How Social Norms Affect Heat Risks In Japan

Eating unagi (eel) is one traditionally Japanese response to uncomfortable heat. Another is installing lightweight, tinkling wind chimes, as some places have done during the unprecedented heatwaves of Japan’s summer 2022.

As with eel, wind chimes don’t have an obvious link to cooling down. It’s believed that the mechanism is more psychological.

“Some senses impact on the ability of judging their own feelings. For example, when Japanese people hear wind chimes, they feel calm and cool,” according to Shigenori Asai, the deputy director of the nonprofit Japan Water Forum (JWF).

2022 marks the 20th year that the JWF has run its uchimizu campaign, another culturally specific practice that some people view as a heat-relieving measure. Uchimizu simply involves sprinkling water outside. The JWF encourages people and organizations around the country to engage in uchimizu to cool down small areas for short periods of time.

“Uchimizu is an old custom in Japan,” Asai says, which has seen a resurgence since the Covid-19 pandemic and the increase in time spent at home. A group in notoriously hot Kumagaya has even produced a memorable song-and-dance number about uchimizu. It’s most commonly practiced around the home, according to Asai, although a number of shops also pour water onto sidewalks for both cleaning and cooling purposes.

To conserve water, “We set a rule not to use tap water, but to use used water and collected rainwater,” Asai says. However, “storing rainwater and reusing rainwater are less common than before.”

Asai acknowledges that the effect might only last 10 minutes, and that it may not be helpful in high humidity. But he believes there’s a broader benefit, if the uchimizu campaign draws more attention to both water conservation and the need to protect against the heat.

“We can tackle the heat problem ourselves,” he declares.

Kazutaka Oka, who researches climate adaptation at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, is diplomatic about this practice, which can in some cases worsen humidity.

“In terms of science, it doesn’t have a big impact. But it has other meanings,” Oka says, such as educational and cultural associations. “I’m a scientist, but I also think culture is very important.”

Culture can sit uncomfortably alongside science in discussions of climate adaptation. But it’s useful to understand how the two are interlinked.

For instance, physical toughness is valued in different ways depending on gender and social roles. Crews of sanitation workers provide one example. This is a profession prone to heatstroke, according to the Tokyo Sanitation Workers’ Union, given the very physical nature of the job.

Takayuki Sakabe, the vice president of the union, says, “The summer is probably the hardest season all year round.” It’s more arduous than the rainy season, the cold, or even typhoons, he believes. “Even the veteran workers can still get it…They can’t ever get accustomed to the heat.”

Shuichiro Tada, the union’s secretary general, points out that this is a growing risk. “In recent years the temperature isn’t climbing gradually. It’s a sudden rise.” This makes it harder for bodies to acclimatize.

The social aspects of the work can be both helpful and harmful. On the one hand, one member of the three- or four-person crew can call the office and request a pickup if a coworker is showing symptoms of heatstroke.

On the other hand, Tada says, in a relationship between a senpai and a kōhai (a senior and a junior), the older person might be too proud to show weakness. They might attempt to mask just how ill they’re getting from the heat, until it’s too late.

Another way that social expectations affect sanitation workers in the heat is that residents sometimes complain when they see sanitation workers taking breaks. There have been cases of people publicly shaming sanitation workers, or even filing complaints, about sanitation workers not wearing face masks or resting with drinks. The worry is that this leads to these workers not protecting themselves from high heat – rest and hydration being critical forms of protection.

Osamu Tadachi, the general secretary of the National Council of Japanese Firefighters and Ambulance Workers, reports the same phenomenon for paramedics, who also carry out physically demanding work. According to Tadachi, “In the UK and US, firefighters and paramedics are treated as heroes. But in Japan, you need to be perfect.” He says there’s a perception that public workers need to be a model for the rest of society – even if that includes going without rest in public.

Tadachi describes Koshigaya, where he works, as an exposed plain. Much of the city is industrial or purely residential, so that for people outside, “You have nowhere to escape.”

On the day I spend in Koshigaya, it has Japan’s highest wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT, which measures heat stress in direct sunlight), at 35. This is well past 33, the threshold at which the Japan Meteorological Agency begins issuing heatstroke alerts. It’s so scorching, and there are so few shaded areas, that I can feel the metal rims of my sunglasses heating up on my face.

The severe heat in this situation is due to a combination of climate change, geography, and heat-trapping urban design. This shows that it’s dangerous to attribute too much of heat vulnerability to cultural aspects. After all, the physiology of heat vulnerability, the inequality of public health risks, and the steady increase in temperatures exist around the world. And a focus on culture risks detracting from governmental and institutional responses to climate change, which will ultimately have a greater impact than individual measures.

On the other hand, it can be instructive to view how certain social norms might inhibit or contribute to heat protection. Japan’s culture of public health mascots inevitably includes cute mascots specifically for heat prevention (even if they’re little used). This is the kind of messaging tactic that could help spread awareness of heat health risks, perhaps without causing people to turn off their attention.

Then there are all the common practices that aid heat resilience. One very visible example is parasols, which are widely carried by Japanese women during the summer. Parasols are simple yet effective at shielding against solar radiation, yet extremely underused in many other countries. Next week, Kumagaya will start distributing fiberglass umbrellas to children for this reason, though the measure comes months after the record-setting heatwave of early summer.

A dizzying array of personal cooling products are also available in Japan, even if these have varying degrees of effectiveness and marketing gimmickry.

The tech is advancing all the time, but there remain certain limits to what cooling devices can do, and who can afford them. For instance, the Tokyo Sanitation Workers’ Union, some of whose members have been testing out cooling jackets, reports that many of these remain too awkward to move in and keep charged.

Instead the union is calling for lighter loads for its members in the summer, reduced from five rubbish-collection trips per day to four. Under this proposal, local governments would contract other workers to make up for the shortfall.

Both the construction and sanitation work industries are aging, as the average worker age rises and as few younger workers enter the field. Workers are also bumping into ingrained ideas about when work should be performed, and how.

Ultimately, as the country with the oldest population, with a strong legacy of disaster risk management, Japan will be an important touchstone for the rest of the world when it comes to managing the health impacts of extreme heat.

The government has set the goal of zero deaths from heatstroke, without establishing a specific year to reach that goal. Hopefully this milestone will be accomplished sooner rather than later. Thousands of lives hang in the balance each year.

The other article in this series addresses social isolation and extreme heat.

Reporting for this article was supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, through the Abe Fellowship for Journalists. This story was reported with Chie Matsumoto.