Go fly a kite

I thought for a moment that M was going to lift off.

We had a big windy day on Saturday, and decided to break out the 200 Yen Dragonball kite that m had picked out at the convenience store a while back. After the kite took a few dives into the bushes, we fixed the rips with some tape, and the kite suddenly went professional, soaring high and making great swoops back and forth across the sky. I thought it was a bit strong, but m had her hand on the throttle and took to it like a natural.

The rest of the day was spent running around the farmers' markets on the fresh vegetable hunt, preparing all the old futons, kitchen stuff, and lots of crap that has to be thrown out before the houses get torn down. Then, to our great surprise, the daughter of the old man who owns the house alongside the driveway showed up, introduced herself, and was very friendly. We told her that we'd sent her father a letter, since he was in the hospital, because we wanted permission to let construction vehicles cross over about two feet of her concrete driveway so that they could enter our place. "My father said no," she said, but she was smiling. "He's a very stubborn man who grew up in his little house his whole life, and he won't give in."

So I guess it's time to talk about the one great negative about our moving down to Akiya.

The driveway.

But I'm tired, and it takes a lot out of me to even think of this. It has, after all, been a three-year-long battle.

So maybe next time.

Sh*t (Number Two)

I'm not lying. In the hours between my last post and a visit to the Inax showroom yesterday--a matter of less than a week--the manufacturer once again reached new frontiers in toileting. My awe as reported in the last post about Inax toilet engineers lowering the water usage from an average flush of 13 liters (3 gallons and a bit) to 6 (a gallon and a half) is no longer valid. The Eco 6 has now become the Eco 5 (another liter of water usage bites the bullet).

I know this because yesterday M and I spent the better part of a day with the contractor's rep, Y-san, and the architect, T-san, wandering about the Inax showroom with one of their sales women showing us the company take on kitchens, toilets, tiles and wash basins. As impressed as I was by dish washers that remove the grease with a grime-removing mist, and kitchen cabinets that not only hold your dishes but dry them with a toasty breeze, it's the toilet floor that rocks, straight from the display at the entry of stacked PET bottles showing how much water you save in two days with the Eco 5 toilet (above).

The design of the newest bowls are as sleek as the new Tesla, but the biggest kick is the newest thing: toilet seats that rise as you approach and lower themselves when you walk away. I couldn't tear myself away from strolling down the row of toilets to a synchronized salute of seats rearing their lids at my approach. Then I'd wait until they sensed no presence nearby and slowly closed before I'd trot by again. Fun stuff, and just the thing when you find yourself uninterested in the discussion about the space for cosmetics behind the washroom sink mirror.

(By the way, that five liters of water use by the Satis Eco 5 includes two swirling whirlpools, one to wash away the waste, another to wash away whatever waste was left by the water washing away the first waste. Or something like that: as you can imagine, my attention was still on the bowing toilet seats.)

Then it was off to the Toto showroom down the street to check out their half-unit baths. These are bathrooms (and I mean bathrooms in the Japanese sense: a room for a bath) that are one solid piece of molded material that includes the tub, the floor, and washing aparatus. It ends around the top of the tub, so that you can add any kind of wall and ceiling you want. These are dying out these days, since most people are buying whole units which is a complete cocoon from top to bottom, and easier to clean.

We picked the half unit because we want to do the walls and ceiling in hinoki, or Japanese cypress, which is one of the greatest smelling woods around. It's the wood that the best of the old Japanese wooden baths were made of and, in fact, there was still an oval hinoki bathtub in the Akiya house when I first started renting there. You had to keep water in it to keep it from drying out, but it was an old one and when the slats of the carefully fitted tub walls started splitting there was nothing else to do but tear it up while tearing up.


We walked past the Toto toilets while we were there, and and it was hard not to love the display case of little ceramic toilets on the shelf overlooking the madness of west Shinjuku. I thought they were ashtrays, but they're actually used to set on tile samples to give customers a feel for the color scheme.

Toto did compete on the cool scale, being on the 27th floor next to one of Japan's architectural wonders, but all said and done, I'm an Inax man. You can't beat a line up of toilets that ooze as much personality as the Pixar lamp.