Complaining About the Cold

How time flies. It seems like only yesterday I was posting complaining about the heat. Now winter has arrived and snow is here.

Although Gifu is a lot colder than Kyushu was, it’s no worse than a standard Michigan winter.

As with summer, what really makes the weather unbearable is the different customs of dealing with it.

For example, “Central Heating” never really caught on in Japan for whatever reason. In its place, there are a million small ways they deal with the cold: Electric blankets, hot pocket warmers, heated toilet seats, kotatsu (a table which is heated underneath), small kerosene space heaters, etc.

As Eion observed, “In the West we heat up the whole building. In Japan they just heat up the area around the person.”

Perhaps all this saves energy, and a nominal environmentalist like myself should be happy, but I just can’t help but think how much I miss central heating.

Clothes driers are an almost unheard of luxury in Japan, so I dry all my clothes out by hanging. Works great in the summer, but in the winter they just freeze instead of dry. This was why I told Brett once that one of the things I miss most about America is having dry clothes to put on in the morning. And, in an apartment without central heating, you would not believe how cold it is in the morning getting out of the shower and trying to find some dry clothes.

Because the weather here is slightly colder, the schools are heated a little better than in Kyushu. But during January and February last year it was still not unusual to wear my winter coat to the classroom, or to see my breath while teaching.

What really kills me is there is no hot water in the school. This isn’t so much of a problem for the Japanese because most of them don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom anyway.

That, by the way, is another one of my pet peeves about Japan, but I’ll try not to get too much off topic here. Shoko assures me that most women wash their hands, but I haven’t had the opportunity to observe the ladies toilet. I can vouch that almost none of the guys wash their hands, and the ones that do only do a quick rinse. In five years I’ve never once seen a Japanese person lather up properly.

I, on the other hand, am a bit anal about hand washing. And in a full day of sipping coffee all day long in the teacher’s lounge, I get a lot of use out of the toilet. The hallways and bathroom aren’t heated at all, so it is literally freezing cold, and in that weather I have to scrub my hands in freezing water. And then to top it off, there are never any towels so I dry my hands on my sweater. By the end of the day my hands are always chafed and purple.

Snow driving is also more difficult here than it is back home because of the narrow roads and the small light cars. And no snow plows in Japan. Also there’s a special “snow tire” that we need to switch to in December.

I know absolutely nothing about cars, so I’m not sure why the Japanese switch to snow tires, and we use the same tires all year round in Michigan. Aaron explained it to me once but I forgot.

I got my tires switched in December last year, but then never bothered to switch them back again. I figured we use the same tires all year round in Michigan anyway. Now a lot of my Japanese colleagues are expressing concern that I might have worn the treads out on my snow tires by driving them the whole year, but so far no major problems.

Link of the Day
Racist Comics Gain Popularity in Japan. Boy, this is just depressing.