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Paper short abstract:

Despite the importance attached to the distinctiveness of the four seasons in Japan, historians have made little attempt to question how the country has coped with annual climactic fluctuations. Focusing on post-war Tokyo, this paper analyzes how the summer heat and humidity were negotiated.

Paper long abstract:

During the last decade or so, the promotion of international inbound tourism, as a new source of revenue to prop up the ailing domestic economy, has borne witness to campaigns and remarks stressing the distinctiveness of the four seasons (shiki). Despite work by literary scholars into the ideology of the four seasons, the construction of which was mainly instigated by the upper class in the early modern period through high culture, there has been relatively little attempt to either question how ideas about seasonality were worked out as everyday experiences or to historicize how modernization and urbanization impacted people’s relationship with the spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

Focusing on post-war Tokyo, specifically the period between the American occupation and economic high growth, this paper analyzes how heat and humidity—as lived experiences in the summer—were negotiated through an analysis of various sites of coolness and heat. As the population of Tokyo grew from eight to eleven million between 1955 and 1965 and major infrastructure projects changed the urban landscape, it shows how coping mechanisms for dealing with the heat and humidity were characterized, on the one hand, by heat-avoidance strategies that manifested themselves in a search for coolness in non-urban environments, in the home, and in shades created by new urban assemblages.

Yet it also demonstrates that the dictates of employment bore witness to paradoxical heat-inducing practices that manifested themselves in the not-so-cool clothes men and women wore, revealing the extent to which social and sexual norms inhibited the realization of individual corporeal coolness. As mechanical cooling made inroads into urban life, a shift from a passive to an active strategy of combating the summer emerged, resulting in inhabitants increasingly choosing not to leave the capital but to stay in the metropolis. Despite resistance to artificial coolness at home, where heat-avoidance strategies had been largely successful, the paper argues that the air-conditioner managed to establish itself first in the workplace, and then eventually in the home, as the needs of middle-class urban families made themselves felt.