Beating the cold

It’s winter now in Japan, in case you didn’t know. And even though we live down south, it’s pretty cold, at least by Melbourne standards. Today, for instance, the forecast top temperature is 6°; and when we pushed the kids out the door at 7 a.m., it was either -1° or 0°, depending on which forecast you believe. (I use this one by the way). After a month or so of this, I’ve realised a couple of things:

1. Eleni was right; it would have been hideously cold up north in snowy Akita, where we were originally planning to live. The other day I saw on the telly that it was -27° in the neighbouring Niigata prefecture, so in retrospect, down here in Mihara is quite cold enough thank you very much.

2. You can’t heat the whole house all day every day; it would cost a fortune. You have to do it the Japanese way, grasshopper.

And that means only heating a couple of rooms at a time. Our house has three principle rooms downstairs — parent bedroom, living room and kitchen. Generally we spend most of our time in the kitchen and living room, with the bathroom, corridor and bedroom closed off. We have a little fan-assisted kerosene heater which is very efficient at keeping us warm. In the lounge room there is a kotatsu (low table with built-in heater; see explanation here) where the kids do their homework. This works well as we can chat to them while preparing dinner or doing other Important Parent Stuff.

Upstairs, meanwhile, there’s Daddy’s office and the kids’ bedroom. At night these are positively arctic, because we don’t use them so there’s no use turning the heater on. We usually fire it up just before the kids go to bed, and as you’d expect with Japanese technology, it also has a dinky little timer that comes on in the morning and helps to take the chill off the room before the kids get up.

Partly because of the cold and partly because of the Japanese way of life, the bedrooms have been reduced to nothing more than a place to store your clothes and go to sleep at night; all the action happens downstairs in the loungeroom. Even Ruby has accepted that she doesn’t really need her own bedroom and it makes you wonder what on earth we did with all that space in our big house back in Australia.

Actually I know what we did with all that space: we filled it up with useless junk, which is now stored in the shed. Eleni has been heard to say that she couldn’t care less if the shed burnt down in our absence, and it’s tempting to agree.