Winter Woes
“We don’t think it’s a good idea to give you more heaters for the classroom.”
Ietaka-Sensei said.
It wasn’t that Ietaka-Sensei or Japanese people in general liked to be cold –
the kotatsu, nabe parties, and sukiyaki feasts were good examples of how they
deal intelligently with the cold – but at least as far as education was concerned,
he valued the cold as a tool to ensure the students could deal with unfavorable
situations. Many educators in Japan saw the cold as a valuable tool for education,
so at a student council meeting, when the board of elected students requested more
heaters for the classrooms, the proposal was rejected in mere seconds.
“In fact, its better that you don’t have heat, it keeps your mind alert and ready to
learn,” emphasizing the last syllable for effect.
The bad news was that I shared the same school with the children, and though it seemed
logical that cold kept the mind alert, I was not interested in forced learning. To combat
the cold and the communist response to it, I wore every piece of clothing I owned indoors.
I wore layers upon layers of clothing, and bought lined snow pants from Fuji
(“Happy Shopping…..Fuuuuuji!”). Every day I wore a different beanie, and when
it was really cold, two scarves, a sweatshirt and a heavy coat, and this was just
what I wore indoors.
It snowed four times that winter, but only settled twice. My brain seemed like jelly
and I had constant, enduring headaches. I dreamt of Palm Springs and swim up bars and
midday drunkenness, and then the icy wind from China woke me up.
I didn’t do much during those months; getting home and getting warm was my version of
daily success. Playing basketball was out of the question, visiting friends was a slight
possibility, but only if they had a kotatsu, the Japanese plug-in table covered in blankets
to roast your feet and legs.
It’s well known among foreigners living in Japan that unless you live in Hokkaido or the
most northern regions of Honshu, you’re house will not be equipped with central heating or
insulation. Despite Japan’s leadership of world technology, home heating seems to have missed
the modern innovations radar.
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Instead most people heat one or perhaps two rooms of the home, and often do so with
smelly kerosene heaters. A friend once joked that it was the gas from the kerosene
heaters themselves that had killed Japanese brain cells, thus making the Japanese stupider
and incapable of changing the construction procedures for homes in Japan. Japan certainly
had the means to install central heating in homes, but for some reason the culture of
construction seemed totally averse to change. Houses without central heating or insulation
were the norm, and, as I was beginning to learn, the norm was not so easily changed in Japan.
Unfortunately, if there was one thing I hadn’t been raised to deal it with, it was bad
weather. Three years of university in Los Angeles had erased all memories of rain or wind
from my mind. There is was all sunshine, all the time.
Now it was all my clothes, all the time. I began sleeping in my bulky get up, mostly
because it was too cold for movement in general, and movement seemed required to take
off the clothes. The Sasaki’s brought me a plush felt blanket for my bed, which certainly
helped. I left the heater on all night, woke up feeling like all fluids had been drained
from my body, and cracked my way out of bed to the shower to re-hydrate.
When the sun finally did come out, as a pump-fake in February and then for real in
March, I basked in it, sitting outside the gym on the cold concrete, tanning my face
but still wrapped in four layers of clothing. In weeks it would be humid – the Shikoku weather
seemed that extreme sometimes – but now it was only warm in direct line to the sun.
And though the weather would change quickly, my habits would not. 21 years in California
had conditioned me for heat, two years in Mima was conditioning me for the cold. It would
be at least a few weeks before my brain thawed out and told my body it was time to wear
shorts. So much for Ietaka-Sensei’s theory about cold weather’s and its positive effect
on the brain.
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