Translating as “bathroom dryer", the yokushitsu kansouki is an ingenious piece of kit that straddles the boundary between appliance and room. It consists of a heat pump embedded into a bathroom ceiling that blows out warm, dehumidified air onto clothes hung below. Heating the room to up to 35°C to 40°C, this room-sized clothes dryer can make short work of a load of washing (hung on a rail straddling the room) in about three hours.
It’s the distinctive design of Japanese bathrooms that makes them effective. With toilets usually located in a separate cubicle, these spaces are extremely compact, often with room for a freestanding shower and a deep-but-short bathtub — meant for post-shower soaking rather than washing in — and precious little else. Equipped with plastic-lined walls and a tight-fitting door, these bathrooms can thus function as a sort of cabinet, small enough to be heated efficiently.
The effectiveness of the method is a source of frequent amazement on TikTok, and it’s fairly environmentally friendly, as the energy demands of a yokushitsu kansouki are modest compared with a tumble dryer. It also eliminates reduces the damage that method exacts on clothes through high temperatures and heavy mechanical agitation. With the dryer function on a timer, it’s easy to hang your laundry in the morning and come home to find them toasty-dry, unwrinkled and ready to wear.
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Not every home is equipped with this bathroom amenity, and those that do don’t use the drying function constantly — plain old line-drying is still the Japanese method of choice, used 70% of the time. (Tumble dryers are usually only found at laundromats or in luxury homes, though combination washer-dryer machines are available.) Not only does hanging your laundry outdoors reflect a widespread — and accurate — belief that direct sunlight kills germs, it avoids the damage to clothes, microfibre pollution and massive energy consumption associated with machine drying, the latter especially important in a country where electricity costs are much higher.
Even in gadget-loving modern Japan, thrifty and low-tech air-drying is deeply ingrained. The laundry pole merchant, hawking bamboo poles door-to-door by hand cart or truck, was long a common sight, and their drying sticks were so familiar that “laundry pole” was a nickname given to the famous extra-long blade used by a 16th-century swordsman still celebrated in popular culture. These poles — now usually metal — remain a boon for urban dwellers in cramped living conditions, because you can stick them out of a window without having a balcony (aided by laundry-focused weather maps that forecast local drying conditions around the country).
When it’s too cold or damp to get the job done outside, bathroom dryers really come into their own. One wonders why the rest of the world hasn’t caught on to the virtues of the concept. After all, another Japanese bathroom innovation — the electronic toilet attachments popularised by the Toto Washlet — now enjoys cult status among high-end homeowners in the US. But there are some significant barriers to wider adoption. In Japan, the dryer units are integrated with the bathroom’s ventilation system, complicating installation options. And you need a very small space to make the system economical to run. Given that Americans’ love of dryers is matched by a fondness for roomy full bathrooms, those aren’t easy hurdles to clear.
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Jongwan Kim, a Korean-born software engineer who moved to New York in 2015 after 12 years in Japan, has lived in two clothes-washing cultures and sees in them fundamentally distinct worldviews.
“This might be reaching a little too far,” he tells Bloomberg CityLab, “but I think this discrepancy speaks to the cultural differences between Japan and the US. In Japan, a lot of the products are focused on making as little waste or harm as possible to the environment, whereas American products tend to fixate on efficiency.”
If you want to approximate Japanese-style laundry ways, you can buy an appliance that is in fact taking off in the US — the freestanding laundry drying cabinet. The market for these machines is expected to reach over US$195 million annually by 2026, according to data supplied by ReAnIn. Like the heated drying racks that became popular in the UK when energy prices spiked, these don’t offer the space-saving ingenuity of the built-in bathroom dryer, but they’re better for your clothes (and the planet) than the power-sucking, lint-spewing mechanical alternatives, and could fit well in US homes.
What’s more, if they became part of the standard roster of household appliances, both Americans and Europeans might be ready for the next potential shake-up to emerge from Japan’s laundry culture — Japanese washing machines usually wash only with cold water.
