I started washing dishes ‘the Japanese way’ when I was 22 years old as a homestay visitor in Morioka in 1984-1985. I learned from my homestay hosts, the Moritas, that one need not use hot water, but lots of cold water is used. Instead of using a cloth inside a sink full of warm, soapy water, as I had grown up doing in a Norwegian-American nurse’s family, I now converted to using a sponge and running cold water over each dish for washing and rinsing.
This difference in method seems to reflect different beliefs about soap, detergent, and chemicals in general. In my American upbringing, we had a washing sink and a rinsing sink, and food scraps built up at the bottom of the former, while the latter was crystal clear, but nearly scalding, so as to kill as many germs as possible. Taking rinsed dishes out of the rinsing sink sometimes involved grabbing them quickly and setting them up on the rack next to the sink, sometimes still donning a small puff of suds until they dissipated during the drying process.
Of course, even in America we did not consider it a good job to leave suds on the dish for the next person to eat, but it was not so flagrant a crime. In Japan it is flagrant. Furthermore, even having a rinsing sink of still water is problematic, because the last water the dish touches before being set on the rack contains some residual detergent. The Japanese alternative is always to use running water, although it need not be hot.
Thus in my American home we were much more concerned about ridding ourselves of biological contamination, while in my Japanese home (and this is as true in my Japanese wife’s kitchen as it was in the Morita kitchen) it is chemical contamination one is to avoid. I should perhaps not have been surprised to discover, then, that Japan has a strong tradition of organic farming. In fact, places like Asian Rural Institute, a Japanese farming NGO where agricultural leaders from the developing world come for training (http://www.ari-edu.org/english/index.html), focus their development assistance efforts not so much on cleanliness or even productivity, but on farming naturally.
Certainly this is not to say that Japanese culture does not have strong traditions of hygiene. It does. But chemical contamination is more deeply distrusted, relative to my American experience. Apple peelings are shaved before serving, and this is typically justified by the possibility of chemicals used in their production. Vegetables are generally washed, but potato skins have never caught on, for the same reason. Recently dentists are recommending Listerine, but gargling with old tea (degarashi) is still a preferred method, and health rooms at middle schools I worked for sent out notices that green tea has the ability to envelop viruses, rendering them powerless to infect the gurgler. Health supplements are quite popular these days, but urban legends readily indict them for one malady or another. Meanwhile, wearing masks prevents colds. Japanese homeowners cannot be found walking around their yard with ‘round-up’ and lawn manicure (with gasoline-powered mowers, fertilizers, ammonia, and weed killers) has simply never become a national pastime, as it has in the US.
So while Japan is fully on board with most aspects of modernity, Japanese culture has never embraced chemo-modernity. Genetically modified foods are scorned and the spraying process makes imported rice suspect in the eye of the consumer.
Yet all this attention to preserving natural environments and consumption habits falls by the wayside in its significance when the government allows incinerators to distribute dioxin and power companies to litter radioactive particles. It seems profoundly ironic and tragic that all these careful daily efforts of the Japanese people are so utterly disregarded by those in power.
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