A Tour of a High-Tech Japanese House

As I have just returned from Japan I have decided to dedicate a couple of blog posts to my trip.  I will return to my usual author/book related themed posts in a couple of weeks.

This week’s post takes the form of a tour of a high-tech Japanese house.

Below is a cross-section of someone’s kitchen wall.  I have no idea what half of these do.

The picture below is of a Japanese bath.  What more could you possibly want from a bath, except taps, I asked myself as I tried to figure out how to fill it with water.

As I don’t have an engineering degree and only a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese Kanji, it took quite a while to work out out how to fill the bath with water of the desired temperature.

It took me an eternity to figure out how to drain the water at the end of my bath.  I assumed that as 出 means exit in Japanese that the button on the left of the control with the symbol 出 would do exactly that.  However, despite hitting the button numerous times while cursing loudly, nothing happened.  Eventually, after considerable trial and error, I discovered that to drain the bath one must press a manual plunger on the right of the tub. Later when I went to the living room I heard the house’s resident Japanese infant swearing in English.  This Ied me to discover that the button with the 出 was a telecom system.

Above is a Japanese lavatory.  It can initially be quite alarming when the seat opens automatically on entering the room.  Below is the controller for the lavatory.  It is not necessary to become familiar with the multitude of buttons, as it performs its one necessary function automatically.

I was so keen to show you my magic trick involving a tap that I purchased a WordPress premium package, in order to embed this video in the post, so I do hope you click on it.

I was very fatigued after trying to figure out the technological complexities of the Japanese house, so I went to the shop to buy an energy tonic.  The shop had tonics for just about everything (see below).