Heat Exchange: We went to Tokyo in July. What Were We Thinking?

I never understood dew point before, but now that I’ve seen it in action – felt its hot and spongy hands tightening around my throat – I know what a heartless bitch it is.

“Don’t go to Tokyo in July,” everybody said. “It’s too hot,” they said. “It’s too humid.”

“Look,” I said, cockily, “I’m from Washington, D.C. I can handle it. Heat and humidity is my middle name, which makes for a really weird birth certificate.”

Reader, I could barely handle it. I spent most of the trip wrapped in a carapace of my own sweat. And there was a moment when I briefly thought the heat might actually kill me. But more on that later.

The author with his littlest fan. (Photo by Ruth Pritchard-Kelly)

Of course I knew that it was going to be hot. When you pick up a Japan travel book and flip to the part headed “Best time to visit,” it doesn’t say “July.” But July is when my wife, Ruth, had a conference in Tokyo, so that’s when we went. And, overall, it was a great trip. Japan is a beautiful and fascinating country, the surface of which we barely scratched.

But, man, that surface was hot. Black-vinyl-roof-of-a-1976-Buick-Electra-parked-all- day-on-an-asphalt-parking-lot hot.

Oh, and humid. As our planet’s climate disintegrates, humans are coming up with fun new ways to describe just how uncomfortable we are. We used to just marvel at the thermometer and whether the temperature was bitterly low or painfully high. Then we started adding more terms so we could fine tune the details of our misery: windchill, heat index, “RealFeel,” dew point…

I never understood dew point before, but now that I’ve seen it in action — felt its hot and spongy hands tightening around my throat — I know what a heartless bitch it is.

For most of our time in Japan, the high temperature was in the mid-90s, with a dew point hovering around 73. Apparently, any dew point over 65 feels miserable. That’s because your body’s magic cooling mechanism — sweat — doesn’t work. Oh, you sweat, but that sweat can’t evaporate off your skin because the air is already too moist. The air’s like, “Keep your sweat. I’m good.” And so you walk around like I did, continually basted by my own juices. ¹

The Japanese have various ways of dealing with summer. One way is by wielding a parasol. It’s mainly women who do this, more, I think, to avoid darkening their skin or developing sun spots than to beat the heat.² Another is by fanning themselves, either with a hand fan or a tiny rechargeable portable electric fan.³ These fans come in all shapes and sizes and after a few days Ruth decided we had to get some.

You can get anything in Japan. You can get lots of different types of anything. We went to a store in Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood called Bic Camera, which is like a Best Buy on steroids. It’s seven floors of electrical stuff: cameras, yes, but also refrigerators, computers, hair dryers, desk lamps, watches…

The electric fan section was stocked with floor fans, table fans and hand fans, dozens of types of each. There were even little fans you could wear on a lanyard around your neck, angling them up to blow on your face. We opted for basic, three-speed fans, with handy wrist straps.

There’s only so much a tiny fan can do (dew point, remember?), so we tried to stay inside air-conditioned places during the hottest part of the day. The weather was a little cooler when we were in Hakone, a forested, mountainous area west of Tokyo known for its spas, or onsen. The water for the spas is heated by a volcano, which you can visit, breathing in the sulfur and channeling your inner pumice.

Volcano erupting? Run into a building!

There’s just no escaping the heat. That fact — there are more and more places on the planet where there’s just no escaping the heat — will increasingly affect everything humans do. That includes where they go on vacation. It’s hard to enjoy a place when you’re sweating like a high school wrestler in a rubber suit trying to make his weight. ⁴

Our heat tolerance was complicated by a couple of things. One is that we’re old. (Ruth and I have an average age of 62.) The other is that we both came down with Covid, first me, then Ruth. It was at the very end of our trip, affecting only the last few days. But I think it sapped our strength. And so when we couldn’t for the life of us get a cab to take us to the airport and decided to take the subway, we were in a diminished state.

Japan has great public transportation, but some of Tokyo’s subway stations are so massive — spread over many city blocks — that you can walk nearly a mile when transferring from one line to the next. There aren’t as many escalators as you might hope, either, which isn’t a problem when you’re feeling healthy and it’s a comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit, with a dew point of 45, but challenging when it’s 97 degrees, with a dew point of 81, and your blood is filled with spiky balls of coronavirus.

There was a point when we had to transit the sprawling Shibuya Station. This involved hiking through the overheated station, laden with our bags,⁵ jostling through the omnipresent crowds that surged ever forward. Our route to the next line involved crossing over the railroad tracks of Shibuya, which meant climbing up, up, up a flight of steps and then going through a large, enclosed metal catwalk that seemed designed to flash grill all who dared enter it.

I could feel the perspiration pouring off my body. I started to doubt my ability to continue, wondered if I might drop my bags and fall to the ground. I thought Ruth might do the same, must do the same. I wondered if she would welcome the cool embrace of the mortuary slab as much as I. But when I turned I saw she was just a few steps behind me, her face grim but determined. We soldiered on.

We made it to the airport in time, feeling like human sous vide but alive. We stripped off our sodden clothes and stuffed them in plastic bags, like bathing suits after a trip to the beach, then changed into dry clothes for the flight home.

Here’s an irony: I lived in Japan as a boy. I was 3 when I left, so I have no memory of it, but for some reason I grew up knowing exactly one Japanese phrase: atsui desu ne.⁶

It means, “Hot, isn’t it?”

Cool Runnings

Thanks for joining me here. I hope to write two or three times a week about whatever’s on my mind — sort of like my column in The Washington Post but without the deadline, the rigor, the safety net or the salary.

And lest you think Japan was all heat and misery, here’s a couple photos of the deer in Nara:

1. Well, you’ll be basted by your juices.

2. Many women also wear long gloves. They reminded me of Jacqueline Bouvier at a debutante ball.

3. Or by opening the refrigerated drinks cooler at a convenience store and sticking their entire head in, as I saw a man do in Nara. I thought he was looking for a particular drink, but he was just chillin’, literally.

4. The World Economic Forum released a report last year titled “Rising global temperatures are already affecting the tourism industry — here’s how.”

5. I’m proud that we didn’t pack as much as we normally do, but we did buy a bunch of stuff to cart home: replica baseball jerseys and caps (Hiroshima Carp and Tokyo Yakult Swallows), T-shirts, fans (electric and hand), face cloths, tea towel, fashion magazines and a vintage Olympus Pen FV 35mm half-frame film camera (with six lenses!).

6. 暑いですね。