Oh, The Japanese Appliances You'll Use

Anyone who has studied Japan or Japanese for an extended period of time knows of one sure thing:

they have very interesting appliances.

Take the toilet. Or rather, the toilet seat. They are either called "washlets" or "warmlets" and for good reason: a warmlet is a heated toilet seat. A washlet, well to put it bluntly, is a toilet seat that sprays or jets heated water to clean your bum. And has a heated toilet seat. It's a toilet seat on steroids.

While a warmlet only has either maybe one button (the switch to turn the heat on or off) or none, the washlet has an array of buttons on a control panel along the side of the seat. The only washlets that I have come across on a regular basis are the ones at school - the newer the building, the newer and nicer the bathrooms and the more chances of me coming across a washlet (in addition to the evil and ubiquitous Asian squat toilet). There are even buttons that control the water pressure. At first, I could not make heads or tails of all the buttons but lets just say now is that I want a washlet for my future house.

Toto (think Kohler in the States as a brand for plumbing stuff) actually has a showroom in NYC now but compared to the Japanese prices of washlet, they are pretty expensive; not so many people use them, though there is an increasing demand. Hideki Matsui requested that he have one installed in his apartment in the Trump Tower by the UN.

It's a complicated setup. You need to have an electrical outlet near the toilet so you can actually plug the toilet seat in - it sounds totally absurd, but these toilet seats actually have miniature computers in them. Its like having a butler for your bum: "Would you like the water warmer? How is the water pressure, mum?" Then you have to connect the toilet seat to a water source. So electricity + water + bum makes for a precarious setup unless you have people who know what they are doing, can lead to some interesting occurrences during installation. I wonder how well equipped Toto's lawyers are for sue-happy Americans.

My opinion is that the more buttons, bells and whistle a Japanese appliance has the better it is. It's not like the States where the more buttons you have the more complicated it is. That is very much not the case here. Take my next Japanese appliance: the unassuming rice cooker.

You can get a $30 rice cooker or even cook rice in a pot. But the Japanese take it up a notch and as Emeril Lagasse says, "BAM!" I myself have a very simple rice cooker that I actually got for free (it's pretty old but I got it for free and it makes my rice); Colleen has a newer one with several buttons and settings. One is "O-kayu" which makes Japanese rice porridge, which is aptly called "O-kayu" as well. It is their version of chicken noodle soup for when you are sick.

Then you have the regular ol' "make rice" button. And I think two or three more other ones that I didn't really pay attention to. But here is where it gets REALLY nifty: there is also a button labeled "Keki" in katakana. In Japanese (and in bastardized Greek-English, and for this I highly find amusing), "keki" means "cake." So not only do you have a rice cooker to make rice, you have a rice cooker to make cake. As such, Colleen has make banana bread in her rice cooker. We plan to go to Meidi-Ya (the foreign food store) to get Sara Lee brownie mix and try to make brownies in a rice cooker. Only in Japan kids, only in Japan.

Which leads to the question: why have a rice cooker than can make cake? Well the answer I think is pretty simple: due to the lack of space, (small houses = small kitchens), the nature of Japanese cuisine and the fact that Japan is earthquake prone, full-on ovens are not that popular or that common (they do exist here, however just not in a typical Japanese house). There are mostly stove top burner sets with a small grill in between the two burners (imagine a rectangular box with two burners then inside the box a grill). I myself just have one electric burner, but I got a small grill that I use as an oven which is electric. Some of these burner-boxes are electric and some are gas; if it's gas you hook it up to the pipeline, but when you are not using the burner-box there is a switch to totally turn of the gas. I have that for my hot water; it's all because of the earthquakes.

So I have seen many takes on the Japanese appliances. My friend Alisa has a microwave oven that can make brownies, grill fish and toast bread. I was going to get the same microwave, but opted for the smaller and cheaper grill. Her microwave is the classic case of having a million buttons, yet you actually use every single one of them.

But I think the one that tops them all for the moment is the one I least expected: the blackboard eraser cleaner. Yesterday, during my graduate seminar, my sensei was writing on the board - using chalk and an eraser of course. (The only whiteboards that I seen are portable ones). All of a sudden, he pulls out a small shelf under the chalkboard that contains a yellow and green box. I never really noticed it before, but what I have noticed is that all the blackboards at Rits have a small drawer underneath the ledge for the chalk that holds more chalk.

To the green and yellow box. It was plastic and had a plug that led to a socket right underneath the chalkboard. But what got me was the NOISE that emanated from it: like a loud vacuum cleaner. I was sitting in the back, and totally surprised to see my sensei running the eraser across the top of this screaming box and voiced a very audible "Eeeh? Nan desu ka?!?" ("Huh? What is that!?!") The Japanese kids started to chuckle - there are three foreign kids in my class but they are Mongolian and Korean so I am the most visible "foreigner" - and explained to me that that is a machine that cleans the blackboard erasers by vacuuming all the chalk dust out, so that way you don't have to clap the erasers to clean them (or scrape them along the edge of the chalk holder ledge). I asked the Mongolian girl near me if she has seen that and she said it was her first time as well. Even my sensei was chuckling at my surprised reaction; I literally jumped in my chair from the noise because I wasn't expecting that. (I am assuming, since from my own experience Korea is pretty similar to Japan, that Korea might have these things as well.)

Now THAT is a nifty appliance. Even better, there weren't millions of buttons, but I'll bet that one day the upgraded model will have a button to control the volume of the vacuum, the speed of the vacuum, maybe squirt out some cleaner...