My first winter in Japan I learned to be careful what I wish for because I might get something else.

During my first year in Japan the weather didn’t cool down much until mid-October. I laughed that the students had to switch to winter uniforms even though it was still warm. Then it finally got cold and I finally decided to try out the space heater that came with my apartment.

This involved hooking up hoses to a main feed and figuring out where to turn on the feed and being careful not to trip over the hose that was snaked across the floor. I then twisted the nob on the toaster oven sized heater and there was a lot of clicking but not a lot of heat because it didn’t turn on. I tried several more times and even checked the hoses but it was clear the heater was broken.

I then biked down to the city office and explained, or at least tried to, that the heater didn’t work. (I’d only been in Japan a few months and my Japanese sucked.) My then supervisor drove me to a shop near the office and bought me a blanket set. I kept repeating that my heater didn’t work and he kept going “no problem. no problem.” which almost always means there’s a problem.

My supervisor took me back to my apartment along with another guy to do the heavy lifting and they helped me set up the blanket set under and around my coffee table. My coffee table was a large square and was actually a kotatsu or a heated table that was assembled like a sandwich. Fireproof carpet on floor; bottom frame of table (which included the heating element); fireproof blanket over frame; top of table on blanket. Since I was sitting on a floor chair, I would basically cocoon under the coffee table and slowly roast my legs and other, um, nether bits.

My living room was suddenly swallowed by a large blanket and none of it was what I’d asked for. I finally showed him the heater and said it didn’t work. He said something that indicated he thought I didn’t know how to work it (even though it had only one nob and only one way to turn it). He tried it. The guy with him tried it. They both checked the hoses. They checked to make sure gas was turned on to the apartment. The both tried to start it again and then finally declared the heater didn’t work.

A lot of this was language problem but some of it was “you can’t possibly have done this in your own country”. Granted, this was technically true as all the houses I’d lived in (except those in Albania) had little things like “insulation” and “central heating” and we are warned about using space heaters, especially in a room that was suddenly all blankets.

I finally got a working heater, and a nice one at that, but for the rest of the winter, in fact for every winter, as I roasted under the kotatsu, I couldn’t help but wonder why Japan didn’t insulate and heat its houses as well as it did its coffee tables.