The case for Japan’s amazing clothes-drying bathrooms

There’s a gulf between Europe and America, and it involves laundry. When it comes to drying clothes, the former relies largely on air-drying, laying their clothes on racks or hanging them on lines outdoors. Households in the US and Canada mostly tumble-dry their laundry in mechanical dryers. The chasm is pretty marked: Europe’s greatest dryer enthusiasts, the Danes, use machine drying for just 28% of their laundry, while an estimated 80% of American households tumble-dry weekly. 

It’s a gap that has persisted for decades, much to the puzzlement of international visitors. But in Japan, travelers from either side of the Atlantic are often surprised to discover a third way of drying clothes: Behold the yokushitsu kansouki.

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. 

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