As if Cool Biz weren’t aggravating enough, the Diet and administrative agencies are now getting ready for Stage 2: Warm Biz. Instead of turning down the air conditioning during the hottest months of summer, they want to turn down the heating during the coldest months of winter. So instead of seeing Diet speeches given in button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up, Sankei indicates we might see Diet speeches given in overcoats and mufflers.
The culprit appears to be Environment Minister Yuriko Koike, mistressmind behind the Cool Biz program, who apparently believes that air conditioning is going to lead to the end of the world as we know it. Compare Joi Ito’s comment on Cool Biz: “For some reason this kind of suffering feels very Japanese and annoying. There is something very ceremonial and inefficient about it.”
Maybe Warm Biz won’t be as bad, though. Wintertime street clothes would work just fine in a Warm Biz building: if you have to go into a heated building, just take your coat off. Still, it seems like a rather inadequate benefit for such a cost in discomfort.
Yes, the unsavory influence of this Egyptian Rasputina must be stopped and fast!
Rasputina is kind of a cool band. It would probably be hard for them to play their cellos and stuff with overcoats on though.
Or they could turn off the heat on subway cars. Nothing worse than a jam-packed car full of people in winter overcoats… with the heat turned way, way up.
What, and eliminate one of the few places in Japan where a gaijin tourist can actually feel WARM in winter, overcoat or not?
Why don’t they just create a vast grid of geothermal conduits to capture natural heat from the Earth and pipe it into the cities? Then, during the summertime, they could fill the conduits with water to cool the cities down!
Where’s my Nobel Prize for Awesomeness?
I’m down with pumping supercooled water from the ocean depths (just so long as it’s from within Japan’s EEZ, of course) but as for the steamp pipes, remember this?
“Four Dead After Steam Leaks at Japanese Nuclear Plant”:http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000101&sid=ac08G
I’ll wear an extra layer of clothing or two before I enter a building with superheated steam!