Inanimate speaking (and some non-speaking) objects:

It is a little depressing when you get the feeling that every inanimate object is smarter than you. Or at least, that every object knows more Japanese. Lots of inanimate objects talk here. Our water heater says something when you turn it on, the elevator in Jim's lab building talks, the cash registers often talk, some public restroom talk: and all speak more Japanese than we do. -Sigh.-

I am thankful for our microwave that is actually a lot easier than US microwaves to operate. It just has a knob that you turn for the desired number of minutes and a switch that is either set to a picture of a hot drink or a snowflake. (Dummy me, the first few times I looked at it, I wondered if it actually cooled things, but it finally dawned on me that the snowflake meant “defrost”.)

We have a little washing machine on our porch and other than the top that says “Twin Air Dry” the rest of the directions and buttons are written with characters. Thankfully there is a booklet that the rental company gave us that says in English, “turn on faucet, load clothes and detergent, press this button and then this button.” After making the mistake of pressing another button just to see what it would do, I finally had the machine running and water was filling it and all systems were “go”. Awhile later the machine beeped so I figured it was finished. Now, the English on top of the machine “Twin Air Dry” led us to believe that this machine might somehow be a dryer as well. (Jim's reasoning was, “After all, even the toilet seats are heated.”) However, after staring at all the buttons I could not figure out how I could set it to dry clothes. Finally, Jim checked online (from work, our internet wasn't working at home) and found the model description. Naturally, it was all in Japanese, so he used Google to translate. What resulted was garbled silliness; something about air shooting in the machine and wringing out the clothes so they are ready to dry in the beautiful sunshine. So...it looks like our machine doesn't really dry clothes after all. At least I hope it doesn't since all our clothes are hanging on our balcony... :)

Talking vehicles:
There are trucks that go through our neighborhood on a regular basis, playing music reminiscent of an ice cream truck and making announcements in Japanese. We are slowly (with an emphasis on slowly) figuring out the functions these different vehicles. At first it sounded like some sort of propaganda a government would send out during wartime, but then we realized that one of these vehicles is the cardboard pickup (I assume for recycling). Another talking musical vehicle that sounded like a Mosque at the call to prayer was selling something (but it definitely wasn't ice cream so we didn't make a beeline for it). There is one that comes by every morning too early and has a woman's voice—that one I haven't figured out yet. One day maybe I'll finally understand...