Okinawa is like living in central Florida, only more humid.
Humidity is common to most of Japan and so the Japanese have all sorts of neat devices for reducing the amount of moisture that gets trapped in your clothes, your bedding, your closets, and so on.
Here are some of the products we've found so far:
This is the ol' zo-san (Mr. Elephant), put it in your closet, behind a curtain, pretty much anywhere and it will start collecting the moisture in the air.
The top part looks like it's filled with little Styrofoam balls (don't take the paper covering off by the way) and the bottom (seemingly by magic) fills with water:
The picture above this one is of our closet and you'll notice there's some kind of wooden palette next to zo-san:
You place your futon on this every morning so that air is able to circulate and it doesn't get too funky. Believe me, you have to get at least one of these or else you will be sleeping on a moldy, funky bed. We were here for, maybe, seven days and we found that there was, not a little, a lot of moisture under our futon. Soaking.What's crazy is this (February) is supposed to be one of the driest parts of the year in Okinawa. It did rain here for about two and a half weeks straight when we first arrived, so that may account for some of it. We'll come back to bedding in another post; but I did want to show several other moisture-reducing gadgets that we've picked up along the way including this one that you put under your futon:
This is basically a sheet of those desiccant packets that you find on shoe boxes it has a small plastic patch on one side that changes from blue (dry) to pink (wet) telling you to do two things: 1) air-out your futon and 2) air-out the desiccant sheet. Okinawa gets plenty of sunshine, so don't worry.You can hang this bad boy in your closet:
and you can put these in your suits:
1 comment:
I love these cleaning and daily life posts. So fascinating!
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