The Cold Creeps In

“We spared ourselves the trouble last year,” my wife and I say to each other, both of us covered in two layers of clothing despite having the split-type heater turned to its highest setting, “by being at home” – that is, in the Philippines – “for the worst of it.”

She has her favorite yellow hoodie pulled over her head, her white over-hear headphone on top of the plush fabric, while playing games on her PC at her desk next to mine. She sits with both feet on the chair, knees squeezed between herself and the desk. With the socks she perennially has on no matter the season, she’s about as cozy as can be. Meanwhile I’m in my black and grey cardigan and our matching red pyjamas, still shivering every now and again because even with the heater, my desk’s position right by the door to the balcony means the cold still creeps in through the cracks. My feet, because I refuse to keep it covered in socks like she does, get the worst of it.

Now two years in Japan and still we’re in shock at how different the seasons can be. We knew about the winter cold, but like the changing of the seasons it remained an abstract thing for both of us, especially as we spent the better part of December and January in the Philippines last year – what should have been our first winter as residents here – for our wedding ceremony. Thanks to an exam that my department amazingly scheduled for Christmas day, we couldn’t enjoy the same privilege this year. Anyway we were curious to actually try living through Kansai’s winter for the first time – and you know what they say about curiosity (and cats).

It’s an interesting problem, one that our Manila upbringing never prepared us for. Yes, we’ve been to Baguio. Baguio, even at its most chilly, never got like this. What amuses us to no end is the fact that this isn’t even the worst of it: that people living in other parts of the world – nay, in other parts of Japan – have to deal with much, much worse. Some parts of the world, the land literally freezes over. Here there’s still color in the trees that keep their foliage through spring. At worst, the pavement only get somewhat slippery, as whatever powder drops in from the sky turns to slight rain on the way down.

There’s a metaphor here somewhere, I tell her. Barely a week ago we were splashing about in a swimming pool of a hotel in Parañaque. Now we try our best not to get our hands wet for fear of frostbite. The cold rushes in from the slightest cracks between the windows. Suddenly our apartment becomes much smaller: we’re forced to close the tatami mat room for most of the day as our heater isn’t powerful enough to cover the entire place.

Luckily we’ve obtained a smaller space heater that we can use for that part of the apartment for when it’s time to sleep, but in order to save money on electricity we have to turn off the other heater in the meantime. This means that at night, our bedroom gets relatively toasty, while the rest of the apartment – including the bathrooms – turns into a freezer. As in literally: we accidentally left a pitcher of iced tea out on the dining table for the whole afternoon, and when we tried it it was still cold.