Friday is the new Thursday

...at least for this week.

For a place that isn't supposed to have much snow, this year has been pretty exceptional. It snowed last weekend and it started to snow again today. This time, we weren't at home when it started because we were out last night and we had to take the train back this morning. This meant that we had the unusual experience of seeing trains run really late.

We didn't exactly plan our departure and just took trains as they arrived so we didn't really know when all of them were supposed to show up (also, some of the signs weren't displaying the times which is unusual). daid noticed that something was off at some of the platforms (like a the absence of times on the signs) and I noticed that it seemed to be a lot louder than usual because of the live overhead announcements (the typical announcements are pre-recorded and quieter).

At one of our transfers, I noticed that the train was seven minutes late because the time was actually displayed (this is unusual for Tokyo) and then just before our station, we had to sit on the tracks for 10 minutes.

The good thing about sitting on the train for 10 minutes while it's stopped is that you can see the other train tracks and you can marvel at how the train had to stop when there is absolutely no snow on any of them.

Anyway, I did learn one good use for carrying an umbrella when it's snowing: If you want to shake the snow off a tree (which you might since some of the trees around here are not the kind accustomed to losing their leaves in the fall) then having an umbrella in hand means that you're not going to dump snow on yourself when you do so.

In closing, here is a photo of someone trying to shove his bicycle through the snow. 

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

Snow!

When I got here, I was told that it really didn't snow too much around Tokyo. So far this year, I've seen it snow at least three times. The first time, nothing stayed on the ground and it all melted immediately. The second time was last week and the snow stayed on the grass, but melted on the pavement. Then Friday evening and continuing into Saturday, this happened: the most snow Tokyo has seen in 13 years.

Now, I've spent my entire life living in a place that has some idea of what to do with snow. Where snowplows are numerous and on-call (though their efficiency varies from city to city); where people own snow shovels and/or snow blowers; where you can find bags of salt at the grocery store from about November until March or so. I've never been to a place that rarely experiences a proper snowfall when such a snowfall happened. So naturally, I wanted to see how people who rarely see so much snow react to the existence of this much snow.

Umbrellas in the snow...

Apparently the answer is "with umbrellas".

I'm not sure if this is only a Tokyo thing, but umbrellas appear to be the answer to every weather problem (as helpfully illustrated by daid here). I'm also not sure if it's clear from the photo, but the woman on the right is also wearing a poncho.

Now, the snow was a little wet, but it was easy to dust off and the umbrellas were definitely overkill.  It's a bit unusual though and something I've maybe seen happen in Canada once ever.

Umbrella and plastic
bags as shoes...

There were a few people wearing rain boots, but that's a bit more understandable (if you don't own winter boots, wearing the only boots you have makes sense). There was at least one guy who was wearing plastic bags over his shoes, which is just a little odd. I kinda get where he's going with it, but I'm a little impressed that he didn't fall down constantly.

Perhaps stranger than people using umbrellas to combat the snow were the people who had put chains on the tires of their cars. The roads were never especially bad since people had been driving on them as the snow was coming down so the snow didn't accumulate much. At most there were about five centimetres of snow in the middle of the roads where nobody was driving.

Why?

Granted, chains on tires at least serves a practical purpose, unlike lifting the windshield wipers on a car while it's parked. I have no idea what people thought this would accomplish, but people did it like it was a perfectly normal and sensible thing to do.

Maybe it's because people don't necessarily own things to scrape the snow and ice off their cars or they're worried that the ice will stick the windshield wiper to the windshield. All I know is that this is the only place I've seen anyone do this and I have no idea what it's supposed to accomplish.

Now, there were definitely some people who were totally dealing with the snow in a way that made sense. The people who presumably owned a store around the corner had cleared the walkway leading to the door and made a pile of snow for their kid to sled down. At the park, there were more kids tobogganing and some parents were making snow ramps for their kids (which is a total necessity for sledding). There were teenagers who had eschewed their umbrellas having snowball fights (though they were doing this across a street which was probably not the best place for it) and people who seemed to be lending each other shovels to clear out walkways.

Granted, the snow had started to melt by Saturday evening and by Sunday evening, the lack of salt on the sidewalks made everywhere a bit of a death trap. Now the roads and sidewalks are mostly clear again and everything seems to be back to normal. It was definitely fun while it lasted.

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Update: It seems that putting windshield wipers up before it snows isn't just a Japanese thing. In fact, googling it turned up a lot of people from the US discussing or complaining about this phenomenon. There's even a facebook group dedicated to complaining about this phenomenon. The theory is that putting your windshield wipers up before a snowfall will keep them from sticking to your windshield and make it easier to clean.

I definitely disagree with this because it's just going to mean that snow and ice will get to coat your windshield wipers on all sides and if they're lifted off the car, they can't be heated by the car when you turn it on. If the blades are stuck to the car when you come out in the morning, the easy solution is to just turn on the car and let it warm up (with the defroster on) while you clean the snow off your car. Then the windshield wipers will become un-stuck as the car heats up and the ice melts.

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.