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You wake up because you are wet. Not from rain, from yourself. It is the middle of a summer night in Edeto, and the air inside your tiny room is so thick you could almost drink it. Your sleeping mat is damp. A mosquito is
How Edo-period Japanese survived brutal summers without air conditioning: wooden houses built for heat, bamboo summer dressing, street water sprinkling, wind bells, and cooling tricks.
Key Takeaways
- Pre-modern Japanese cooling relied on architecture, airflow design, and evaporative methods rather than machines.
- Community-wide practices such as street sprinkling were far more effective than individual efforts.
- Cultural adaptation turned harsh summers into seasonal celebrations involving fireworks, river parties, and sensory comforts.
What the video covers
- Summers in Edo (present-day Tokyo) around 1810 were hot, humid, and crowded, with about a million people in the city and no air conditioning.
- Yoshida Kenko's essay advised building houses for summer, since winter can be endured with extra layers but summer heat cannot be escaped.
- Traditional houses used deep eaves to shade walls in summer while admitting winter sun, raised floors for airflow, and sliding panels that opened the home to breezes.
- Wealthy families performed a 'summer dressing' of their homes, swapping heavy fusuma for reed blinds, hanging bamboo sudare, and laying cool rattan mats.
- Ordinary residents lived in cramped nagaya row houses with little ventilation, so they cooled the street instead of the house.
- Uchimizu, sprinkling leftover water on streets at dusk or morning, used evaporative cooling to lower ground temperature and draw in a breeze.
- Wind bells, goldfish, and morning glories provided sensory and psychological relief from the heat.
- Clothing made of hemp and ramie kept fabric away from the skin, and cool water was sourced from wells, including chilling melons and watermelons.
- Ice was a luxury; it was imported from distant domains and stored in ice houses, reserved for aristocrats.
- Summer leisure included river boat parties on the Sumida River, mosquito nets, and festivals that began as rituals against epidemics.
Chapters
- 00:00A Sweltering Summer Night in Edo
- 01:38Setting the Scene: Edo in 1810
- 03:16Architecture Designed for Summer
- 04:49Life in the Nagaya Row Houses
- 06:20Street Sprinkling and Evaporative Cooling
- 07:57Wind Bells, Goldfish, and Cooling Comforts
- 09:34Cool Clothing, Ice, and River Festivals
- 11:27Summer Festivals and the Haiku Poet's Legacy
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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singing somewhere near your ear. You reach for a paper fan, wave it twice, and give up. There is no window to open because the whole front wall of your home is already open. There is no breeze because your home sits at the back of a
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narrow alley behind three other rows of houses. Welcome to summer in the biggest city in the world. Here is the strange part. Japanese houses were made of wood, paper, and straw. No glass, no insulation, no machines. Edeto summers
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were long, wet, and sticky. And around a million people were packed into the city. And yet, they did not just survive those summers. They turned them into a season of fireworks, river parties, cold sweets, and wind chimes. So, how did
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Japanese people survive summer without air conditioning? And why did one famous writer say that a house should be built for summer, not for winter? Stay with me because later you will learn about a trick that cost nothing but a bucket of
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water. You will meet a poor poet who measured his life in mosquito bites. And at the very end, you will find out why some of the coolest summer clothes in Japan were made on top of snow. Let's start with where you are. It is the
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sixth month of the year 1810. You are a young carpenter in Edeto, the city we now call Tokyo. In the old Japanese calendar, the sixth month falls around July, right in the hottest stretch of the year. The rainy season has just
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ended. The sun comes up early, the ground steams, and by midday, the wooden streets shimmer. Historians think Japan was a little cooler back then than it is today. The world was still in a long cold spell that scientists call the
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little ice age. But a little cooler does not mean comfortable. Edeto sat on a bay beside rivers and canals and the summer air was heavy with water. Sweat does not dry in air like that. It just sits on
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you. So before we look at fans and ice and fireworks, we need to look at the first and most important weapon the Japanese had against the heat. the house itself. Around the year 1330, a Buddhist monk named Yoshida Kenko wrote a book of
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short essays called Essays in idleness. In one of them, he gives a piece of advice that Japanese architects still quote today. A house, he says, should be built with summer in mind. In winter, you can live anywhere, but a house that
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is bad in the heat is unbearable. Think about how strange that sounds to someone from Europe or Russia. In cold countries, the first job of a house is to keep the heat in. Thick walls, small windows, a big stove. Kenko says the
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opposite. Build for the season that is hardest to escape. You can always put on another layer in winter. In summer, you can only take so many off. So, a traditional Japanese house was designed like a giant sun shade that happened to
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have a floor. The roof had deep eaves that stuck far out past the walls. In summer, the sun rides high in the sky, so those eaves threw a deep shadow over the walls and the veranda. In winter, the sun sits low, so its light slid
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under the same eaves and reached inside. One roof, two seasons. The floor was raised off the ground on wooden posts, so air could move underneath and damp earth would not soak into the tatami.
