Tuesday, August 26--You Learn Something New Every Day

In an effort to learn as much as possible about our new home and how to take care of it properly, I signed up for a class entitled (appropriately) “Your Japanese Home.” A Japanese native taught the class, and helped to alleviate some fears while inspiring some new ones. Apparently, it is not a matter of if your home will mold or mildew, it is a matter of when. In an effort to stave off the inevitable for as long as possible, we learned about all kinds of dehumidifiers, electric and otherwise.

The tatami room is the one room in a house where Americans have the potential to cause the most costly damage. Between the tatami (grass) mats on the floor, the shoji screens in front of the sliding door, and the fusama room dividers, I am especially grateful that we have no small children or large dogs!

We learned about the proper way to use the bathroom—you should have separate slippers outside of the toilet room so as not to contaminate your house slippers. If you want to take a bath in the tub (which can be automatically filled for you either by a switch in the kitchen or by setting a timer so it will be ready when you come in from a long day at work), you must first take a shower. To take a proper Japanese shower, you should sit on a small plastic upside-down bucket, so as not to splash your dirty water into the clean water of the tub (the shower is not enclosed, and is right next to the tub). When you are done in the tub (soaking only, no bubble bath or soap lest you cause thousands of yen in damage to the recirculation system), leave the water for the next person. With a simple touch of another button, the water in the tub will be reheated in preparation for the next person in line. I’m not sure how much sharing of the bathwater there will be in this house, but I can guarantee during the cold winter, I will be reheating my own water and spending hours in the tub!

After the classroom instruction, we went on a field trip to the Daiei, which is a local shopping mall. We were shown many Japanese products that will be useful to keeping our home clean, comfortable, and smelling great (don’t confuse the room air freshener with the one meant specifically for the bathroom, or your Japanese guests will laugh at you). It’s interesting to notice the difference in packaging of Japanese products compared to similar American products. For example, bug spray (either for spraying the house/yard or for spraying bodies) in Japan comes in cans with colors we normally associate with babies—pale blue and green. Big contrast from American bug spray in its black, red, yellow, dark green, or orange packaging.

Dinner tonight turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. The Officer’s Club had been closed for renovations since we arrived, and had its grand reopening this past weekend. We decided to try it out for dinner tonight, and walked in on Mongolian BBQ night. We’d heard of this in the States, but neither of us had ever tried it before—boy, were we missing out! Basically, you create your own meal from the ingredients laid out before you—tons of vegetables, every kind of meat you can imagine, a dozen spices, and twice that many sauces. You pile everything you want into a big bowl, and they whisk it off to the kitchen to cook it up for you. Mine turned out delicious, if I do say so myself. Unfortunately, I have no idea what I put in it, so there’s no way I’ll ever recreate it!