Whitegoods are dull. Nobody takes them seriously. Once dominant Japanese manufacturers have completely surrendered these menial commodities to Korean and Chinese firms, they keep on building basically the same old box year after year, although they are making it cheaper and cheaper. In this area at least, their creative mind goes only skin deep. Milliards of colors and printed patterns. Gothic, art nouveau, classic Tang dynasty style, and so on.

An extravaganza like a Dayglo polka-dotted refrigerator in pre-Islamic Jahiliyya style, with a built-in anti-burglar system... but, had Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison peeped into its innards, they would have understood all functions immediately.

A few years ago, a strange wind started blowing through the Japanese whitegoods market. Incredible curiosities, things like a US$1,000 rice cooker, or US$2,000 washing machine. Not a Korean/Chinese cosmetic surgery whitegood, but really innovative and terribly expensive gadgets.

Take the electric oven. This staple of kitchens all over the world is classified even a step lower than the regular whitegood. Nobody notices what manufacturer built it. Anyway it's built-in, usually. You don't have a chance to buy it at an appliance market.


In the Japanese kitchen, amazingly, an oven is not considered a standard necessity. Even in the most expensive brand new apartments, you can't find an oven. Oh sure, a microwave is a completely different matter. Everybody in Japan loves Chin!, I mean, microwave oven. This nickname derives, of course, from the sound it makes when its timer is up.

Therefore, when a herd of consumers started to purchase an electric oven, market watchers and economists just scratched their heads and couldn't find the right word to say. Soon, it turned out that the oven in topic was not the dull regular junk, but a super-expensive super-heated steam furnace. Sure, it was a quantum leap from the 19th-century nichrome-wire dinosaur.

Sharp AX-1000. A dull-looking oven, but its innards are totally next-worldish.

Again, the champion innovator Sharp started this phenomenon in 2004: The marketing craze dubbed as Oven that grills with water. Presently, the third generation of this funny oven has been released. Superheated Steam Oven AX-1000 Series.

Even kindergarten kids know that water temperature never goes up over 100 degrees Centigrade at sea level. Water vapour plays a different game. It can be heated up indefinitely. Well, actually, it cracks into hydrogen and oxygen, then into plasma at a certain temperature/pressure point. But Sharp did not build a plasma oven anyway. Not that hot yet.

The oven heats up the vapour to a very hot temperature, around the 300 to 330 Celsius range, and blows it into the foodstuff with high pressure.

Mechanism of vapour furnace. (From Sharp's site)

330 degress Celsius is really a high temperature. The boiling point of edible oil is a mere 200-odd degrees C. High temperature means short cooking time. There, Sharp loudly sings the gospel of almighty healthy cooking according to superheated heaven. Your Mobile Ojisan is a suspicious type, a pinch of salt is always ready by his side. But, obviously, hundreds of thousands of Japanese consumers bought its gospel literally (or partially, at least). The price tag hangs at around 140,000 yen (US$1,217), a sort of evolutionary price.

Sharp has singlehandedly created a completely new and exciting market in the dull whitegoods desert. Mobile Ojisan, grudgingly, pays homage to Sharp.

By the way, the AX-1000 is equipped with a Chin! functon as well. If you're too scared of hyper-heated steam blast, simply retreat back to microwave mode. After a few minutes, you can hear the familiar, good ol'e sound, Chiiiin!.

 

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