by Cecilia Luzi

It is the end of February and winter in Kyūshū is almost over. Days are longer and temperatures during the day rise above 15 degrees on some days. According to the people living here, the region did not experience a particularly harsh or long winter this year. However, I feel like this was the longest and coldest winter of my life and I believe this is related to the experience of living in traditional Japanese houses.

Winter in North Kyūshū.
Copyright © Cecilia Luzi 2022

During my four months of field research in Buzen, I lived in no less than five different places, three of which were large traditional houses. My first residence was a former agricultural warehouse next to the main house that had been renovated about 10 years ago. The owners, retirees who had returned to Buzen after their working years in Kitakyushu, had used it as a guest house until the outbreak of the pandemic. Although the renovation work was thorough and meticulous, getting up from the futon in the morning, even in November, always required some determination and strength of mind. The toilet was in a small room at the end of the veranda, and inside the temperature was not much different from outside. There was a small wood-burning stove that heated the two large adjoining rooms: a ground-level room that contained the kitchen and a dining table, and a room lined with tatami mats. The owner went every week to the forest, which could be reached by climbing a small hill, to collect wood. He taught me how to cut logs with the electric saw and the hacksaw, and how to light the fire so that it would burn well and heat the whole house properly. In mid-December, the weather forecast announced a big snowfall for the region, and one morning we woke up to over 40 cm of snow. For a week, my son and I ate, wrote, played and slept in front of the small wood stove. Every evening, after he bathed, I warmed his clothes on the stove and dressed him in front of the fire, so he wouldn’t get too cold.

Living with children in an old Japanese house is fun, but very cold in the winter.
Copyright © Cecilia Luzi 2022

In January, I moved into another old house where an elderly lady, now deceased, had lived until recently. The house was huge, and in order to have a space that could be easily heated, my son and I occupied only two rooms with a kitchen and toilet. This time there was no wood stove and to keep warm we used an air conditioner and a small kerosene stove, which I had to turn off before going to bed for safety reasons. Towards the middle of the month, a new wave of frost came. The night before the expected snowfall, the owner and neighbor, advised me to prepare pots and kettles of water because the pipes might freeze during the night. When I woke up in my room, it was 9 degrees Celsius, and no hot water came out of the kitchen tap for three days.

The warmest room in the house.
Copyright © Cecilia Luzi 2023

The house we currently live in is a trial house. It has a 5-meter ceiling at the entrance, and the sliding glass walls of the room have a three-millimeter air gap to the outside. You can see the floor underneath between the floorboards in the hallway. The first night, despite the warm air conditioning, I couldn’t fall asleep because the cold air was flowing through the tatami and I could feel it even through my pajamas and heavy socks. The next day, I went to an electrical store to buy an electric heater and a hot water bottle. Unfortunately, as the saleswoman explained, all the units were out of stock. I had to drive all the way to the next big city to find the last hot water bottle and a mini heater on the empty shelves.

One of the houses we have lived in.
Copyright © Cecilia Luzi 2023

Obviously, I am not the only one who feels the cold. The homes of the people I visit and meet are all equipped with various improvised heating methods that serve more to satisfy immediate needs than to create comfortable living conditions. These include electric stoves, gas stoves, kerosene stoves, hot water bags, and heat patches tucked under clothing or into shoes. Certainly, the winter in Kyūshū is no harsher than a Berlin winter, but the living comfort is different. In recent months, I’ve been wondering why living conditions are so difficult in those old homes in the countryside. I have spoken at length with those born and raised in the city who have made a conscious choice to live in these homes, and this coldness reveals in part the radical nature of their decision. For many of them, these houses are full of life, they have stories to tell from the daily lives of their former families. But all in all, the Kyūshū winter is quite short, and living in a traditional house brings many benefits.

The great view through the large glass walls overlooking the forested mountains.
Copyright © Cecilia Luzi 2022

Through the large glass walls overlooking the forested mountains, I could see how the seasons change the landscape from autumn to winter and from winter to early spring. There is no thermal insulation, just as there is no sound insulation. So I can hear the river running just below the road, the deer and tanuki that come undisturbed late at night to eat the persimmons hanging to dry outside the back door, or the sound of the wind rushing through the gaps in the fusuma. The cold and the sounds remind us that we are embedded in nature, for better or worse. Since only glass, straw, earth and rice paper separate the rooms, the boundary between the outside and the inside of the house is much thinner than in any country house I have lived in Europe.