Our refrigerator

I'm afraid this is a boring post again today. I cleaned my refrigerator. Now why in the world would anyone write a whole blog post about that? And take pictures?!

This is my refrigerator. I decided that it needed a scrub before the end of the year (Japanese do all their spring cleaning at the end of December...) This refrigerator has served us well for nearly 20 years. When we bought our house and moved in, our American friends who were returning to Japan, left us all their furniture including their refrigerator.

Our refrigerator is very basic. Japanese kitchens do not have a water supply that will feed into a refrigerator (for an automatic ice cube maker or water dispenser). The Japanese housewife tends to go shopping daily and so a huge double width refrigerator with a giant freezer isn't really necessary. (And it wouldn't fit in the tiny Japanese kitchen!)

There is a vegetable compartment on the bottom, refrigeration in the middle, and freezer on the top. (Oops. I didn't really clean out the freezer... Just moved things around a bit there.) I have two ice cube trays that I fill by hand. I have heard that recent Japanese refrigerators have a tank that you can fill with water and THAT will supply water for an "automatic" ice maker, but we are not that technologically advanced yet.


Our refrigerator doesn't beep when the door is left open, nor have eco mode etc. If I really wanted to be ecologically minded I could buy a refrigerator curtain that hangs inside the refrigerator and keeps the cold air inside. That seems like it would be a bother to paw through to get to your food but I hear that it is a good way to save electricity... (Picture from the Internet.)

Tetsu noticed this morning that our refrigerator was shining. Gives you an idea of how long it had been since I last cleaned it!