Back when I lived in America, I never realized how incredibly wealthy my home country is, and how incredibly high the standard of living is. There were so many things I took for granted as basic, necessary tools that everyone has – whereas here, those same things are considered luxuries.
I could name a lot of things, with the most basic being that in the US, you can get drinking water out of a tap pretty much no matter where you go. Here, there are a lot of places that use well water that needs to be boiled before drinking, even in the suburban area I live in.
Something else that I took for granted, and the topic of today’s post, are dishwashers.
Granted, a dishwasher is one of the less likely appliances to be in a US household (about 65%, which is pretty low compared to the 95% held by microwaves), but that’s still over twice as much as Japanese households. Up until last week, my family didn’t own a dishwasher, either. In Japan, dishwashers are considered more like luxury goods; most people simply wash dishes by hand.
There are a few reasons for this (and I’m totally just shooting this off the top of my head based on personal observation, so take it with a grain of salt). First, Japanese residences (whether house, townhouse, or apartment) are pretty small, and dishwashers take up a lot of space. Back in the US, my mom always called our kitchen “small,” but it was easily two to three times bigger than my kitchen here in Japan.
Second, dishwashers are pretty expensive. Most houses won’t come with a built-in dishwasher (unless you decide to put one in while building a house from scratch, a practice that is surprisingly common in Japan), so if you have one, it’s probably going to be a portable version that sits next to your sink. The cheapest of these dishwashers start around 26,000¥ (roughly US$240), which seems to be about the same cost in America (judging by the US Amazon website). However, these only fit a dozen or so dishes; if you have a bigger family (which is why most people would want a dishwasher in the first place), you’ll need a bigger dishwasher – most of which fall in the 60,000-80,000 yen range (US$545-727). That’s not counting the cost of installation, which will be another 12,000¥/US$120 minimum.
Basically, you’ve got to be willing to spend a pretty penny to get a dishwasher, and since most Japanese households are pretty small (4-5 people), my guess is that most people simply don’t think the price (or the amount of space it takes up) is worth it. Add to that, a lot of commonly used dishes shouldn’t be put into a dishwasher. I’m thinking specifically of the bowls used for miso soup (traditionally served with every meal), which are usually made of wood. Of course, there are dishwasher-safe soup bowls made of plastic, they’re just typically not as nice/fancy as the wooden ones.
Anyway, even though dishwashers were the norm in the U.S., now that I have one here in Japan after going without for so long, I’m feeling pretty spoiled.
