The busy week is finally over but next week will be busy too... For winter vacation I'll be going on a trip to Greece with Anne and another JET (I'll tell you more about that later) so I've got to pack my suitcase. I did a Christmas presentation for the third-year students at Hashi on Friday and I have to modify it this weekend for the first and second-years.
But anyway, I was thinking I should probably tell you more about the apartment where I live. Before I came to Japan I had no idea what to expect except that it would probably be a lot smaller than any place I had stayed in before in the US. Thus I was pleasantly surprised that my room (B.R. 2 below) was larger than my college dorm room and there really isn't a feeling of having too little space (most of the time).
The layout of my apartment.
As can be seen there is a separate shower room (S.R.) and toilet room (W.C., also known as a water closet), there is no clothes dryer, and there is no oven. The patio has built-in bars so that clothes can be hung during the warmer/sunnier months but now that it's cold we have to dry our clothes inside on portable clothes hangers. When the clothes hangers are up, the kitchen/living room can feel very cramped. Another thing to note is that the bathroom-area sink does not have hot water so one must go to the kitchen and turn on the water heater wall unit for the kitchen sink. The water heater, shower room water heater, and stove top burner (only one) are all gas powered. The microwave unit in the kitchen has a toaster and oven setting but it is too small for most baking pans. The shower room contains the deep bathtub a moveable shower head (like my grandmother has). Unfortunately the shower head is way down near the floor so instead of just leaving it up on the wall to have a real shower I have to either crouch down really low to wash my hair or pick up the shower head and wash using that. I get water in my ears pretty often but not as often as when I was first starting out. Turning the shower on is another obstacle.
The shower controls.
I have to turn on the gas so that the heater can heat the water while I shower (luckily it heats the water very well). Next I turn the water on. During the winter months if it's below -2 Celsius (~28 degrees Fahrenheit) we have to drain the water in the pipes of the shower room so that the water won't freeze there during the night.
The toilet is not like any other I've ever encountered. I was expecting to have a high-tech toilet like the ones I saw when I first came to Japan (even the toilets at the movie theater have heated seats) but the toilet in the apartment is… a glorified trap-door. The toilet bowl has little to no water inside of it and as I said, the bottom of the bowl is like a trap door which is released when you hit the flusher and more water enters the bowl, or when the weight inside is heavy enough so that the trap door opens on its own. It's certainly… different and is apparently a fairly old-fashioned toilet.
Well, some of the previously mentioned things can get annoying but most of the time I'm so used to them now that I don't even notice. I do like several aspects of the apartment including its spacious closets, its open kitchen/living room, and the lovely tatami mats in the bedrooms and living room. Tatami mats are delicate so you can't wear shoes while you walk on them (this is one of the reasons that outdoor shoes are not worn inside of Japanese houses). I imagine another reason is that it is much easier cleaning-wise to separate outdoor shoes from the indoors (in school this is especially effective). Remember all those rainy days when hundreds of kids would track mud into the school building leaving slippery messes all over the place? That doesn't happen in Japanese schools where the kids put on their indoor shoes once they enter the building.
Many aspects of the apartment (the good and the bad) are there to either save space or are designed to prevent earthquake damage. For example, in a traditional Japanese home there will not be any tall furniture or standing lamps. In the event of an earthquake you don't want to have heavy things up high where they might potentially fall on you (like a tall bookshelf). Most rooms have dangling ceiling lights that will get shaken up but won't fall.
My ceiling light.
The closets are large because people want the option of using bedrooms as other kinds of rooms during the day. For example, the living room could potentially be used as a third bedroom if we put up the sliding doors between that room and the kitchen and put the kotatsu into the large closet at night. During the day the futon could be folded and put into the same closet.
Anyway, that's the tour for now!
