New gear

There’s a moment during one of John Updike’s Rabbit books where the protagonist, in the middle of swapping wives, finds himself preoccupied with his friend’s medicine cabinet; with how the small details of consumerism reveal big differences in the way people live. Life in Japan is the same as in England, but different. Perhaps, like Rabbit, some of those differences are most apparent from the new and different things that I have acquired since living here.

In the bathroom, for example, I have a new exfoliating wash towel and special soap; and charcoal and hinoki oil shampoo with a special rubbery head brush/massage thing. The special shampoo was a gift from my mother-in-law; the rubbery massage thing, a gift from my wife. Apparently the regular use of both will stop my rapidly receding hairline in its tracks. I’m not sure of the scientific basis for these claims, and I’m not sure my wife and mother-in-law are sure of them either. But just because they belong to that broad mass of wacky supernatural beliefs that I put down to cultural differences (also eg. their belief in the effectiveness of Core Rhythms DVDs etc.), doesn’t mean I’m going to dismiss them. About three years ago we visited a couple of temples on New Year’s Day with my wife’s family, and we all made a wish at each one. When we asked my nephew what he had wished for, it turned out that he had wished for a brother at one temple and a sister at another. Nine months later both wishes were granted: his mum gave birth to twins. The next year we were walking together on such a clear day that we could see Mount Fuji. “I wish I could live close enough to see Mount Fuji every day,” said my wife. Two years later and here we are.

So no, I’m not quite ready to dismiss the crazy, wacky beliefs of my wife and her family. But I think there is a sounder scientific basis for my exfoliating wash towel, which is a replacement for an exfoliating wash sponge that rapidly started to smell bad because in the moist heat of our tiny shower room it never dried out. I use it in combination with my special soap to address one of the problems caused by the intense heat of the Yamanashi summer: I now have a really, really spotty back. I spend most of my days drenched in sweat. When I sleep at night I sweat. When I get out of the shower, I sweat. When I walk to work, I sweat. When I sit down at my desk, I sweat. When I stand up at the front of the classroom, I sweat. When I walk home, I sweat. And when I go running along the Arakawa river, boy do I sweat.

And one of the upshots of all that sweat is the blocked pores on my back, which have turned into nasty red pimples. I’ve only just started using my special soap, but it’s already stopped the painful itching, so I’m hoping it will also get rid of the spots. But in case all that talk of spots has you choking over your cornflakes, perhaps I should move into the kitchen.

Like many other Japanese families, we are now the owners of a small gas range that sits on top of our worktop. In fact, these gas ranges are so common that you can get all sorts of equipment for it, like a magnetic metal shield to stop food splashing up your walls; and a special foil cover that sits underneath the gas hobs to stop food splashing all over the cooker itself. Before we could install these, though, we had to clean our gas range for what was probably the first time in its 10-15-year-old life (ie. about twice the usual lifespan of these things). My wife chose to do so just after I’d got out of the shower, before I had a chance to get dressed. So picture me, if you can, wearing nothing but a pair of rubber gloves, cleaning the accumulated grime and grease of ten years of cooking. And now picture me, if you can, discovering the dead carcass of a cockroach, right underneath where we cook our food.

Which brings me on to the next category of equipment: bug-killing. Apart from that solitary dead cockroach, the first major problem we had with insects was that our tatami mats were infected with mites (that leave a tell-tale two-pronged bite). To get rid of them we used a bug bomb, which is a metal can that contains poison. To use it we cleared all of our belongings into the closet, and then ripped off the top of the can. There was a brief burst of flame, and then poisonous smoke started billowing out. At which point we went shopping. When we returned, four hours later, there was no more smoke, or tatami mites.

That wasn’t the end of our insect problems, though. We also have a little electronic pig in the corner of the room, which dispenses some chemical in the air to kill off mosquitos. But without a doubt, the worst insects are the cockroaches. Wandering into the kitchen one evening, I found myself gazing at one of our dishes, wondering how come I had never noticed the sort of red-ink floral pattern on the side. Then the red-ink floral pattern on the side started to move and I realised with a grisly sinking feeling that I was staring at my first live cockroach. I didn’t expect to have any sort of psychological problem with cockroaches because I’m not that squeamish about insects, and as far as I can tell, cockroaches aren’t any more unclean than any other household insect. But the way this one seemed to emerge from some alien cloaking device – and the sheer size of the thing, crawling all over our plates – left me feeling properly violated.

That first cockroach escaped. The second one, I attacked with some bug spray until it was on its back, legs whirring and kicking in its agonised death throes. The third one, I will admit, I was lucky, lifting up the loo seat at just the right time to knock it into the toilet, where those little legs performed the same macabre dance, before I flushed it away. A minute before or afterwards and they’d have been crawling around near my exposed privates. Anyway, since then we’ve also added some little black plastic capsules to our array of new equipment, each one home to poison that the cockroaches will apparently bring back to their breeding grounds. Let’s hope they work.

And so, finally, we get to the bedroom, where the most important piece of equipment is our air conditioning unit and fan, because since we arrived in Yamanashi it has mostly been impossibly hot. For the first few nights we would leave our aircon on all night, just so we could sleep. In the interests of the environment, however, we gradually weaned ourselves off it, replacing it with special ice pillows that we wrap in small towels and place under our heads at night. (My wife also has similar ice packs for her feet).

By far the most important piece of new gear in our apartment, however, is the plastic loo seat in our tiny sweatbox of a toilet. That’s because our apartment is 40 years old, and 40 years ago, the most cutting-edge toilet technology consisted of a hole in the ground. But that brings me on to the subject of the apartment itself, and that’s a whole other story that I’ll hopefully get round to telling you next time.