大雪

大雪, around the seventh of December — the fortnight snow stops being a possibility and becomes a fact, at least on the Japan Sea side. Some of those towns get buried. Aomori gets eight metres in a season, which is among the snowiest inhabited places anywhere.

Which is a reasonable moment to talk about the single greatest piece of furniture ever designed.

A low table, a heating element under the tabletop, and a heavy quilt sandwiched between the frame and the top so the warmth stays underneath. You sit on the floor with your legs in it. Nothing else in the room gets heated at all.

That is the point, and it is a very old solution to a specific problem: traditional Japanese houses are built for surviving August, not January — paper screens, no insulation, designed to let air through. Heating the room is hopeless. Heating *the people* works.

The cultural consequence is that in winter the family collects in one room around one table, because that is where it is warm. There is a well-worn joke about being unable to leave the こたつ, and a specific image that goes with it: a cat asleep underneath, and a bowl of mandarins on top.

The kana

The *r* row — except it isn't really an *r*.

ら, り, る, れ, ろ sit somewhere between English *r*, *l* and *d*. The tongue taps the roof of the mouth once, lightly, the way it does in the middle of *very* said quickly. It is much closer to the Filipino *r* in *araw* than to an English one, so you have less to unlearn here than an English speaker does.

Do not roll it. One tap.

Shapes to watch: る and ろ differ only by the loop at the bottom, and れ is the ね you learned in chapter five with a different right-hand side.