私の家 watashi no ie, My House, chapter 2: The winter

This post revisits the idea of the winter chill in my little home.

I never honestly knew what cold was until I lived in Japan for a winter. Being the masochistic person I am, of course, I ended up staying two more frigid winters than was necessary to fulfill my initial contract. Somehow love of a country, curiosity and a desire to learn the language and travel as much as possible can burn through even the iciest of experiences.

My home was detached, a true luxury for most 外人。Each week the kerosene gas truck would come around and fill my little red tank that I had out on a cinderblock next to my front door. This made it easy for me to clear the snow away and hand-pump the gas into the tank of the heater every time it went low on heat. As these were kerosene heaters, we also had to always keep some sort of ventilation going or else the air would register "bad" and the heater would shut itself off. I did not realize this, however, until a few months into the winter leg of the first year of my stay, believing that something was wrong with the heater because it would constantly shut itself off with red lights blinking strange 漢字 kanji Chinese characters that I could not read. After a few trips to the hospital for bronchial infections we figured out that I had to keep my front screen door slightly open while the heater was on (creating, might I add, a terrible draft, but at least I didn't have to go to the hospital anymore).

Hence, when night fell and it was time to sleep, the stove had to be turned off.

As mentioned in my previous post, the homes in Japan are not insulated. You could see in the photograph that all that there was between myself and the ground outside was a layer of 畳 tatami and a layer of plywood. It was a step above camping, in essence; I called it "indoor camping". The temperatures inside of my little house would become as cold as the Great Outdoors very quickly, which required me to wear hat, mittens, two pair of pants and three sweatshirts while laying on my ふとん futon with so many blankets over me I could hardly move.

I would awake in the morning to my sponges in the kitchen sink frozen solid, the hose leading to my shower head frozen and my shampoo frozen. I could not open my door as the weatherproofing between my door and the doorjamb had water in it, condensation from the water I would boil atop the kerosene heater as a humidifier, that froze and stuck the door closed.

I learned at some point in the middle of my first winter that there was, in fact, a way to set my heater to kick on automatically in the morning *before* I awoke and to shut off at a specified time at night. This was, needless to say, a great breakthrough for me and my chilly body. However, the key was, as I learned on various occasions, to ensure the night before there was, in fact, enough kerosene in the little silver tank to ignite the heater. If not, it was another cold morning of stumbling out the front door (providing I could get it open, of course), hand-pumping the kerosene into the tank, and going back in to warm up.

My time in Japan definitely gave me a new perspective on and thankfulness for central heating.