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And most of the walls were not really walls at all. They were sliding panels, paper shouji, thick fusuma doors, wooden shutters. On a hot day, you could slide them away or lift them out completely, and the whole house turned into one long
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open room with the wind running straight through it. And then when summer came, wealthy families did something that sounds almost like magic. They changed the house. This was called natsu, the summer dressing of a home. The heavy Fusuma doors were taken out and stored
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away. In their place went doors made of thin reeds or bamboo called yoshido. You could see light through them and air went straight through them, but they still gave you some privacy. Bamboo blinds called sudare were hung under the
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eaves to block the low afternoon sun. And on top of the tatami, people laid cool mats woven from rattan or thin strips of bamboo which felt smooth and cold under your skin. In other words, they did not just survive in the same
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house all year. They had a winter house and a summer house. and it was the same building. But that is the house of a rich merchant or a high-ranking samurai.
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You are a carpenter. So, let's go back to your alley. Most ordinary people in Edeto lived in long wooden row houses called Nadaya. A typical unit was about 9 ft wide and 12 ft deep, around 10 square meters for a whole family. You
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walked in through a sliding door onto a small dirt floor with a stove and a water jar, stepped up onto a little room of straw mats, and that was it. Kitchen, bedroom, living room, workshop, all in one. The Nagaya stood in rows behind the
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shops that faced the main street. To get home, you walked through a gap between two shops into a narrow alley with a drain running down the middle. At the end of the alley, there was a shared well, a shared toilet, and a shared
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rubbish heap. In that kind of place, there are no deep eaves and no rattan mats. There is no back garden to pull the breeze through. The front of your home is a sliding door, and the back is your neighbor's wall. On a still night,
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the air in the alley just stands there like water in a jar. So, how did you survive? You did what everyone in your alley did. You stopped trying to cool the house and started cooling the street. Every summer evening as the sun
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went down, people came out of their homes with buckets and ladles and threw water onto the ground, onto the dirt in front of the door, onto the stones, onto the street. This was called uchimizu, sprinkling water. It sounds like a small
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thing. It was not. When water evaporates, it takes heat with it. That is exactly why sweat cools you down.
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Sprinkle a street at sunset and the ground that has been baking all day starts to give up its heat. The dust settles. The air near the ground becomes noticeably cooler and fresher. And because hot air rises, the cooler air
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flows in to take its place. So, a still evening can suddenly gain a small breeze. Here is the clever part. People did not use clean drinking water for this. They used what was left over.
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Water from washing rice, water from washing the dishes, the water from yesterday's bath. In a city where every bucket had to be hauled up from a well, nothing was wasted. And that is the trick I promised you. A cooling system
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that cost nothing but a bucket of used water. And that worked better if your whole street did it together. There was one more rule. You did it in the morning or in the evening. Never at noon. Throw water on a hot street at midday and it
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just turns into steam and makes the air even more humid. Every child in Edeto learned that the hard way. Now, the next weapon against the heat is one that a scientist might laugh at. People in Edeto did not only cool their bodies,
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they cooled their minds. Hang a small bell under your eaves, and every breath of wind makes it ring. These were called fing wind bells. Bronze wind bells had hung at temples for centuries. But in the Edeto period, glass ones appeared,
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and people loved them. The sound told you that a breeze was coming, sometimes before you could even feel it. Buy a goldfish from the goldfish seller who walks through the alleys in summer and put it in a glass bowl or a wooden tub.
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Watching it swim is like watching cold water move. Grow morning glories up a bamboo frame by your door. In the years around 1810, Edeto went crazy for morning glories. People bred strange new colors and shapes and showed them off to
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their neighbors early in the morning before the heat arrived. None of this lowers the temperature by a single degree. But anyone who has listened to rain on a hot night knows that feeling cool is not only about the thermometer.
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The Japanese even have a word for this suzi. It means cool, but it is a pleasant, refreshing kind of cool. And a huge part of Edeto summer culture was simply about creating that feeling. So far, we have the house and the street.
