From Endurance to Escape: The Tokyo Summer as Lived Experience in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This article investigates how heat and humidity—as lived experiences in the summer—were negotiated through an analysis of various sites of coolness and heat, focusing on the period between the American occupation and high economic growth in postwar Tokyo. As the population of Tokyo grew from eight to eleven million between 1955 and 1965 and major infrastructure projects changed the urban landscape, the study shows how coping mechanisms for dealing with the heat and humidity were characterized, on one hand, by heat avoidance strategies that manifested themselves in a search for coolness in nonurban environments, in the home, and in shades created by new urban assemblages. Yet the article also demonstrates that the dictates of employment bore witness to paradoxical heat-inducing practices embodied 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 it. Despite resistance to artificial coolness at home, where heat avoidance strategies had been largely successful, the article finds 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 living in more western-style apartment blocks made themselves felt.