By Elaine
Japan has been an interesting adventure so far. My spouse and I are here on a temporary contract and are being housed in a high-tech serviced apartment. The apartment is nice, airy and light, and plenty warm, once we figured out how to run the heaters (remote control widgets, if you're not careful you could turn up the heat instead of changing television channels). Therein lies the trouble. This place is loaded with all the latest electronic gizmos, all carefully labeled in Japanese. We don't read Japanese, and only know a little survival oriented Kanji (like the one for exit, and men's and ladies toilets). My Japanese/ English dictionary isn't much help since it only works one way. You have to know the English word to find out
what the Japanese symbol is. This results in a hilarious guessing game, supplemented by random button pushing (hey what happens if you do this?)
What we really need is a foreigner's guide to Japanese appliances. It took the combined efforts of a PhD and an electrical engineer to cook our first meal. Figuring out how to work the microwave/grill/oven took longer than cooking dinner. It's one of those amazing multifuncition devices with loads of presets. This would be useful if you knew what the presets actually did! The management of the building provided a handy little guide for the appliances with key buttons explained, sort of. There's one helpfully translated as "grain", I suppose I could try some porridge on that setting and see if it explodes. There seem to be three settings for rice judging by the pictures, though only one of them has the Kanji symbol for rice on it (none of these are translated) And so it goes.
The best part of the kitchen is a little gas grill. I've been using it to make toast (I understand flames). We deduced from the little pictogram next to the knob that the locals use it to grill fish (and a good job it does too). We also have an old-fashioned tea kettle, no electronic parts in sight (the Japanese produce clever electronic kettle/thermos devices that keep the water at the ideal temperature for tea). So we've perfected tea and toast (though my first attempt at buying butter was a failure, it turned out to be cheese).
It's all been a bit frustrating, because cooking is one of my hobbies. I was especially flummoxed when I went to buy a rice cooker. They look like they're capable of launching a sattelite into space. All I wanted was a simple one with an on/off button. Working one of these new fangled ones will make programming the vcr look like a piece of cake (I'm afraid to even look at the vcr).
Blessedly, the washer/dryer is a European model (similar to the one we had in London), labeled with little pictures. I managed to wash and dry some clothes without incident (which is more than I can say for the first time I tried it in London). We've also figured out the dishwasher, despite the fact that the diagrams in the booklet were for a different machine. It appears to have a default setting that does the basic washing/drying, though from the looks of it, you can get it to do everything besides make rice. After a bit of experimentation, we learned how to turn on and adjust the hot water so now we can bathe as well (yes, even the bathtub and shower are electronically operated, heaven help us if there's a blackout!).
Then there's the combination telephone, answering machine, fax, copier. Not as mind-boggling as it looks, once you figure out where the send button is. But it keeps talking to us in Japanese. I think it might be giving instructions, on the other hand, like the elevator, it might just be saying "Thank You" for sending a fax.
Funny how these things don't show up in your average tourist guide/phrase book!
