So, I’ve officially been in Japan for one week and three days. It’s been a whirlwind of an adventure, from taking an exhausting 14+ hour flight from Miami to Narita to being whisked away in the chaos that is Tokyo to finally being dropped like a UNICEF rations package into the inaka that is Ishikawa.
Coming from Florida, you’d think someone like me would be used to hot, humid, days.
And I am.
But there’s also this marvelous invention called air conditioning that we Floridians rush to in order to escape that which is hot, humid, nasty ass Florida weather. So, we Floridians usually don’t have to deal with humidity on a consistant basis.
Japan, on the other hand, apparently have never heard of this magnificient invention.
Well, scratch that. They have. It’s just that their air conditioning is almost laughable.
You see, Japan is eco crazy. Everywhere you look there’s an advertisement about being green and trying to go eco. When you go shopping, the packaging promotes how ” eco friendly ” it is. When you first enter the country, you’re assaulted with five different trash cans of “eco friendly” ways to dispose of your garbage. You are forced to recycle in this country. It is not an option.
Hell, when you go shopping, you don’t even get shopping bags. You have to bring your own.
Being eco is like the way of life in Japan.
No Eco, No Life would be the phrase if Tower Records ran an eco campaign. Probably through AKB48 on the poster holding some globes while duck lipping into the hearts of Japanese men everywhere.
Anyway, I’ve slightly digressed, but getting back to the point. AC in Japan is a luxury and if your building happens to have AC on, it’s at the highest ‘comfortable’ temperature possible. Probably 26℃ ~ or higher. The reason being is that Japan’s current power situation is on the shitter to put it bluntly. With Fukushima Dai-ichi all broked, and about 90% of Japan’s nuclear reactors on shut-down, the country is trying to conserve energy to not stress out the power sources already in effect.
So by setting the A/C at the most inane uncomfortable temperature possible, the machines don’t have to turn on thus not using energy and in result being eco friendly and putting one up for the team. Go Japan! 一緒にがんばろう！
It reminds me of this 13 hour eco special I watched with this idol group I like a few years back. Everything was all powered by people running and solar energy and all this other green shit until the final hour of the special where they simply doused the entire arena in bright lights, obviously powered by the local power plant. The irony was so funny I cried laughing. Oh, you tried. Have a gold star, NTV.
Anyway, there’s a interesting twist to this methodology the Japanese have put into place here.
While they strive to be eco and green and tree huggery, they seem to waste a lot of paper. There seems to be an obsession with killing a lot of trees to make a lot of paper to print useless, redundant things on them, to have them stamped with red ink, to then be shuffled across Japan to eventually come back to your desk or apartment.
I can’t even tell you the stacks of paper I have shoved on my genkan cabinet just from the first five days of getting settled into my apartment.
America is all about electronic this and electronic that. Even when you go shopping, you have the option of having your receipt emailed to you to reduce paper usage.
But we still laugh at the idea of recycling. LOL, them stupid ass tree hugger hipsters.
I don’t think we’re ever gonna get this green eco life style right, in America or in Japan. I think the world is just going to be consumed by humanity’s need of being a parasite onto the world. Though, needless to say, it is amusing to watch these insane efforts take into play.