VI 
KEEPING WARM 
Enduring Cold the Japanese Way 
In Japan, people warm themselves, not their drafty houses 
by Amanda Mayer Stinchecum 
“A house should be built with the 
summer in mind. In winter it is possible 
to live anywhere, but a badly made 
house is unbearable when it gets hot.” 
These words, written by the Buddhist 
priest Yoshida Kenko in the fourteenth 
century, still reflect the feelings of the 
Japanese people. Lady Lawson, a trav- 
eler to Japan in the early twentieth 
century who, being English, was used to 
cold, damp winters, wrote of the Japa- 
nese house in winter: 
I believe the Japanese love to sit in 
draughts. On a cold, frosty morning, a 
paper house does not seem the right thing 
in the right place, and paper windows are 
inadequate, as the shivering foreigner 
feels. On these occasions, I used to recall 
Pierre Loti’s dictum, that Japan was a 
tropical country which had moved up 
north by mistake and had never found it 
out. 
It would be risky to state that the 
Japanese do not feel the cold as keenly 
as Westerners do, but there is no ques- 
tion that they are more stoic. Edward 
Sylvester Morse, who went to Japan in 
the late 1870s as a marine zoologist 
and became fascinated with Japanese 
culture, described his experience in 
Tokyo: 
Occasional snowstorms have occurred this 
winter but the jinrikisha men do not seem 
to mind the snow and run in it barefooted, 
and when standing the steam is seen rising 
from their bare feet. Curiously enough, the 
houses appear as open as in the summer. 
The children are barelegged, just as in the 
summer, and play in the snow without 
minding the cold. 
In general, instead of seeking to 
change an uncomfortable or difficult 
situation, the Japanese accommodate 
themselves to it or, more often, endure it 
so as not to make anyone else uncom- 
fortable. They frequently speak of the 
necessity of putting up with things or 
being resigned to them. This attitude of 
accommodation is perhaps at the root of 
the Japanese approach to dealing with 
cold: they warm themselves, their indi- 
vidual bodies, rather than their environ- 
ment. And this, in turn, is tied to the 
way they think of the space they inhabit. 
The traditional Japanese house and 
garden form an integral unit, separated 
by a wall from the surrounding commu- 
nity and from raw nature. The garden 
usually lies on the south side of the 
house, although its shape varies as part 
of the overall design. Particularly in 
smaller towns and in the country, the 
garden may adjoin rice fields, vegetable 
gardens, or even uncultivated land, and 
the wall surrounding it and the house 
may be simply a living hedge of bamboo 
or other foliage. Nevertheless, the gar- 
den is not part of nature but a recon- 
struction of it that belongs to the space 
of the house. It is not a backyard to sit 
out in on hot summer nights, but a 
setting for seasonal changes to be 
viewed in safety from one’s living room. 
In order to appreciate the poignancy of 
the passing seasons, the Japanese ob- 
serve the garden, even in winter, not 
through narrow panes of glass, but with 
the sliding doors thrown open as wide as 
possible. In her Pillow Book , Sei Shona- 
gon, the great diarist and wit of Japan’s 
early eleventh-century court, described 
with delicacy a typical scene at the 
palace in Kyoto: 
In winter the early mornings [are loveli- 
est]. It is beautiful indeed when snow has 
fallen during the night, but splendid too 
when the ground is white with frost; or 
even when there is no snow or frost, but it is 
simply very cold and the attendants hurry 
from room to room stirring up the fires and 
bringing charcoal, how well this fits the 
season’s mood! But as noon approaches and 
the cold wears off, no one bothers to keep 
the braziers alight, and soon nothing re- 
mains but piles of white ashes. 
As one might guess, the inhabitants of 
Kyoto do not face winters of extreme 
cold. The four main islands of the Japa- 
nese archipelago extend south to north 
as far as the United States does from 
Mobile, Alabama, to Bangor, Maine, 
but more than two-thirds of Japan’s pop- 
ulation lives in temperate regions south 
of the thirty-sixth parallel. Japan’s ma- 
jor metropolitan centers are concen- 
trated between 35° and 36° north lati- 
tude, the same as the central third of the 
state of North Carolina. In this zone, 
temperatures in January average 32° to 
39°F, and people who live in such cities 
as Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Osaka 
may see snow only once or twice a year. 
Even in the northernmost and more 
mountainous regions of the main island 
of Honshu, the January temperatures, 
warmed by the Japan Current ( Kuro - 
shio), average from 18° to 32°. 
Hokkaido, the most northern of Ja- 
pan’s main islands — and the coldest — is 
a case apart. Originally inhabited by the 
Ainu, a racially and culturally distinct 
people, Hokkaido did not have large 
numbers of Japanese settlers until the 
nineteenth century. In general, the ar- 
chitecture follows the European more 
than the Japanese tradition, and the life 
style also reflects the strong Western 
influence that followed the Meiji Resto- 
ration in 1868. Faced with snowy win- 
ters, the settlers of Hokkaido, by neces- 
sity, departed from the original 
Japanese patterns. A description of tra- 
ditional attitudes does not apply to Ja- 
pan’s truly cold region, therefore, but to 
the more characteristic temperate areas, 
where nevertheless, the dampness of the 
climate, combined with features of Jap- 
anese architecture that preclude effi- 
cient heating, contributes to an experi- 
ence of winter that can be uncomfort- 
ably cold for weeks or months on end. 
The traditional Japanese house is un- 
A woman wears a straw cape for 
protection in snowy Niigata, a 
prefecture on the northwest coast 
of Japan’s main island, Honshu. 
Underneath, she wears her ordinary 
house clothes and no gloves. 
50 
