's sake) when he's too lazy to take his shoes back off, crawl on his hands and knees back into the house--being careful not to let his shod feet touch the floor-- to get some forgotten item.  Really.

No one in Japan, I mean literally no one--not even thieves--would ever in a million years step on a tatami mat with shoes on.  Children as young as 18 months can be seen sitting on the genkan step struggling to take their own shoes off.

I meant that about thieves, by the way.  A former student of mine once told me (in halting English) about how her parents house had been broken into.  A window opened, things taken.  The police could tell where the thief had come in since there were shoe prints in the mud outside the window.  Oh dear, I said, wasn't the inside a muddy mess?  No, she replied, just some things were taken.  But, why wasn't there any mud inside the house if the thief had to stand in mud to get in the window?  He took his shoes off, came the inevitable reply.  I was flabbergasted--he took his shoes off?!  Why?  She looked puzzled... but--you can't go inside with shoes on!  This, of course, made me laugh--and then I had to explain (no easy task) what on earth I was laughing about.  I'm still not sure she understood why I thought it was hilarious that the housebreaker had taken off his shoes before breaking and entering (apparently the police give thieves extra time to get their shoes on and off before racing to the scene of the crime...).

If you'd like to actually see what I'm talking about, go rent the movie "Adrenaline Drive" from the foreign film section.  A group of Yakuza (Mafia) are chasing the main characters, chase them into an apartment, step into the genkan (entryway) .... and all 5 crooks remove their shoes before continuing the chase inside the house.  I nearly bust a gut laughing.  My husband looked at me like screws were falling out of my ears--he had not the slightest clue why I was laughing.  I explained.  He didn't get it.  I backed up the tape and showed him the scene, and told him why I thought it was funny.  He just looked at me funny and said, "But, you have to take off your shoes before you go inside."

Doh!

If GOD showed up on a doorstep in Japan, well, He'd just have to take off His shoes,too.  Come to think of it, maybe God is Japanese, since that's what He told Moses to do (was there a tatami mat inside the Burning Bush?).  But I digress.

Seriously, I love my genkan.  I like having all the shoes right by the door.  No muddy, sandy shoes to come stomping through the house.  Even without the special entryway, it's easy enough to make a "genkan" by the back garage door--just put some simple shelving by the door (outside, or just inside), one shelf per family member.  Put a slipper rack back there in the winter if your feet get cold.  It may take a while to get used to it (my Mom is still working on my Dad...), but once you do, it's almost impossible to wear shoes inside again.

To be honest, I see examples of both Good and Not-So-Good Design here, but the good examples outnumber the not-so-good examples.  At least, I think they do.  So to be scientific about it, I'll start a list and post again On Design in about a month:))

Mata asobou, ne!