Efficiency in Design

For the first month of our stay, we opted to take a pre-furnished apartment. This was mostly so we’d have a bed to lay on for a few weeks while we got our bearings, settled into work, bought some furniture, and picked a decent place to live for the rest of the year. (Needless to say, prefurnished = expensive.) The place is a bit cramped, but not too bad, thanks mostly to a number of design efficiencies that, while you won’t see them in the West, seem to be standard procedure here.

First, the fridge. These aren’t the closet-sized behemoths you see in most American homes. These are the cupboard-size things you see here:

Eagle-eyed readers will notice a can of Boss Coffee, previous mentioned in this post.

This accompanies the overall approach towards food in this country: you buy what you need when you need it. This definitely flies in the face of everything I’ve learned as a life-long resident of the US, where I always may as well buy the jumbo size if it’s non-perishable.

The Night Festival Block Party That Happened Outside Our Window

Our first Saturday in Kyoto, I told Katie that we had to check out the downtown nightlife. We made tentative plans to do so, but after a day filled with a lot of walking and exploring (that’s another post entirely), we were pretty beat. We went back to the apartment to relax, but after about 20 minutes, I looked outside to see this:

Booths serving street food and beer out of coolers. Men wearing red hats with cats drawn on them guiding traffic and yelling at people to move to the sides. If I leaned off our balcony and looked to the right, there were more booths, more people, and more noise coming from up the street. We had no idea what this was or how long it would last, so we grabbed a few yen and went downstairs.

A Quick Apartment Tour

In case you were interested in our apartment, here is a quick, guided tour, in pictures.

Looking into the Japanese room (our bedroom) from the living room, which is separated by shoji (Japanese sliding doors)

View of our bedroom with the shoji closed (we added pictures to the doors)

Stray observations of life in Japan (Part 1)

Probably one of the most common things people want to know when reading this blog is “How is life different in Japan?”.  So, here is our first post (of most likely several) stray observations. We are also working on a post called “Efficiency in Design”, all about quirky things in our apartment, which we will post soon.

Toilet add-ons

1) Many toilets in Japan often have an electronic pad, where people can select “Bidet”, “Shower”, and “Flushing Sound”. For example, our hotel toilet had one, as well as, interestingly enough, the local McDonald’s.

Being the research scientist that I am, I, of course, had to experiment. The result of “Shower” was quite terrifying: an electronic tube sprayed a stream of water straight at Chris. I didnt try “Bidet”, but I could only assume what would happen. Interestingly, “Flushing Sound” was exactly what you’d expect, which is odd since the toilet already made a flushing sound when flushed.