Mizore, you ask? Sleet, I tell you. Sleet is falling in my town and leaving a layer of flavorless sorbet on the roads, buildings, and cars. It's also reversing the warming trend we've had going the past week, for which I am exceedingly displeased. It's not snow, which would be fun, or rain, which would at least bring a pleasant sleepiness with its moist melancholy. It's sleet, and it drives me to complain at last on this blog about the winter in Japan. I've been refraining, having heard enough about the weather in NJ and elsewhere this year to think my comments would not be well received by folks in far more frigid places, but there's a special level of cold here that doesn't really exist at home. We call it school.
For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of hearing me go on and on about the heating system or lack there of in Japan, either in person or by phone, let me provide a short introduction. There is really no central heating in most of Japan, save for the northern island of Hokkaido and parts of northern Honshu. While it's true that it doesn't get as cold here as it does at home, the thirties and forties are pretty common in winter, and it does occasionally fall below zero. In order to stay warm, people use a variety of heating options we don't go for much in the US. On the electric front, there are space heaters, mini heating/AC units for one room, electric blankets, futon pads and carpets. There's also the kotatsu, which is a coffee table with a heating unit and an inflammable quilt, under which you curl up happily; I'm sitting in mine right now. In my area, kerosene heaters are big because they heat the whole room much better than the room units do, and gas is cheaper than electricity. Insulation isn't great, though, so people also bundle up a bit even inside houses.
I've always been somewhat adept at layering and was once called the queen of layers by one of my classmates at college, but I've really perfected the art at school, where there is little to no heating. The teachers' room usually is heated, but the classrooms rarely are. At one of my schools, the windows are left open almost all the time, because that apparently helps prevent influenza. That's a whole other story. The students can't wear anything over their uniforms, so many of them are layered, too, but the girls are wearing skirts, remember! Even when the windows are closed, the schools are built to be extremely open, with drawbridge-sized entrances and windowed hallways. So it's very, very cold at school sometimes.
With the sleet coming down, the administration at the school magnanimously decided that the kerosene heaters in the classrooms could be turned on for the first ten minutes of each class period. During one of my classes, the teacher left the heater on for a whole fifteen minutes before realizing his infraction and turning it off to the dismayed cries of my freezing students. And this is the school that actually has heaters in the classrooms; I'm pretty sure one of my other schools just had class without heat as usual. Eeek!
However, my favorite moment was at the end of the day. After the last class period, we have cleaning time and then the students return to their homerooms for the end-of-day meeting, a fairly brief affair that usually begins with an announcement over the PA system and is followed by the start of sports and club activities. After school activities run until around 5, and all students must leave the school at 5:30. When the announcement came on, it was one of the male teachers rather than a student, and he started out by saying, "Regarding club activities..."
Ah, thinks the American. They're gonna cancel the clubs so that the kids can go home early. That's nice.
"Regarding club activities, due to the weather, please end activity before 5 and leave the school by 5:10." Because leaving twenty minutes earlier will make a huge difference, right? Especially when the vast majority of the kids bike and walk to school, eh?
And lastly: "Please enjoy looking at the snow." Rather than playing with it. And it wasn't snow, it was sleet, but the poor kids here get so little snow that clearly it was good enough to make snowballs and snowmen with. I saw a few!
Here's to the eventual arrival of spring!
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