Japan hot and cold on warming

[Yollam]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/16/MNG6SIA0FD1.DTL


Japan hot and cold on warming
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, April 16, 2006


Kyoto, Japan -- In a pleasant house on a residential side street near the former Imperial Palace, the Fukao family is more or less typical of its neighbors.

Two parents, two children, a grandmother, two cars -- and a generation gap that is jeopardizing Japan's leadership in the campaign to limit global warming.

Kenichi Fukao, a well-to-do lawyer, commutes to work by bicycle. His wife, Yoshimi Fukao, uses a bicycle for her daily shopping. Their Toyota sedan is driven mostly on weekends.

"We just don't like to be wasteful," Yoshimi Fukao said.

But 20-year-old Noboyuki Fukao loves his well-polished Nissan Patrol, a sport utility vehicle. It guzzles gas, he acknowledges, but it's a lifestyle thing.





Since I am currently living in Fukuoka, in western Japan, I felt the need to comment a little on this piece, since it gives a fairly warped impression of how people live here. First of all, people here on average consume MUCH less electricity and fossil fuels per capita than Americans. About half. conservation is still the norm. Most people use cars only on the weekend, since transit is extremely efficient and cheap here, and commuting by car is an expensive nightmare. Despite the airheaded kids in the story, most young people don't have cars, and if they do they usually drive smaller cars, like kei cars, which are tiny and have engines with a displacement of less than 1000 cc's. I see almost no SUVs on the streets here. They may be increasing in popularity compared to previous years, but they still represent a very small percentage of the overall car market here.

We reuse the bath water, pumping it into the washing machine to do the laundry. Most people don't have a clothes dryer, but hang the clothes to dry on the balcony. Dryers are only used during long stretches of rainy weather.

As for heating and cooling, this is probably where I am worst. Because I grew up in a desert climate with cool nights even in summer and very low humidity, I do not acclimate well to Japan's unbelievably hot and humid summers and damp, frigid winters, so I run the AC all summer long, and we use a kerosene heater in the winter. (P-U!) But we generally only heat and cool the room we are using, our electric bill is almost never over $150 in summer, and the cost of kerosene in winter is much lower than that, so the family in the story must be extremely wasteful to spend $500 a month on electricity. We live in a 1200 sq ft. manshon or condominium, which I guess is about average size, although ours is considered roomy since it is in a very densely populated area near a major train and subway station. An 1800 sq ft. house in Kyoto is palatial and would be very expensive, although a house of the same size with some land would be quite cheap in the country.

I guess all I'm saying is that this story is making an issue up out of whole cloth. While it's true that younger people tend to be less frugal than their parents, that tends to change when they start paying their own bills. Japan will never consume resources at the rate that the US does, but I do have to admit to being mystified at the habit many salarymen here have of parking their car and leaving it idling while they read a paper or take a nap. I can understand doing this on a very hot or cold day, but they do it even when the weather is perfect! I swear, it makes me want to stick a banana in their tailpipe a la Beverly Hills Cop!