"Once winter hits, you'll never be warm again"

Tanaka-San, the successful banker-cum-custodian in my dwindling town, strides through the elementary, head held high, broad shoulders practically brushing the walls of small corridors. Clouds of breath before him herald his passing, and the rubber soles of his shoes stick where they don’t slide on the icy corridor floor. He takes huge, metal scrapers to the crystallized interiors of windows in the more remote parts of the school, assuring that the ice never gains too much purchase. Using ample elbow grease, he cracks the frost in the doorjambs of classes, and inside he kick-starts each of their six suns. Though the monolithic heaters blow warmth and fill their individual worlds, with the lights above casting brilliance, the glow and the heat doesn't flow far beyond the doorways, dying out in the cold dark of the corridors beyond.

Navigating the place is an exercise in island hopping, where one must plan his pockets of warmth along the way to his destination least he should freeze up in transit. Even the thick, polar bear hide of a Canadian is not used to such extremes as we tend to have a decadent reliance on insulation—something the Japanese seem to eschew. The children, though, seem as unphased by all of it as I was at their age. They still gambol throughout this half-abandoned, frosty hulk of a building with all the effervescent joy that they had in the late days of summer. They are a plague of leprechauns unleashed in this place, and my every turn yields a little warmth in the form of a new smile or some new mischief.

With the onset of the Hokkaido winter, the seeming complete lack of insulation in my apartment has lead to me losing more and more territory in my large-ish pad. I make fewer forays out of my front room, where I have my desk, kitchen, sitting area and a real mother of a kerosene heater. I would spend most of time in the front room as the days got colder, only braving the icy hallway beyond when I needed to dress, bathe, shit, or sleep. But even then I had to rely on an electric blanket and two small electric space heaters to get my bedroom to a functional temperature. However, when the room got to the point where my breath would linger before me in icy clouds, I decided it might be best to relocate my sleeping quarters to the floor of my main/front room until the Board of Education can scrounge me up another kerosene heater for my bedroom.

So it would appear as though, for all my boasting about being Canadian and being up to the cold of a Hokkaido winter, I had really taken for granted wondrous Canadian inventions like insulation, double-pane windows, and central heating.