• ⇤
• ⇽
• ≡
• ⇾
• ⇥

Japanese electrics

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Everyone's familiar with Japanese electronics. Today I learned about the electric power system here.

I bought a timed power adapter just before we left for Shanghai. One of those things where you can set 'on' and 'off' times for whatever you plug into the adapter. In this case, I wanted to set the lights on the fish tank to come on in the morning and switch off at night so the plants could continue to thrive while we were gone.

Only, it didn't work. The morning we were due to leave, I noticed that the thing had run very slowly and was in still chugging along at 03:00 rather than 08:00.

When we got back from Shanghai, it was obvious that the lights had been on for far longer than I'd intended: there was algae everywhere!

Today I finally got 'round to returning the thing. But at the store the fellow who'd sold me the thing showed me what the problem was. Right on the package there was a little map showing Japan in two colors. The north-eastern half of the country was in blue, while the western half was in yellow. The blue half was labeled "50Hz" and the yellow was labeled "60Hz".

My friend explained that the adapter, with the "National" brand, was made by Panasonic—a company based in Osaka. 60Hz territory. In order for the adapter to work here in the blue 50Hz half of the country, I had to set a small switch on the underside of the adapter.

Amazingly, Japan seems to have two separate power delivery systems! According to Wikipedia it's because different technology was imported to Osaka and Tokyo, and the influence stemming from both installation spread to about half the country.