Frugal Japan
Living frugally in an expensive world

I have lived in Japan for a number of years, but I still can’t get used to how cold it gets INSIDE my house in the winter. I try all kinds of things to reproduce the warmth of a house in Canada, but all to no avail. Or, rather, I do know of ways to make parts of my house/body warm, but no way to make the whole place warm and welcoming.

Probably one of the hardest things to deal with is being cold in bed. I really hate it when I wake up in the middle of the night because I am too cold. I am too lazy/unfocused to do anything about it when it happens, but I am also not able to go back to sleep properly until the situation has been remedied. Do I get out of bed and find an extra blanket — freezing myself even more in the interim — or do I just try to think warm thoughts and go back to sleep? Unfortunately, I almost always choose the latter, although it rarely results in a restful night’s sleep.

One way to make sure that you stay warm throughout the winter involves using a blanket that is not really a blanket on your bed. I discovered this trick quite by accident when I was living in the mountains of Fukushima, a chilly prefecture in southern Tohoku. In Fukushima, most houses have kotatsu, small tables with heating units attached underneath. I had never seen a kotatsu before coming to Japan, so I didn’t set mine up that first winter. (I was a JET living in an apartment that had been furnished by my Board of Education, so I didn’t really know what all the things in my house did.) However, when it started to get cold and I was scrounging through my closets for extra blankets, I happened to find a very thin, perfectly square, kind of stiff blanket that looked like it might do the trick. I placed it on top of my duvet and found that despite the thinness, it acted as a kind of insulator and kept my bed toasty warm without the weight of a normal blanket. It was only a few weeks later, when one of my Japanese friends happened to see the square-shaped blanket on my bed, that I found out the “blanket” was supposed to go underneath the kotatsu (i.e. on the floor as a kind of carpet).

My kotatsu-carpet bedspread served me well over the five years that I lived in Fukushima. I brought it out every year as soon as it started to get cold despite the inevitable laughs it garnered from my Japanese friends. It was a perfect set up for me — the kotatsu-carpet was light so it didn’t weigh me down or hamper my movements at night and it kept all the heat in so once I got warm, I stayed warm throughout the night. Also, because it was kind of stiff, I could pull it over my head and it would keep in the warmth without suffocating me because it wouldn’t actually touch any part of my head. Between that and my newly acquired habit of sleeping with socks on, I managed to survive the cold Fukushima winters and live to tell the tale.

Not sure if the kotatsu-carpet bedspread idea will appeal to everyone because you do have to put up with a bit of jeering in the implementation, but if you find that you are waking up cold in the middle of the night and you don’t want to add too much extra weight to your covers, I would recommend giving it a try!