Doing the laundry—or trying, anyway

I apologize for the rather mundane title this week, but the fact of the matter is that I’m at a bit of an impasse regarding my laundry. I have just washed as big a load as my undersized washer will allow, only to discover that the weather has shifted into torrential-downpour mode, with no signs of letting up in the near future. This is a problem.

Perhaps I should explain. First, the month of June is set aside in Japan for the rainy season, or tsuyu. (The name itself is a picturesque visual metaphor using the characters for “plum” and “rain”, but maybe that’s because “month of perpetual moist gloom” seemed a bit too dreary.) For the better part of the month, there is rain at some point during the day. And if it doesn’t rain, it’s generally overcast and threatening rain, or more rarely, sunny but scorching hot and with 100% humidity. Also, when it rains, it doesn’t seem to hold anything back. Since I tend to misplace my umbrella with alarming frequency, this has likewise meant more days than I’d like to admit where I have ended up soaked through, courtesy of a well-timed cloudburst. I would suspect that this is just another example of nature not being particularly fond of me as a person, if not for the fact that people around me seem to treat it as perfectly normal. That’s fair enough, and even I’m making do for the most part, except that…

I don’t have a clothes dryer. To be honest, that’s pretty much the norm here. In a country where space is a premium and resources are expensive, clothes dryers are seen as luxury items that require both the room to put them and the funds to pay for the electric bills they incur. Consequently, only families, or the relatively well-off individual (or at any rate, not me) actually have one. Instead, most people (including me) hang their laundry out to dry on the balcony of their apartment, airing their drawers for all to see. Since everybody does it, though, it’s not considered the least bit embarrassing to do. Even so, I still find the idea incredibly novel.

You see, I grew up in a house in America which had a clothes dryer as part of a pair. In my childhood, I saw washer and dryer as inseparable, two halves of a whole, yin and yang, and other dualistic metaphors. We washed our clothes in the washer, and when they were done washing, we put them in the dryer to dry. This was the natural and true state of affairs for the Universe, and I could scarcely conceive of it any other way.

Now, even in my childhood, I was aware of other people I knew at least sometimes hanging up their laundry to dry, and I even helped in this endeavor. But somehow, it never occurred to me that I would ever do this with my own clothes. Looking back, I suppose this was the inevitable result of both of my parents working, and my sister and myself being out of the house for most of the day. Knowing what North Country weather can be like, hanging laundry outside would more likely than not end up with us coming back to find the laundry quite a bit less dry than we had left it. But at any rate, the end result is that my time in Japan is really my first experience with drying clothes by air.

And that brings me to the conundrum with which I started this column. I now have a massive pile of clean, but extremely damp, clothing items, and the place where I was going to hang them all up looks rather like the deck of an oceangoing vessel in the middle of a gale. This is especially a problem, because I have work tomorrow and, as usual, have neglected to wash my things until I really, absolutely need more clean clothes. I suppose I’ll just have to spread them around the apartment in ridiculous fashion in the hopes that they’ll be dry enough in the morning to use, but one way or another, it’ll work out. I’m used to doing things counterintuitively by now.

Still, maybe I ought to take a cue from my students at the junior high school where I work. In response to the incessant weather of late, they’ve fallen back on what is apparently an ancient standby, the teru teru bozu (roughly, “sunshine monk”). This is a simple figure made in the same fashion as a tissue paper “ghost”, often decorated with the same silly face as is drawn on Japanese scarecrows. Simply hang this talisman in the window, and you’ll have sunny weather before you know it. Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. I have no empirical studies available examining its effectiveness, but at this point, I’m willing to try pretty much anything in order to get my laundry to dry, so here goes nothing. At the very least, I won’t be having too much of this problem once the Japanese summer officially hits… then I’ll be needing to figure out how to keep myself dry. But that, I’m afraid, is a story for another column.