 letters from japan by michelle Mysteries of Japan Part Two: Climate Control (The Absence of) At my last job in a little-known, poorly-run publishing company, the air-conditioning was often so overpowering that I had to carry sweaters to work with me. The same went for the heating system in the wintertime. Most of the employees would find themselves at one time or another tangled in a phone cord, mid-conversation, trying to remove a sweater before heat exhaustion set in. Which led me to wonder: why is it that no one can get climate control right? Can't we just choose one comfortable temperature and stick with it? It doesn't seem so hard. This is the 21st century, isn't it? It seems that every place I go in the wintertime in America - the post office, the mall, the train station over-active heaters are always peeling the already-lackluster holiday decorations right off the walls. Nothing captures the spirit of the season like curled pictures of Santa and melted Hanukkah candles. Who is responsible for this interior global warming? Here in southern Japan, such questions are never considered in the average junior high school. For some reason, which remains a mystery to me as well as to my fellow foreign teachers in Japan, public junior high schools have no heating system whatsoever. No oil. No electric. No coal. Even the heartiest of Pilgrims had a freakin' wood stove. At first you may think this is because I teach at a school in southern Japan, where the heat in the summertime often rivals that of the surface of the sun. Kumamoto is a place where deodorant meekly surrenders its purpose for existence within the first few minutes after application, and where, in the public schools, warning posters for the signs of heat exhaustion are obnoxiously ubiquitous, where the heat and intense humidity surely would have pulled them from the walls with a force as strong as gravity had they not been smartly tacked in place. While in the summer, this place seems like a version of hell that would eventually yield to a mild and temperate winter, this is, to my utter regret, not the case. The truth is, it doesn't snow a whole lot here, so that one might conclude, falsely, that it's not all that cold. The students, however, sitting at their desks all day with sometimes as many as five layers of clothes under their school uniforms, will be the first tell you in huffing breaths that you can see: "SAMUI!" "It's cold!" In addition to having not a speck of heat in the classrooms or hallways, the Japanese believe that opening the windows in the school will blow all the bad germs out. It is for this reason, in my own estimation, that most schools are built with a light airiness to them. My school, for example, has four outdoor walkways, which unfortunately cannot be avoided when going from class to class. Chilling winds and sometimes snow blow across the walkways and through open windows with such force that most students and teachers can't resist stuttering: "SSAMUUIII!" "It's so cold!" The real horror is Soji. Cleaning Time. In addition to lacking climate control, Japanese schools also lack janitors. The students themselves clean the school everyday in an allotted time called Soji. Students are assigned to various areas; cleaning the windows, sweeping the floors, dumping the trash, etc. Some students are sent outside for the allotted time, usually 15 minutes, sometimes 30, to pick trash up around the school and do general tidying-up. Sometimes they are made to do "gardening" in the frozen patches of mud, but in actuality, they just muck about, poking a shrub with a shovel now and then, trying to keep warm. I can see their hair whipping around their rosy faces, their shoulders pulled in tight, shuddering in the biting wind. Worst than working outside however, is scrubbing the floors. The water in school (by now you might have guessed) is also not heated. Students on floor-scrubbing duty fill their buckets with icy cold water, dip filthy rags and spiny brushes into the bucket and scrub the floor. On the coldest days, the surface of the water actually begins to freeze over, and when I walk by to say hello, the students wave bright red, painful-looking hands at me, and say: "SAMMMUUUUIIIIIII!!" "It's unbearably cold. I can't feel my hands." But luckily, there is an oasis. The teachers' room. The teachers' room is heated with two giant kerosene heaters, and while they might make the room smell faintly like an autoshop, I have to say, it's about 1,000 times better than being in the classroom. I teach wearing my coat, scarf and hat. After every class, I chat with the students for a short bit, then go racing back to the warmth and comfort of the teachers' room. During free periods and in between classes, students will often invent reasons to come into the teachers' room: "Uh, the chalk in the science lab is, um, running low, and I thought I'd get some spare chalk from the teachers' room and" "Come in," a teacher will mumble, not bothering to look up from his desk. Forgetting his imaginary mission, the student will stop in front of a heater, taking the opportunity to warm his hands, probably for the first time that day. If they are completely stuck for a reason to come in, they will sometimes say they want to practice speaking English with me, which is a great sacrifice, as speaking English is only slightly above wetting oneself publicly on the humiliation scale of the average Japanese junior high student. Normally, they''d rather be thrown from a cliff than speak English with me, but in these bitterly cold January days, I get scores of visitors, both boys are girls. Often, they stand cluttered around my desk, not knowing what to say, many not saying anything at all, just staring at me awkwardly, until the bell rings and they scamper away. Postulating the reasons that schools here don't have heating systems, I have come up with a few theories. Maybe it's too expensive on the local community, but I'd like to think that most taxpayers would be willing give a little more to spare their children from potential frostbite and pneumonia. Maybe it's to toughen them up, to teach the students the valuable lesson of not taking things for granted, like the circulation in your own fingers and toes. Or maybe sometime long ago, in the midst of a scorching summer, when the middle schools of Japan were built, the architect-in-charge botched the job, and simply forgot to install heat in the schools. With the summertime heat being so overpowering, no one could blame him, or bring shame upon his name later by attempting to remedy the situation. Whatever the reason, and however tormented we might feel now, we all know that soon enough, when the summer sets in with unrelenting wave after wave of record-breaking heat, when the days feel like they have no end because we toss and turn in sweat-soaked sheets, waiting in vain for the heat to abate, that we'll be recalling fond memories of the bone-aching cold of winter. |
Mysteries of Japan Part Two: Climate Control (The Absence of) Mysteries of Japan Part One: Obaachans Godzilla Was a Misunderstood Foreigner School Lunch, or, Why I Carry Candy and Gum in My Handbag What's in a name? The Shochu Monster Airmail! Intro Find out more about the JET Programme
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