My Japanese Kitchen and Appliances

This is about my kitchen in Japan. By no means am I generalizing that all kitchens in Japan are like this; I haven't been in anyone else's kitchen. We have a galley kitchen. It is a narrow like a hallway, that doesn't even have room for a fridge. The bag next to the fridge has all our milk cartons and food trays that are waiting to be taken back to the store. 

Our microwave/toaster oven/oven combo, with the fridge behind and the burnable trash to the right. 

The fridge is tall and narrow with several drawers on the bottom. 

Inside looks pretty similar to my fridge in the states. 

The doors, however, have much different configuration. It seems that it is specifically designed for something, maybe sauces, but I am not sure if we are using it right. 

The egg holder is in the middle. I bought eggs from Costco most recently. They vary in size greatly and don't have the date stickers like the grocery store did. 

Not sure what this flat area with a sliding lid should be used for. 

This is the water tank for the ice maker. 

I have to fill it manually.

The ice tray drawer is nice! I love that it came with a scoop. 

This is a produce drawer. We use mainly frozen veggies. We have put a bit of produce here, but it is easily forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind. Or maybe I am just out of my mind. Ha!

This is a quick freeze drawer. If I were making popsicles or something I'd make them here. 

Here is the regular freezer. It has two separate trays above the larger drawer. 

Here is our huge sink. There is sink underneath the white dish draining platform. It fits our sink perfectly. 

It can also be changed out for the cutting board that fits the sink perfectly as well. 

I bought this blue basket from the 100 yen shop, Daiso. Some people in the States may be familiar with this store as well. This basket is to put kitchen trash in like eggshells, stems from produce, or fat from meat trimming. Otherwise we have to walk around to the trash can many times. 

Sometimes I put both the drainer and the cutting board over the sink. 

There is no garbage disposal. Under what looks like the disposal should be is a mesh strainer that catches food waste. It's pretty fine mesh and food it was hard to get all the food out. 

I found these bags at Daiso as well. 

They easily catch all the food and make it easy to dispose of. This is mostly oatmeal from breakfast. 

This is under the sink. On the right is our storage for rice. 

By pushing this button, you can select exactly how much rice you want. It measures for you.

Then you open the tray at the bottom to get the rice out. 

Here is our rice cooker. The relocation team labeled in English for us. 

Under the counter storage. 

There is more storage above, but it's not that exciting to look at. 

Our gas stove top. 

Pot storage under the stove. I bought the towel rack at Daiso. 

This is the most annoying part of our kitchen. In order to have hot water, this has to be on. It turns itself off automatically,  not sure after how long. I always forget to turn it on when I am washing dishes by hand. 🤦🏽‍♀️

Here is the mircowave/toaster oven/oven combo. 

We haven't used the oven feature on this appliance yet, but we have used it as a microwave and toaster oven.  In the video below I give a super quick overview of how to use those two features.  

The controls for the dishwasher.

 

As I mentioned before. It barely fits four of everything. The dishes we have are HUGE. I'm not sure how the relo (relocation) people fit everything at once. 

Here is my washing machine and dryer. It has its own closet, which is nice. You can set it to automatically go from washing to drying. It can take up to four hours to do both, depending on the size of the load. Many people hang dry clothes here. It dries faster on a sunny day, that's for sure. 

I bought clothes hanging goods at IKEA. That's one section they have here that they don't in the States. I have never used fabric soften before, but I do here because I might hang dry, or if I use the machine, there are no dryer sheets here. 

So there's my kitchen and most of our appliances.  Do you think you could cook in my kitchen daily? How do you feel about hanging clothes to dry? I have only done it a couple of times so far.  

A Little House Tour

We got into our house this week! This is all of our luggage; it was so cumbersome!

G has to duck a little to walk in our toilet rooms and duck even more to go into our tatami rooms. 

The toilet room. That is a sink spigot in the middle. It runs automatically when you flush. We also have bidets on both toilets. 

Our bath is completely separate from the toilets. In a traditional Japanese bath you sit on a stool and wash yourself first, rinse, then soak in the tub. Everyone shares the same bath water, as you are clean when you use it, so the thing standing up in the tub is the bath cover. The rod we are hanging our towels on can also be used for clothes. There is a control outside the bath that can be used to dry clothes! 

The panel in the wall on the right turns the hot water on and off. There is also one in the kitchen. 

This is our dishwasher. It holds four of everything, but only two of the mugs when everything is in it, but that's OK because it fits all of our glasses. We have to wash dishes after every meal since we only have one of everything for each person! It's not enough dishes to fill the washer, though, so we have been doing it by hand. 

Our washing machine is also a dryer. The wash cycle takes less than an hour, but, the dry cycle takes about THREE HOURS! Lots of Japanese people hang dry their clothes. I tried it with one of our loads of laundry, but it rained, so some of it was really wet!

This is one of our traditional tatami rooms. Tatami refers to the flooring. It is straw weaved together to make mats. Tatami are a standard size and they rooms can even be measured by the number of mats!

Thus is our tiny backyard. 

This is our clothes line. I'll be using it to dry clothes often. 

The best part about our backyard is this traditional broom! How cool is that?! 

We still have many orgazational things to get and we are going to buy futons to sleep on. I'll update as we settle in more.