The turkey is thawing in the living room. This is not, as you might imagine, a health hazard because the living room is only slightly above freezing.

Freezing cold rooms in wintertime are a normal feature of Japanese homes. Rooms are heated individually, not centrally and every room has a door so that you can shut it off from its chilly companions. Each room also has a nice draft so that the fumes from the gas heater (which gets its fuel from a gas outlet plumbed into the wall) don’t asphixate you. It’s a practical arrangement (though less frugal than you might think for a variety of reasons concerning lack of home insulation and the price of heaters) which makes me pine for the luxury of central heating.

Luckly, the turkey doesn’t care. Posted by kuri at December 23, 2001 08:04 AM