Japanese laundry

Before you ever move to Japan, consider one thing...how much do you hate doing the laundry? Personally, I never minded doing my own laundry back in America, but then again, it wasn't the most god awful chore in the world back there either. In Japan, laundry just plain sucks, and if you hate laundry, i can only get worse for you, I promise.

The problem actually arises from both drying and washing.

Machine washing machine is a menace to society, and should be baned. Already, I have soaked my entire kitchen with the damn thing. That's right, my washing machine is in my kitchen. To pump water into my machine, I need to connect a tube from my kitchen sink to the back of it. Then, I need to turn the water on. Typically, this means the water sprays from the sink end of the hose as well through the overlapping hose, so I need a screwdriver to tightly clamp the hose down and make it air tight. Of course, my hands are wet at this point, and using my tiny screw driver is hard work since they are slippery. Once that thing is clamped, you would assume no water would leak out, but WRONG it still kinda does. So only about 3/4 of the water is actually getting into the machine, while the rest is landing in a towel placed over the faucet...just one more piece of laundry which needs to be done. Here's the best part. Once the machine is full, it closes itself off to more water, but the the faucet is still running! So naturally, water is still being pumped into the tube with nowhere to go...hence even more spraying all over my kitchen. And this is all to wash about half a load of laundry.

And drying...my drying machine isn't really a problem since I don't have one. I need to hang my clothes to dry, but while I was doing my laundry, it decided to start raining, so whoopie! I need to wait for a better day to do my drying. Not to mention my balcony is pretty tiny, so hanging requires a lot of space which I don't have. If I did have a drier, it wouldn't really work since all the dryers in Japan are electrical, and don't really dry that much at all. My old apartment had one, and I just gave up with it in the end since it created a lot of moisture and again, soaked my floor.

So all in all, I think paying for my laundry at a place would serve me better than my set-up I have now. Now I just need to find one. Might be hard since everything is residential around here, and I'm at the top of the mountain. I might have to walk all the way down a hill with my laundry...so if you hate laundry, don't move to Japan. It will destroy you.