Lessons in the Orient: Frostnip

Autumn dips into the shadow of winter.Lashes of rain soak me followed by biting cold. My trainers are saturated and my socks are dampened. The ten minute walk from the school back home has revived the frostnip that I contracted in the Orient.

I only spent ten minutes outside there too. Outside my parents-in-laws house in two foot of snow with a shovel and warm clothes before I felt the panging of sore toes. I tried to carry on shovelling the drift to make access for the cars but it persisted, so I dived into the house, shouting my concerns to my wife.

“My middle toes of my left foot are numbing and I have only just gone out there.”

“Let’s have a look!” I follow her command peeling back my socks to reveal my afflicted pale appendages.

“Ooh! They are white! Get them in the bath!” She says ushering me to the bathroom.

I roll back the slatted cover of the deep bath that is traditionally filled with very hot water and covered to keep it cool when not in use. I dip my foot in tentatively. There is a tingling but the pain is not as much as I expected. As I submerge it more, the heat of the bathwater starts to override any sensation until the foot is accustomed to the water and then once again it returns but the numbness remains.

Eventually, the heat of the water does return my circulation but I remain curious as to why they numbed up so fast. Yes it was minus temperature, but it was only ten minutes. It was a couple of weeks later when the penny finally dropped.

The boots had been very cold when we tested them. They were much colder than other footwear that occupied the porch area. The mystery lay not in any mystical sense but in the kind of boots they were. When we weathered in England’s winters we had done so with the luxury of central heating. In Japanese houses, central heating is quite rare and this house was no exception. In England the central heating kept the plates of metal that capped the toes of safety boots warm, whilst a house without central heating with an unheated porch made the same plates of metal colder.

So if you are going to visit Japan and you will not be staying in a ‘purposefully built for gaijins’ hotel make sure you fully ‘dress for the occasion’. Otherwise you may get frost nipped like me. Enjoy your toes.