In my last post about the sprinklers in the road I mentioned that the temperature so far this winter has stayed consistently a little bit above zero. It's cold but nothing compared to the temperatures back home that can dip to -40 degrees with the wind chill and often times hovers around 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Even though the temperatures are higher here winter feels much colder. When someone builds a place here they don't put insulation in the house like they do back home and the windows are by no means windows that keep the heat in and the cold out. Couple this with the fact that electricity is expensive and you have the makings of a winter where you are often cold. Here in Japan central air is not a common thing, and I don't think I have ever heard someone mention a furnace. To heat their houses the people here have portable heaters that they plug into the wall, an oil burning heater, or a wall unit that blows hot air (or cold depending on the season). Most people have these wall units in their place as this is their air conditioning in the summer as well, but some people don't even turn them on. Katy is part of a Facebook group of international moms in Japan and one of the threads on there asked people about when they turn their heater on or how to keep the kids warm in the winter. Some of the posts said that people don't turn there heaters on at all unless it gets really cold. One lady on there said her house was 2 degrees Celsius inside (about 35/36 degrees Fahrenheit) and they still hadn't turned their heater on yet, they just put extra clothes on and bundle their kids up even more to stay warm.
We met a guy here who built a house in Japan. He said that when he built his house he wanted to build it with really high quality windows and good insulation. He told us that the people with the building materials asked him why. They told him this is only Toyama and there is no need for it. The guy said that people here just put up with it for the 4 months out of the year when it is really cold. Everybody makes their house the same way - no/poor insulation and unprotecting windows. It's just the way it's done.
He said it's why there are so many heated toilet seats. It helps people be able to 'put up' with the cold a little better. So every part of you isn't freezing all the time.
One if the first things you see when you walk into a department store here is a section of long underwear and when we go lift in the morning it seems as though most the people in the locker room have them on.
For a lot of the winter we had to turn our heater on at night because it was too cold otherwise. For a majority of the past 4 months I was going to bed with tights (under armour/spandex long pants and long sleeve shirt) my snow pants and my jacket on. And this was even with two thick blankets. Aside from when Katy and I rented a Volkswagon combi van in the outback of Australia that you could see the outside through cracks and holes in the door, I have never been as cold sleeping as I have been in Japan, both this year and other years. Good thing we have great heaters and warm blankets.
