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    Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan
    Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan
    Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan
    Ebook350 pages57 minutes

    Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan

    By Lisa Katayama and Joel Holland

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Japan has a way of thinking that is just . . . different. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Tokyo-born journalist Lisa Katayama's collection of urawaza (a Japanese word for secret lifestyle tricks and techniques). Want to turbocharge your sled? Spray the bottom with nonstick cooking spray. Can't find someone to water your plants while you're away? Place the plant on a water-soaked diaper, so it slowly absorbs water over time. The subject of popular TV shows and numerous books in Japan, these unusually clever solutions to everyday problems have never before been published in Englishuntil now! Urawaza collects more than 100 once-secret tricks, offering step-by-step directionsand explanations in an eye-catching package as unconventional as its contents.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChronicle Books Digital
    Release dateApr 29, 2014
    ISBN9781452141046
    Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan
    Author

    Lisa Katayama

    Lisa Katayama has written for Wired, Giant Robot, and Glamour, and is an editor at Planet magazine. She lives in San Francisco.

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    Reviews for Urawaza

    3.5/5

    30 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Useful tips for everyday life
      I like the format of you he book
    • 1/5
      pathetic solutions, put a chilli in the end of your shoe to prevent frostbitten toes.. you can imagine the mess and not to mention pain once it squashes up and rots. also pouring expensive Japanese liquor onto your face is a very expensive remedy for "feeling stuffy" .. and using lemon juice on your armpits for body odour? I'm sure if you get a backache on a plane, you can afford to see a back specialist for a massage instead of having to resort to wearing a mustard powder-laced towel
    • 4/5
      This book has a simple layout - problem, solution, and why it works. I'm sure a lot of these solutions work, but the few I've tried fell short. I tried removing a stain and freshing coffee. Those didn't work. Curing constipation with pressure points did seem to help a little though.This is a good reference book for some of the daily problems you want solutions to. In other words, if you don't want to deal with chemicals, food going bad, or the dangers of the outside world, and you don't mind looking silly, this is a book you should look in to.

    Book preview

    Urawaza - Lisa Katayama

    INTRODUCTION

    U.ra.wa.za \ ’oo rah wah zah (noun): 1. a secret trick; 2. an unmapped shortcut

    I was born in a small hospital less than five minutes from Roppongi, Tokyo’s bustling nightlife district. My parents weren’t rich, but they had the means to buy what they needed to raise two kids in a big city. The Japanese economy was booming. Growing up, my younger brother and I had fresh salmon from the fish guy, organic beef from the meat shop up the street, piping-hot sweet potatoes from the sweet-potato man’s truck, toy cars and Barbie dolls from the toy shop nearby, and pretty much everything else we needed from the general store on Roppongi Road. Being a child of Tokyo in the 1980s was not, by any means, a struggle for survival, and in the years following, the city’s obsession with consumer culture only grew bigger. But today’s urban landscape of neon signs, soaring skyscrapers, and the manga-reading, blinged-out-cell-phone-carrying, karaoke room–dwelling Tokyoites didn’t just sprout out of nowhere. Today’s Japan is a product of the generations before it, who literally built the country back up from the ashes of war on not much more than a solid work ethic and a penchant for innovation.

    THE HISTORY OF URAWAZA

    The concept of homespun tips and tricks in Japan predates World War II, but it was in the immediate postwar period that such innovation came in especially handy. By the design of the occupation government, directed by the United States, the new Japan was to be peace-loving, nonaggressive, and focused on economic growth. But the country was nearly starting from scratch. By the end of the war, many of Japan’s major cities had been destroyed, and the country’s resources had been exhausted. Basic provisions like food and cleaning supplies were hard to come by.

    All over the country, in many ways, people were trying to discover how to do more with less. Fictional characters such as Astro Boy used their superpowers to inspire progress toward a bright yet challenging future. Engineers and researchers in newly formed companies like Sony and Sanyo experimented with electronics, emphasizing efficiency and miniaturization. Japanese housewives also tried to figure out how to wring the most uses out of the limited supplies available, saving money in the process.

    Imagine a young woman in a suburb of Tokyo standing at her kitchen counter, pondering a single bundle of spinach. She bought it to feed the family for dinner, but she’s trying to figure out what else she can do with it. She boils the spinach, and the water turns green. Can this be turned into soup broth? She tastes it. It’s bitter. But why waste good water just because it’s green or tastes bad? So she washes her face with it. After all, that bar of soap has been making her skin scaly and dry—maybe the spinach has nutrients that would be good for the skin. A week of doing this and her face is smoother than it had been using facial cream, a luxury expense that can now be crossed off the shopping list. She has saved the family a bunch of money and extended the usefulness of the spinach water.

    Even today, Japanese families often live in relatively small quarters with little room for an overabundance of devices and supplies, even if they are able to afford them. And, unlike as in the cheap-and-quick service culture in the United States, manicures and professional dry-cleaning in Japan come at pretty hefty prices. These factors, combined with an enterprising spirit that spans generations, have yielded a treasure trove of useful tips and tricks that make everyday life just a little bit easier.

    In the consumer culture of today, it’s easy to not have to think up innovative uses for ordinary things. Aisles and aisles of cleaning supplies and convenience items have rendered creative economizing almost completely unnecessary. If you want to clean the kitchen tile, or the bathtub, or the windows, you can simply buy specialized products for each of those purposes. But urawaza have appeal beyond strict necessity. Nonchemical solutions to cleaning messes or stains, for example, avoid environmental and health consequences, and sometimes a simple home remedy is simply more effective than using a store-bought product for a common ailment. Plus, there’s something oddly satisfying and fun about being resourceful and discovering new adaptabilities to everyday challenges. There’s a certain Wow! factor to knowing that you have an organic, quirky cure for just about any ailment or household accident, that you can walk around in high heels in pouring rain without slipping, or that you know how to make your sled the fastest on the slope on a snowy day. Urawaza can save you money, earn you style points, impress your family, and amaze your

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