Clang clang! Clang clang! Right outside my window right there’s a fire truck driving by slowly, ringing a bell and playing a recorded voice: “This is the community volunteer fire-fighting brigade. Please remember to extinguish all flames before going to sleep tonight.” Japan lacks American-style central heating in its homes, with the majority of people using kerosene heaters to warm individual rooms, although there are other options such as “fan-heaters” which use kerosene to heat the room but electricity to run a fan and regulate the temperature, and shut off the flame every three hours for safety and ventilation purposes. With so many heaters like this in use, it’s not uncommon for fires to occur, and the Japanese are extremely cautious about making sure they don’t, which is why when it gets cold out, our small local fire department will make the rounds and remind people of how important it is to make sure heaters are turned off before bed. Fire has long been the bane of Japan, a country with a high population living in homes of wood and paper, and the tradition of fighting fires goes back to the Edo Period. Over the past few years, Japan has — finally, from my American-centric point of view — gotten more serious some of the public safety concepts that we take for granted, and now requires that smoke detectors be installed in all new homes.
