Ever want to cure a stuffy nose, but nothing works? Try stuffing scallions up your nostrils. Your bedmate won't stop snoring? Tape a tennis ball to her back. Bathroom mirror always fogging up? Rub it with a potato.
These are some of the imaginative homespun solutions to daily problems trotted out in Lisa Katayama's "Urawaza." In the age of Googled answers, this treasury of folk wisdom contains nuggets that aren't on most search engines. If you need to junk sensitive documents but don't own a shredder, for instance, stuff them into a stocking, tie it up and run it through a washing machine cycle. Minutes later: illegible pulp.
"Urawaza" literally means "hidden technique," and initially referred to secret hacks in video games published in the 1980s. These days it also connotes secret tricks and tips that many Japanese obsess about — tens of thousands discuss them in forums on the Mixi social networking site, which has groups dedicated to iPod urawaza, wedding urawaza, cooking urawaza, Disney urawaza, and even Mixi urawaza. Tokyo-born Katayama, who now lives in California, links urawaza to the Japanese postwar struggle for survival, when hard-up housewives would devise innovative tricks like using water that had been used to cook spinach as a nutrient-rich facial moisturizer; today, thrift contests are still a recurring theme on Japanese variety shows. In a crowded, resource-poor archipelago like Japan, urawaza evolved out of the heightened sensitivity that Japanese have toward others and their environment.