Once again here I am to talk about some of the more interesting things that I find living here in Japan. When I first moved to Japan I have to say that I was quite lucky on many fronts. The biggest thing that I was lucky about was a place to live. I was very fortunate to essentially stumble backward right into a very good situation. I will explain. See I had been to my wife’s apartment a couple of times, and I never thought anything about it, as I had never been to any other apartments in Japan, so I just thought that all apartments are the same. Maybe they are I still don’t know for sure, but what I do know is that there are some big differences between the apartments I have lived in in America and the condominium that I live in with my wife now. And it mostly has to do with all of these buttons everywhere.
The first thing that I noticed as soon as I moved in was that if I wanted to take a shower or bath, that I had to push a button in order to heat the water. In America we have a hot water heater, so when ever you turn on the faucet the water is either cold or hot, but we don’t need to push any buttons to do it. It’s just hot or cold right away.
Let me add also that my wife has been less than informative about the extras or perks of our apartment. I have to again, stumble upon these things and then ask questions before I can find out about them.
So second, about a year and a half after living in Japan (my 2nd winter), I was looking at what I thought was a light switch, so I just looked at my wife right in the eye as she sat across the room, and I pushed the button. She instantly said, bad, bad, bad. You’re being bad, and you are being wasteful. It was then that I knew that I had found an interesting and important new button. I had to ask her. Why are you so upset? What does this button do? She said., “It’s to heat the floor”. To heat the floor!!! I thought wow! How cool is that? She said, “No!! Don’t use it!! It wastes energy!!”. So my new favorite button has never been used.
Third and just this week I found a new button, and no, I didn’t find it because my wife told me about it. I saw her use it and I asked, “Hey!!! What doest that button do!!??” She said it’s to heat the mirror, so that when the bathroom mirror become to steamy you can heat the mirror and clear the steam away. I thought “COOL!”, but I knew exactly what my wife would say. “No! Don’t use it! It’s wasteful!”
Actually I’m still wondering if there are more buttons that I don’t know about. I will let you know.
Jerry
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