Our Apartment

Our apartment is by no means large. Quite small, actually. But the Japanese have a talent for space conservation. There are gadgets and gizmos packed into every square inch of this apartment. I thought I'd walk you through some of the more interesting aspects.

This is just to show you how unbelievably obsessed with details the Japanese are. These are knobs on our closet doors. They push in when you are not using them! To use the knobs, you push them in again, and they pop back out. I guess having protruding knobs is unsightly. :)

We have a shoe closet! And you can't see it well, but the hooks in the closet also fold in when they are not in use.

One of the closets held a surprise for us: a washing/drying machine! Now we'll just have to figure out how to use it. We realized that one of our big problems is that we can't read the text on any of these fancy gizmos.

This is interesting. We could not figure out for the lives of us what this did. It's located in our 'kitchen.' I thought it was the heat, but alas, couldn't get the room to heat up. (Anyway, can you imagine having the heat set at 43 degrees Celsius?!) Finally after fiddling with enough buttons, we heard the water filling up in the bathtub! That's right! You can cook dinner and push a button to fill up your bathtub, so your water will be ready when you want to bathe. How fun. :)