The Japanese technique to dry clothes in closed spaces in a more efficient and faster way

It doesn’t matter that we are in winter, with short, cold and wet days, or in the middle of summer heatthere is a household task that is always complicated: dry clothes. If you don’t have a good outdoor clothesline, a balcony or a dryer can become a real nuisance.

In winter they do not dry the sweaters. In summer, beach towels and swimsuits.

Or at least that’s how it is in homes in most of the planet, where to get by, solutions are usually used that either require too much space or increase the electricity bill: dryers, radiators, dehumidifiers…

In Tokyo they have another way to solve it.

Learning from Japan

There they have found a way to dry clothes in rainy seasons efficiently, quickly and without bad odors. In the Japanese capital, a city of climate humid subtropicalgenerous in rainfall and where there are also abundant small apartments —so many and so small that sometimes it is necessary to talk about “microhousing”— have developed a technique to keep their clothes clean and well ventilated all year round. And without the help of dryers.

The system is called “hanging rainbow”, and while it sounds a bit poetic it is actually a graphic description of how the clothes should be arranged.

The first step is to find a well-ventilated room in the home, through which the air circulates and, if possible, is warmed by the sun during part of the day. There we will install our clothesline, bar or rope, on which – and this is a key part of the technique – we will arrange the garments. in the shape of a rainbow.

As? Trying to make the clothes draw an inverted “U”, so that the longest garments would be at the ends and the shortest ones would be distributed in a staggered manner towards the interior. In it Apts real estate portalaimed at leasing in Tokyo, even include a graph on how clothes should be arranged for efficient and quick drying.

“When hanging clothes, leave enough room for air to circulate. Japan’s humidity can make the air seem heavier, which means clothes will take longer to dry —platform abounds—. A good trick is to hang the clothes in the shape of a rainbowhooking the longest ones at the ends and the shortest ones as you move inward. For towels, hang one side longer than the other for better air circulation.”

According to their calculations, the technique allows considerable time savings. If drying a load by arranging the clothes in a V shape can take four and a half hours, arranging it as an inverted U can reduce that time to just four hours.

It is not the only thing you should take into account. If you want a good drying and prevent your clothes from taking on a musty smell, Apts also advises not leaving them in the washing machine for longer than strictly necessary. And that means removing the clothes “immediately”, without waiting, once the washing cycle has concluded.

“Even leaving clothes in the machine for 10 minutes can cause odor,” he warns. Other tricks involve placing the clothes perpendicular to air circulation and in opposite direction at the entrance of the room or use hangers to avoid that, once distributed on the clothesline, the fabrics are close to each other. Ideally, they should be as far apart as possible. For smaller socks or underwear, you can use an octopus.

The goal: to make drying clothes in autumn and winter less of an ordeal…

…without having to dedicate space and money to a dryer.

A previous version of this article was published in November 2024.

Images | Leroy Tan (Unsplash) and Atul Vinayak (Unsplash)

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*An earlier version of this article was published in November 2023