Video Blog: Japanese Home Appliances

Wow, I took a bit of a break from my last post, and right when I had a nice streak going too, huh? I've been rather busy these past couple weeks jumping head first back into my Japanese studies. I sort of re-discovered the site AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com, after reading this article a while back. For those familiar with the site, maybe it's self-explanatory what happened. I felt motivated to take Japanese to the next step, dropped hobbies relating to English, and immersed myself in it, I daresay more than I did even in Japan. lol It was a magical thing. Perhaps I'll make a post in the future to do justice to this site and what I'm doing now.

But for now, I want to get back on track to Japan documenting. :p

And do I have a treat for you! Today I will cover two of my most popular videos on YouTube. They'll take a closer look at some things that are considered perfectly ordinary parts of everyday life in Japan, which from a gaijin (foreigner) perspective might actually, possibly, sort of be kind of cool. If you watched the first video of my house in Japan, you will have seen both of these briefly. I do apologize for the sound, my camera is not good at picking it up even from a foot away apparently.

Japanese Washing Machine

Video notes:

• Like I said in the video, "washing machine" is sentakki, but it can also be sentakuki.
• There are various reasons that Japanese don't own dryers. First and foremost, they're rare and expensive, so if you see one in a home you know that the family is pretty well-off. Another reason is that the Japanese don't want to waste electricity needlessly (which can be seen in bringing hand towels everywhere instead of having hand dryers in bathrooms), and better still is that over a period of time dryers will wear down colors and fabric. Either way, from much of the world's perspective Americans are weird for having them. lol
• The rest is self-explanatory.

Japanese Showers

Video notes:

• I was going to say that the reason this one had so many hits was probably because people thought I was taking a video in a public shower. However, the washing machine video had even more hits so I don't know WTF is going on.
• The shower room is called ohuroba.
  
• I say shower specifically and not bath because I never actually took a bath while I was there, unfortunately. Wish I had that time to relax, but the most I did was plug it up one time while taking a shower to make sure that I wasn't wasting as much water as a bath anyway, and it was pretty clear that a shower was the way to go.
• It got annoying at times having to turn off the shower while lathering up, but through the cold nights it certainly built up discipline and reminded me how I was saving water. haha
• Someone on YouTube asked why I didn't wash myself outside the bathtub and then soak in it afterward. Obviously there's the water issue, but I told the person that when my host parents explained how to use it, it sounded to me like if I was going to use the shower I should do it in the tub and keep the water from getting on the floor. So I did that and they never mentioned anything else about it the rest of the four months I was there. In hot springs however, which I'll cover in a later post, that person would certainly be correct.
  
• As I mentioned in the other video blog, privacy was a matter of closing two curtains and shutting an unlocked door. But as I covered, the Japanese have a high respect for said privacy, so no problems.

A short post, enjoy.