Since a friend of "NA" asked yesterday, it's a good opportunity to say a couple of things about washing machines in Japan. First, yes, as a rule washing machines here don't have a water-heating mechanism and consequently wash with cold water. Why? I haven't found any official answer but I've heard that it has to do with the Japanese doing laundry every day and, thus, doing it with cold water to save power and with the washing machine being able to get hooked on the bath and therefore recycle the bathtub hot water, obviously for the first washing cycles; remember that in Japan, bath or "ofuro" (お風呂) is a hot tub where you soak after having showered and washed yourself very thoroughly, hence my usual wisecrack about the Japanese being the only people who wash themselves before taking a bath. The cold water thing is for the standard issue Japanese washing machines, those with the horizontal drum and the opening on the top but the last years you can also see some models with a vertical drum and the opening on the front, and those sometimes have a water-heating function.
About my reader's second question, about dishwashers and if they also use cold water, I don't know because I've never seen a dishwasher in Japan either in a home or in an electric appliance store -it's characteristic, I think that at the website of Yodobashi Camera, one of Japan's biggest electric appliances and electronics chains, if you search for dishwashers you get five results whereas if you search for washing machines, you get 112. (I've seen them in restaurants, though, which means some people use them.) And here I can only speculate but between the many and very diverse sizes and shapes of Japanese tableware, the many materials that can't be washed with detergent like bamboo, lacquerware, wood and good ceramics, the fact that because Japanese cuisine doesn't use much oil and fats tableware gets clean very quickly and often just with cold water (i.e. with no detergent at all) and the space limitations, I think that a dishwasher is the last thing the majority of Japanese households would get.
Like I said to our friend yesterday, the matter is complex. As often happens in Japan!
(For a bigger version of this picture both in color and black and white, check my "Japan Arekore" set on Flickr)
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