Summer’s Divide
From Motions and Moments (2015)
In summer, Tokyo splits in two. Only when summer ends does Tokyo finally come back together into a whole again. This huge urban division isn’t economic, political, geographic or social—it’s thermal. About June, the city divides into two completely different spaces—shiver inducing cold or brain stunting hot.
Every city in the world takes defensive measures against heat, but Tokyo surely has more air-conditioned spaces than any city in the world. It is like Tokyo has two entirely different seasons–one inside and the other outside. American cities are designed around cars and Italian cities around churches, but Tokyo seems designed around air-conditioning. It’s a basic urban principle.
When I first moved to Tokyo, I wondered if all the big changes back and forth in temperature on an average summer day in Tokyo was some sort of Asian health technique, like the cold water bath after a scalding soak at an onsen hot springs bath. Does going back and forth from freezing in stores to sweating on the sidewalk improve blood circulation?
I quickly realized that Tokyo’s hot spaces are kind of embarrassing. People pluck their sweaty clothing away from their skin and wipe their faces with goofy, little towels. So, it always feels like it is politeness that keeps thermostats cranked so low. Casually mention it is hot outside to a taxi driver and they will turn the cold knob to high.
Actually, it is more than just two seasons. My summer commute to school puts me through a global tour of climate zones. It’s ‘temperate’ at home, ‘tropical’ biking to the station, ‘subarctic’ on the train, ‘tropical’ again from station to school, and then inside my classroom, either ‘polar’ (air conditioning fully on in small seminar rooms) or ‘sub-tropical’ (air conditioning half on in lecture halls). I feel sorry for my body having to constantly re-adjust.
Tokyo really needs two summer weather reports, one for inside and one for outside. The inside weather report would announce the average cold in, say, department stores, subway lines and kissaten. Digital maps of Tokyo would be marked for temperature, as they are for traffic, and would tell people how to get from here to there without walking outside in the heat. With that kind of map in hand, some Tokyoites might never go outside all summer.
Japanese always claim to love harmony, but temperature is one issue on which no one ever agrees. Students turn it on. I turn it off. Or I turn it on and they turn it off, when the women all wear short skirts. At meetings, the older professors crank the thermostat to low and pour themselves hot tea. The younger professors suffer in silence. Everyone wears wildly different layers and thicknesses of clothing. Like some game of musical temperature chairs, someone is always left out of the comfort zone.
The temperature segregation of Tokyo summer always makes me wonder about the true nature of the city. Which is the real Tokyo–the cool artificially controlled spaces or the sweltering natural environment? My reaction changes from day to day. Some days I wonder why anyone would be foolish enough to build a major world city in such a tortuous summer climate. And other days, I embrace the heat and try to endure, with the assistance of cold beer and well-placed fans.
In summer, strangely, Tokyo’s cold spaces start to feel the most natural, even though they are the most artificially created. Are people truly themselves only when they are unnaturally comfortable? Tokyoites are able to stand dense crowds, high prices, long commutes, and small living spaces, but somehow cannot stand to shop, sit or walk in a temperature too far from “normal.”
Tokyo’s drive for comfortably cool interior spaces is a big project. More than changing geography by diverting a river or defying gravity to build a skyscraper, Tokyo wants to tame the air to provide comfort for humans. Why not just throw a bubble over the entire city and cool the whole thing? I sometimes wonder.
With the electricity saving campaign started recently, people might have to encourage themselves to get used to not being refrigerated all summer. Even still, the day at the end of the summer when the outside temperature cools and the city’s air-conditioning infrastructure relaxes, what I call “temperature equinox day,” comes as a relief. On that day the city once again feels balanced and whole as Tokyoites return to thoughts other than just the weather and what it does to them.
