Meteorology lesson

Wow! It's got really cold this last couple of days here in leafy Chiba-ken. Want a lesson in meteorology? I knew you did. Well, sometimes at this time of year we get a little old 'low' moving briskly up the Pacific Coast and it sucks a heck of a lot of cold air southwards from eastern Siberia and across the Sea of Japan from Vladivostock. We aren't just talking cold air here - not the cissy stuff we get down from Scandinavia in Europe during cold snaps. No, this is the real thing, straight from the 'cold pole' of the Northern Hemisphere, that vast area of tundra around Verhoyansk.

Of course we are much luckier here than places on the other side of Honshu from Akita down to Matsue. Over there they get snowstorms blasting the place and burying it deep in the white stuff for weeks, a bit like the Cascades in North America. Luckily the central mountains of Japan keep the worst of that away from the Pacific side of the country.

The problem here is that your average Japanese house in Kanto and points west is built to cope with excessive heat, not cold. Basically they are sophisticated plywood boxes without much insulation and with no central heating system. As soon as this weather strikes we find ourselves clustering around kerosene heaters and burrowing deeper into the futon. I've never felt so cold anywhere as I have in Japan.

Yesterday was especially bad because there were high winds with it, so freezing air soon leaked into most parts of the house. I abandoned my study and headed for the kitchen table with two heaters running. On Christmas Day we'd set up our new TV in the corner but it seems that digital signals don't like cold windy days, especially when they are as weak as they are around here, and we had a frustrating time before we figured out how to switch back to the analogue signal. So much for technology.

When you get weather like this with high winds the unimaginable happens - the gales affect the power system and pantographs and (shock horror!) the trains start running late because they can't get enough 'juice' from the overloaded overhead system to run at full speed.

Anyway a sure way to get warm is to run a nice deep hot bath and lounge in it for hours with the water up to your neck. Hmm. Talk to you later.