to absent mops

[stormsewer]

You know in Spirited Away, how they clean the floors by pushing a rag back and forth across the floor with their hands? When I first saw that I thought it was an anachronism, but actually they still clean floors exactly like that around here. The have brooms, but the whole mop thing just doesn't seem to have caught on. Weird.

Comments

[doctor-wombat.livejournal.com]

I'm oddly intrigued by situations where people could do something in an easier fashion but choose not to. Does the rag-on-floor method somehow produce a cleaner floor?

[stormsewer]

Uhh... It does seem a little more scrubby, and it's certainly cheaper than a mop, which is a consideration when you rely on students to clean the school. But if you're "oddly intrigued by situations where people could do something in an easier fashion but choose not to," then you are intrigued by the Japanese, my friend. Very frequently, the process is more important than the result in Japanese culture. The result doesn't always matter as much as the fact that things were done the way things are supposed to be done. There's also this concept that everyone has to be trying and straining really hard and busting their butt all the time (they frequently use the verb "ganbaru"), so that co-workers and superiors will see that they are a hard worker (a "gokurosama"), which makes them tend to do things the hard way even when there's no rational reason (from an American point of view) to do so. And let me take this opportunity to complain about heating in Japan. Winter here is ostensibly not so bad- typical temperatures seem to be around 40 F. However, insulation and central heating are non-existent, and thus the interior of the buildings during the winter is only marginally higher. It's a pain. What gives?