Laundry week in a Tokyo furnished apartment

The washing machine stands in a shallow plastic tray beside the bathroom door. It fills, it rinses, it spins hard enough to knock once against the tray, and then it beeps and stops. The clothes are still wet. There is no dryer next to it, none under the counter, none in the closet, and none anywhere else you would think to look.

That is the standard combination in a Tokyo furnished unit: a washer, a balcony, and a pole laid across two arms on the balcony wall. The clothes go outside. The weather decides when they come back in.

So the week stops running on days and starts running on the forecast. You wash the night before a dry morning. On Thursday you already know what Saturday is for. A load hung out at seven in the morning is folded before dinner, and the same load hung at seven in the evening is still damp at breakfast.

Wash, rinse, spin

The panel has no English mode. Three words carry nearly all of it:

• 洗い (arai — wash)
• すすぎ (susugi — rinse)
• 脱水 (dassui — spin, literally "removing the water")

If you learned 洗濯 (sentaku — laundry) from a dictionary, you will look for it on the panel and not find it. That word lives in the machine's name, 洗濯機. The step is the shorter 洗い.

The standard course, marked 標準 (hyōjun — standard), runs all three in order and stops. You can also run any one of them alone. Hitachi's manual puts it plainly: press the button for a step you do not want and turn its light off. That sounds like a detail until the evening you rinse a shirt in the sink and want the machine to spin the water out for you.

That last one gets more use than you would think.

The water is cold

The machine fills from one tap, and that tap is cold. This is not an oversight. The manufacturers write it down as a rule: Hitachi's manual says not to feed the machine hot water from a water heater and not to use water above 50°C, and Panasonic's says to use tap water at 30°C or below. Both quote their cycle times at a water temperature of 20°C.

That changes what comes out of a shirt. Body oil lifts off fabric more easily as the water warms, and Panasonic says the enzymes in detergent work best at around 40°C, a little above body heat. Cold water also leaves powder detergent sitting undissolved, which is on Hitachi's own troubleshooting list along with the fix: switch to a liquid. None of this ruins a wash. It is why collars and cuffs want attention in Tokyo that they never asked for at home.

There is other water in the apartment, though, and some machines are built to reach it. Look behind the washer for a coiled hose with a small filter head. That is a pump, and it goes in the bathtub. Hitachi calls the setting お湯取 (oyutori — taking the hot water) and switches back to the tap on its own when the tub runs dry. If there is no hose, do not improvise. Panasonic's entry manual says tap water only, no hot water and no leftover bath water.

Kao publishes the rule for using it. Ordinary laundry detergent keeps lifted dirt from settling back onto the clothes, so bath water is fine for the wash itself. The same page says to keep it out of the rinse and use clean water there. Toshiba's machines take the decision off you: bath water for the wash and the first rinse, then tap water automatically from the second rinse on.

The volumes make the case. Tokyo's water bureau puts an ordinary household bath at around 180 litres. Panasonic's 8 kilo machine uses about 92 litres for a standard wash. One bath is two washes.

So the words on the panel become a small decision you make every Sunday. Bath water for 洗い. Clean water for すすぎ.

The dryer is in the ceiling

Look up in the bathroom. The white panel set into the ceiling above the tub is not always just an extractor fan.

浴室乾燥機 (yokushitsu kansōki — the heater, fan and clothes dryer built into the bathroom ceiling) is ordinary equipment in Tokyo apartments. Panasonic's catalogue for one ceiling model lists what the single unit does: 予備暖房 (yobi danbō — warming the room before you get in), 衣類乾燥 (irui kansō — drying clothes), 換気 (kanki — ventilation), 涼風 (ryōfū — cool air), and round-the-clock ventilation.

The reason guests never find it is that the switch is not in the bathroom. It is a small wired panel on the wall outside, in the changing space, at light-switch height beside the mirror. If the only switch out there says 換気扇 (kankisen — extractor fan), you have a fan. If the panel has 乾燥 and 暖房 on it, you have a dryer, and you have been hanging shirts on a balcony for six weeks for no reason.

The rail above the tub is the other half. TOTO calls it a ランドリーパイプ (randorī paipu — laundry pipe) and sells it separately, which is worth knowing, because the brackets can be up there with no pipe in them. TOTO's manual asks you to hang the thick things, jeans and sweatshirts, nearest the warm-air outlet, and to drain the tub or put the lid on before you start. Leave the bath full and the dryer spends its hours pulling water off the bath instead of off your clothes.

Check the pipe before you plan the evening. Panasonic's support page puts a telescoping bar at 3 kg of laundry and a fixed one at 10 kg. Both Hitachi and Panasonic size their washers on roughly 1.5 kg of laundry per person per day, so a 5 kilo machine holds about three days of one person. Three days does not fit on a 3 kilo bar. A full wash is two runs, and the second one starts after midnight.

