Staying warm

One thing about Japanese houses, most do not have central heating (nor much wall insulation) so people rely heavily on space heaters instead. Basically not only does it save money to heat just the rooms a person is using but also in the event of a large earthquake it is better to have smaller heat sources in buildings so there is less chance of a fire afterward (and less insulation means less fuel for potential fires as well). Back in Massachusetts I had been living with relatives who kept the thermostat way down in the winter because the main source of heat was a wood-stove in the living room (and the heat never seemed to make its way up to my room somehow, even though I thought heat was supposed to rise...). Essentially I'm used to sleeping in the cold but not to doing daily activities (like eating) in the cold and I was getting a bit discouraged each time I entered my freezing cold apartment in the evening. We had the kotatsu (the heated table I mentioned in an earlier post) and the small A/C unit in the living room which can also give a little heat but with temperatures getting below 7 degrees Celsius (45 degrees F) at night Anne and I wanted something more.

So, a couple of Fridays ago we went out with a lady from the Board of Education (also named Suzuki-san if you can believe it) and we drove to the next town to get two kerosene heaters (one for the living room, one for Anne's room), a small electric heater for the bathroom area, and an electric blanket for my room. I could have chosen to get a kerosene heater as well but as I mentioned I'm used to sleeping in cold rooms and I haven't even opened the blanket yet even though it's dipped to 2 degrees Celsius (36 degrees F) at night since then.

The two kerosene heaters are pretty high-tech, they have a built-in clock so we can set them to come on or turn off at a certain time. They're set to run for three hours but if they sense that there's too much CO2 or CO in the air they turn off automatically. If we want them to run for more than three hours we have to push a button (I guess this is a safety measure in case a person forgets about having the heaters on and leaves the house or goes to sleep). We bought some kerosene while we were in town (at about 70 yen/L) the kerosene heaters themselves hold about 5 Liters but we've been burning through around a Liter a day... It's a bit annoying to keep refilling the tanks but so far it hasn't been as annoying as stacking wood for the wood-stove back home.

Here's one of the smart kerosene heaters.

To diminish the heating bill further we got some plastic "ribbed film" to stick to the windows that's supposed to help keep the heat in and also absorb the ridiculous amount of condensation that accumulates.  We also stopped by the clothing store UNIQLO (which I liked a lot) and purchased some "Heat Tech" clothing which is popular in Japan because it apparently helps the wearer stay insulated even though the material is quite thin.  The clothing store was having a sale so I got several articles of clothing for 999 yen (about $13) apiece; I wore one of the shirts today and I think it really did help (I only had to wear two layers!).  If we have a chance I'd like to go back and get some leggings and socks too.  In other news we got snow tires for our car yesterday so hopefully we'll be alright when the fabled ice comes along... haha.

 And finally for your enjoyment (and to celebrate the 1000th blog view even though most of those are probably from my sister obsessively refreshing the page) here is an ebi (shrimp), tamago (egg), and bacon pizza on sale at an "Italian" restaurant in the next town.