Keeping warm in drafty apartments

In the winter, perhaps one of the most noticeable differences between Canada and Japan is the fact that buildings in Japan do not really have central heating. Maybe some do, but I have yet to encounter such a luxury here. Things like double paned glass on windows and good insulation in the walls do not seem to exist here either, which means that our apartment does not retain heat well. Although even if we had real insulation, our apartment has a mail slot in the front door that is exposed directly to the outside air because the stairwell for our building is not enclosed. 

In some ways, the lack of central heating and insulation are not so terrible because it's much warmer around Tokyo than it is around Toronto in the winter (with an average low of 2.5°C in January compared to -6.7°C). However, having the temperature drop below 10 or 15°C in your apartment is pretty awful no matter where you are.

Fortunately, we are saved by space heating. While it is possible to buy air conditioning units that can be installed on the wall or in the ceiling to heat an entire room (and cool it in the summer), these can be expensive to purchase and operate so we don't have one at home. Instead, we have one small space heater for the bedroom and a kotatsu for the kitchen.

A kotatsu is basically a table with a heater underneath. By default, the table top is screwed into a frame with the legs and heater. In the winter, one can remove the top, put a blanket on top of the frame and replace the table top (minus screws). The blanket traps the heat from the heater, making for a really toasty space underneath. One can then put their legs or as much of their body as they can fit under the kotatsu and blanket to keep warm. 

As the only real furniture in our apartment,
the kotatsu also stores a lot of things.

Kotatsus are so useful and wonderful that this is the only piece of actual furniture we have bothered to get for our apartment (unless futons count as furniture) and it is something that we would totally have shipped to us when we move.

Since we left to visit our families before it got especially cold here, we only bought a blanket for the kotatsu yesterday. We installed the blanket last night and I promptly took a nap underneath it.

A good thing about the kotatsu is that since it only heats a small volume, it doesn't require as much energy as using a space heater to heat an entire room which is good for the wallet as well as the environment. It also means that if you want to heat the space to higher temperatures than you would heat a room, you're still not being especially wasteful. The only downside is that if you have to to leave the warmth of the kotatsu for bed after you've decided that sleeping on the floor with your arm as a pillow is not a good plan, you may quickly become be very uncomfortable.