It is not free either. Panasonic's catalogue for that ceiling model puts drying at 1,250 watts and works two examples at 20°C and 60 percent humidity, laundry already spun: 2.0 kg dry in 2 hours 5 minutes, 3.0 kg in 2 hours 20 minutes. So 1,250 watts for 2 hours 5 minutes is 2.6 kilowatt-hours. At ¥31 per kilowatt-hour, the figure the Japanese appliance industry uses when it prints running costs, that is about ¥81 for the small load and about ¥90 for the larger one. Tokyo Gas lands in the same place from its own tariff: roughly ¥36 an hour for an electric unit, and about four hours for a 5 kilo load. Four loads a week for a month puts something near ¥1,400 on top of the usual bill.

The same catalogue prices the weather in. A load at 5°C and 60 percent humidity takes 40 to 60 percent longer. A load at 25°C and 80 percent humidity takes 10 to 30 percent longer. TOTO's manual, measuring a 5 kilo load, gets 3 hours 15 minutes at 25°C and 4 hours 50 minutes at 5°C, which points the same way from a different maker. The machine you want most in June is also the one that costs most in June.

If the apartment bills a flat monthly utility charge rather than a metered one, all of this changes shape, and how that fee gets set is worth reading before you decide how freely to use the ceiling.

June breaks the routine

梅雨 (tsuyu — the rainy season) runs to a schedule the Japan Meteorological Agency publishes. Its thirty-year normals open the Tokyo region's rainy season around 7 June and close it around 19 July.

June is not Tokyo's wettest month, which is the part that catches people out. The same normals give Tokyo 167.8 mm of rain in June and 224.9 mm in September. June's problem is not volume. It is 11.6 days with a millimetre of rain or more, average humidity of 75 percent, 7.6 days with no sunshine at all, and 20.5 days out of thirty under heavy cloud. September drops more water and then stops. June does not stop.

The balcony goes out of service, and not because it rains all day. Because it might.

Bring the load inside and you meet the second problem. Lion's research group explains where the smell comes from: bacteria breaking down the small amount of body oil and protein still on the fabric, plus that same residue oxidising in the air. Kao tested towels that smelled and found Moraxella bacteria on them at high frequency. Damp fabric releases more of it, so anything slow to dry smells worse.

Put that next to the cold tap and you can see how it connects. Cold water leaves more oil on the collar. Slow indoor drying gives the bacteria the hours they need. The smell is not the room. It is last week's shirt.

The manufacturers know it too. Hitachi builds a 部屋干し (heyaboshi — indoor drying) course into the washer that runs 64 minutes against the standard course's 43, spending the extra twenty minutes getting more water out before you hang anything at all.

This is the month the ceiling earns its money, and also the month it costs most. Ten to thirty percent longer turns two hours into about two and a half, or roughly ¥105 instead of ¥81. Two runs to clear one wash is five hours and around ¥210. That is a whole Sunday evening, and it is the point where people put their coats on.

The coin laundry down the street

The dryers there run on gas, and that is the whole difference. Japan's coin laundry association measured the drum centre at about 100°C during drying and the exhaust at about 70°C. Baluko publishes 70°C on its standard setting, 30 to 40 minutes for a load of clothes and 50 minutes for a duvet. Nothing in your apartment goes near that.

The prices are posted by the minute. WASH House charges ¥100 for 8 to 10 minutes on its 14 kilo dryer, ¥100 for 6 to 8 minutes on the 25 kilo one, and ¥300 for a 7 kilo wash. A full load washed and dried comes to somewhere around ¥600 to ¥700 and a little over an hour, all of it dry when you walk out.

Set that against five hours and ¥210 on the bathroom pipe and the answer stops being obvious. The coin laundry is for the week you fell behind, for the duvet and the blankets the pipe cannot hold, and for anything that has to be dry by morning. The apartment handles the rest of the year.

Find the panel before your first load

All of this belongs in the first week rather than the sixth:

• Look up in the bathroom, then look at the wall outside it. The dryer's control panel lives in the changing space, at light-switch height.
• Find the pipe over the tub and see whether it telescopes. If it does, plan on 3 kg a run, which is roughly half a wash.
• Look behind the washer for a coiled hose with a filter head. That is the bath-water pump. No hose means tap water only.
• Learn three words: 洗い, すすぎ, 脱水. Everything else on the panel is a version of them.
• Ask the operator (the company that runs the furnished apartment) whether the electricity is metered or a flat monthly charge, before you run a 1,250-watt dryer four nights a week.
• Keep the washing inside the rail. UR, which manages a large share of Japan's public rental housing, asks residents not to hang laundry so it sticks out past the handrail, and bans futons on the rail in its high-rise buildings. Your building will have its own version of that in writing.

I would do the first one before unpacking a bag.

Sunday night, and the bathroom is warm

By the second month the loop has a shape. You start the wash while dinner cooks. The pump takes the bath water for 洗い and the tap takes over for すすぎ. Half the load goes on the pipe over the tub and half goes on the balcony, because Monday looks dry.

At eleven you go in to brush your teeth. The room is warm, the shirts on the pipe are stiff and dry, and the whole place smells of nothing at all. You take them down. The bathroom cools in about a minute.

The dryer was there on the first day, two metres above the tub, behind a switch on the wrong side of the door. Nobody points at it, because everyone who lives here already knows. Look up.