I’ve got a few more to bitch about. Every place I’ve lived while in Japan has had shitty light-switch placement. At first I thought my problems were just due to my cultural expectations, but my wife, who is Japanese, also complained about a few things. The worst offender is my present apartment. The front door opens toward you, handle on the right. The door has a closing swing arm, and so your left hand will be holding the door open while you enter. Where would the logical place for the switches be? On the left, so your free right hand can swipe along the wall and find a switch. That’s the logical placement regardless of whether you’re right or left handed because of the way the door opens (which is a logical arrangement) and it’s closer to the hall, so you could hit the switches from there after you’ve taken off your shoes and stepped up into the hallway. Where are the switches? On the right side.
You can’t hold the door open with the same hand, you have to turn around, switch hands, and basically be facing outward again. You have to actually go into the entryway—which in Japan is always cluttered with shoes—to get to the switch. To make it worse, there is a framing around the doorways that sticks out one or two centimeters. The switches are set right along that framing so that groping for them the way you normally would doesn’t work; you have to curl your fingers and run them along the jamb. It’s the most awkward placement imaginable.
The placement of the front hall switch is terrible too. No one can find it in the dark, which is presumably when it would be most needed. I’ve been living here for over three years and I still have to brush my hands up and down the wall as I walk toward the entry to find it in the dark; even then I often miss it and have to backtrack when I know I’ve gone too far. It’s set in the middle of the hall, not directly in front of the stairs, and not within easy reach of the entry area. To switch off the hall light when you go upstairs, you have to turn off the light and take two steps in the dark. Or, you have to go to the stairs first and turn that light on, then go back and turn the hall light off. I almost never use it. It’s more efficient to leave the living room light on, go to the stair light, then back to the living room to turn that light off. It’s practically the same amount of movement and requires less backtracking.
There are two switches there. One is also linked to the entry light so that at least you don’t have to lean across the entry to use the switch there to turn off the entry light (which shows that someone put at least some rudimentary thought into things) and the other goes to the hall light. That’s the only switch for the hall light. So, to light the hall, you have to walk halfway down the hall—in the dark :smack:
Outlets are another gripe about the place. There aren’t enough of them, and they’re put in odd places. The living room has two outlets, both on one side of the room, which necessitates stringing extension cords to serve all areas of the room. There’s also one outlet which is in probably the most unusable spot in the entire area, right in the space you have to walk to get to the kitchen from the living room. If you put anything there, you will be blocking access to the kitchen.
The kitchen has one good placement, an outlet in the wall convenient to the counter. The only other outlet is on the far end of the kitchen away from any area you’d put another appliance. It also forces the placement of the refrigerator in that corner. One outlet that serves two plugs for a kitchen, and it’s placed at chest height in the wall farthest from the stove. We’ve got extension cords running from the kitchen/living outlet (which we often trip over because they’re right in the walkway and there’s no way to effectively keep them out of the way without making possibly-permanent modifications) and the high wall outlet in the corner of the kitchen to serve the modest complement of appliances: fridge, microwave/convection oven, toaster oven, coffee maker. It’s a fire inspector’s nightmare.
I’ve got just one outlet in the bedroom, on the outside wall. Fine, except that if I want to use a fan, I have to use an extension cord, or have the fan blowing right on my head. The room next to it has outlets on both outside walls, nothing in the middle.
Oh, and the light switch for that room can only be logically used from the sliding door that connects to the bedroom, not from the short hall at the top of the stairs. They might just as well not put the second door there since you can basically never use it after dark, unless you like taking four blind steps into the hall to turn on the stair lights after you’ve turned off the lights in that room, or don’t mind going to the hall, turning on the light there, backtracking to turn off the room light, and then going back yet again to go down the stairs.
Such a simple thing: light switch and outlet placement, yet it causes so much daily aggravation. Even after living here all this time it still causes me problems. I’d like to beat the guy who placed the switches and outlets: one stroke of a Singapore-style cane for every time I’ve tripped over a cord, tripped or jammed my toes because I’ve had to walk in the dark, and bonus whacks for every extension cord we’ve been forced to use by his shitty design. I’d probably have to stretch the beating out over a couple of months to avoid killing him.
There are other design flaws too, like an insufficient overhang so that the first story windows have to be closed whenever there’s rain, there was no towel rack before I put one up, two of the folding-sliding closet doors can’t be used at the same time, the kitchen has about enough counter space for a single cutting board and bowl even though there’s plenty of room for other counters on the other wall, the cabinets are so high that even I need a step-stool to reach anything higher than the second shelf (my wife is about chin-high to me and she can barely reach the first shelf), and the flow-through of the place is not the best.
The scary thing is that this was one of the better places I’ve seen as to living design. Japanese apartments and houses have generally poor construction (little insulation, cheap materials, everything feels plasticky and flimsy) but you’d think that design-wise they’d be okay. Nope. Crap. Even in a high-rise apartment my wife’s father has in Tokyo—a half-million dollar piece of property—the floor looks like the shitty plastic faux-wood trim you’d see in a low-end car, and while the layout is a bit better than my apartment, I can see that I’d have some gripes if I had to live there. All the attention to design seems to go into the car industry, with a little left over for electronics. Occasionally. (I seem to recall complaining about my lousy remote control earlier :mad: )
