CENTRAL HEATING

One standby item I dig out faithfully every winter that unfortunate folks abroad in the West know little or nothing of, much to their necessarily unspoken disappointment (rife indeed are the disappointments we know not of) is my good old haramaki. Or maybe my fashionably new haramaki.

Yes, when the days grow short and the temperature falls, when the skin gets bumpy and the snuggle factor begins to rise, when the spirit with spring in its heart but winter in its teeth calls for some sort of cuddle, that's when I feel sorry for all those shivery folks in the developed world who have to crank up the central heating merely because they don't have a haramaki handy.

I truly hope that doesn't include such a thinking person as yourself. And when you think about it, what better place to maki (wrap) than the hara (roughly: abdomen)? The ancient orientals knew all about these things. Long before infrared was made visible, they knew that major quantities of body heat were lost from the uncovered, or even conventionally clothed, hara.

A brief look at your handy anatomical model will confirm this. Note where the ribs end, and where the major organs are as a result exposed and essentially unprotected, sheltered from the world only by a smattering of muscle and a layer of skin. Shivering liver!! Icy bladder!! Snowy pancreas!! Chattering kidneys!! Frozen colon!!

And if you look closely at any of those ancient twelve-foot tall Japanese temple guardians, you'll see that the very center of their dynamic energy, the root of their ki, is the hara, firmly outthrust, and centered with a navel that looks like the satellite image of a typhoon (how well they understood the unity of energy in those days!).

Needless to say, the haramaki soon becomes an essential element of one's winter clothing here in the historically energy-conscious orient, where central heating is not yet the norm and you can go into any general store and get yourself a haramaki of cotton, wool or silk, even a self-heating haramaki, if you're of that persuasion, and lower your heating bills.

In the deeps of winter I sometimes think that perhaps Japan should organize some kind of relief effort and send haramaki out into the developed world to relieve the tremendous suffering caused by crushing monthly energy bills to heat an entire house when you only need to heat the occupant, but then I realize that the Japanese themselves are slowly but surely slipping out of life itself and into the intensive care of central heating, and I think maybe I should stock up on haramaki while they're still available.

On the other hand, though, with the big oil price rises looming incrementally the further we get down the centrally heated billion-lane expressway that is tomorrow, I think the haramaki could one day be, worldwide, the ideal form of central heating.

THE LIGHT BULB DEFICIT

I've been wearing haramaki for over 30 winters now - though for some reason not this year, could be my intensive winter regimen of chocorobics, or maybe it's that non-global non-warming, who can say...

Anyway, for all those decades the only people who wore haramaki outside their clothing (even in summertime!) were the generally tasteless big-bellied men of yesteryear who hung around pachinko parlors and for whom the external beige haramaki was a macho statement, especially with a pack of cigarettes tucked inside and a folded fan sticking out. Haramaki under the clothing was generally only for grandmas and grandpas and those who worked outdoors in winter, or people like me who lived in relatively unheated places.

Nevertheless each of those winters I dug out the old beige or gray (sometimes a daring pale blue) haramaki, looked like my grandfather's undershirt, I wondered why, WHY (like the anko bean paste in the local souvenir bun-- don't they ever put anything else in the bun?) didn't the haramaki makers make stylishly varied haramaki?

Took a few decades, but finally a light bulb went off over someone else's head, someone in a position to do something about the black hole of haramaki style, and PingMag has a nicely detailed article about it.... these will go like hotcakes, or better yet, buns with not chalky bean paste inside, but semi-sweet chocolate crème, maybe. Or even raspberry jam, or...

We need more light bulbs around here.