Slowly but surely, it is getting cold here. Both last winter and last summer were relatively mild with not too extreme temperatures, but somehow I am worried that I will not be that lucky this winter. Right now, it has 9 degrees outside – and 10 degrees in my bedroom. And for next weekend, the weather forecast promises around 0 degrees during the night…
My new apartment is in parts better, in parts equally bad as the old house I lived in before. My office – the room where I spend most of my days in – has only 9 square metres as opposed to the 12 of the old room. There are also no cracks in the walls and all the windows are closing tight here. Unfortunately, the windows still only have single glazing, and there is no insulation whatsoever either on the inside or the outside of my walls, which are not even 20 cm of concrete, with wallpaper on one side. And even new houses are still built like this – I don’t get it…
The Japanese solution to the issue is either air-conditioning (if you reverse the airflow, it is getting warm inside) or, mostly, space heaters. For larger rooms they use liquid gas, but in a normal apartment many people use electric heaters. Obviously, this increases people’s energy consumption, which, with most of the nuclear plants still down, is not encouraged. The solution to that came with my last electricity bill: a nice flyer suggesting: “Oh, just heat your room to 20 degrees only!” So, either the Japanese are a very active people who never sit down during winter time, or they are actively trying to kill me…
For now, I heat my office only, to about 22 degrees, and I am just wearing a bit thicker sweaters and a bit warmer socks. I have also closed all the doors in my apartment to prevent draughts, and I have added sticky foam padding to strategic places where the fusuma sliding doors are not closing properly (they never do). And today I went out to buy a second space heater, mostly so that the friend who’s visiting next week will have her own. We’ll see how it goes – and for how long…