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Now, let's look at what you are wearing. And here things get strict. In the Edeto period, the Shogun's government set fixed dates for changing clothes. This was called for samurai on duty. It worked like a uniform rule. From the first day of the
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fourth month, you wore a lined kimono called awaset. From the fifth day of the fifth month, you switched to a thin unlined summer robe called katabira, usually made of hemp or ramy. In autumn, you went back to the lined kimono. And
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from the ninth day of the 9th month, you wore a kimono stuffed with cotton padding for winter. Ordinary towns people followed the same rhythm, more or less, and changing clothes was not as easy as opening a different drawer. Many
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families did not own separate summer and winter outfits at all. In spring, they unpicked the seams of their winter kimono, pulled out the cotton padding, and sewed it back together as a lighter robe. In autumn, they did the opposite.
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There is even a Japanese family name that remembers this. It is written with the characters for the first day of the fourth month, but it is read as watanuki, which means pulling out the cotton. The fabric mattered more than
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anything. Cotton was common by 1810, but for the hottest days, the best summer cloth was hemp and rammy. These plant fibers are stiff and crisp, so the cloth stands away from your skin instead of sticking to it, and air can move
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underneath. A good hemp robe felt cool in your hand even before you put it on.
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Now, here's the part that seems unfair. The people who suffered most in the heat were often the ones at the top. A samurai on duty could not just take his clothes off. Even in the middle of summer, an official going to work at
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Edeto Castle had to wear formal dress. A kimono with stiff winged shoulders and wide trousers called a kamishimo, plus two swords at his hip. In summer, that outfit was made of hemp, but it was still a full uniform with several layers
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worn in rooms full of other men in the same uniform. Meanwhile, down in the street, the porters, boatman, and laborers often worked in nothing but a loin cloth and a towel tied around the head. Foreign visitors in the 1850s and
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1860s were shocked to see how much skin ordinary Japanese people showed in summer. For a man hauling rice bags on a hot day, it was simply common sense. In fact, it was not the shogun who finally stopped it. In 1872, a few years after
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the samurai government fell, the new government in Tokyo issued rules that banned going naked or half naked in public. One big reason was embarrassment. Japan was opening up to the west and officials worried what foreigners would think. If you are
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enjoying this trip through an edeto summer, now is a good moment to subscribe. It costs nothing and this channel is all about how people actually lived in old Japan. the heat, the cold, the food, and the strange little tricks
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that made it all work. Now the sun is up again and you are hungry. So what do you eat when it is too hot to eat? Let's start with something you would never expect. Hot, sweet rice drink. Amazake
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is a thick sweet drink made from rice and koji, the same mold used to make sake and miso. It contains almost no alcohol. Today, many people think of it as a winter drink, but in old Japanese poetry, it is a word for summer. In
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Kyoto and Osaka, Amazake sellers came out on summer evenings, and in Edeto, you could buy it all year round. People drank it to fight summer tiredness, the heavy, sleepy feeling that came when the heat made you lose your appetite. Modern
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writers sometimes call it a drinkable IV drip because it is full of sugars and nutrients that are easy to absorb. Then there is the cold water cellar. On hot days, a man walked through the streets with two buckets on a pole across his
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shoulders, calling out, "Hi, hi," which means cold, cold. Inside the buckets was fresh, cool water. For a few coins, he poured you a cup, dropped in some sugar, and a few little white rice dumplings called shiratama. A writer named
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Kitagawa Morisada, who carefully recorded Edeto Street Life, noted that a cup cost 4mon, and if you wanted more sugar, you paid more. How did the water stay cold without ice? Wells. Deep wells in Edeto stayed cool all summer and the
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water seller simply filled his buckets from them. The same trick worked at home. If you had a watermelon or a melon, you put it in a bucket and lowered it into the well. A few hours later, you pulled it up chilled. The
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well was Edeto's refrigerator. And then there is eel. Today, on a summer day called Noinohi, Japanese people eat grilled eel brushed with sweet sauce.
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You will often hear that this custom was invented in the 1700s by a clever scholar named Hinaga Genai, who supposedly helped an eel shop sell more eel in summer by putting up a sign telling people to eat it on that day. It
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is a great story, but historians have not found any document from Gennai's own time that proves it. It is probably a legend. What is real is much older. In the Manoshu, a collection of poems from the 700s, the poet Otoono Yakamoi teases
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a friend who is incredibly thin. He tells him that eel is good for summer weight loss, so he should go and catch one. In the next poem, he adds that his friend should be careful not to be swept
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away by the river while trying. So, the idea that eel gives you strength in summer is more than a thousand years old. It started as a joke between friends. Now, what about ice? Surely someone in Japan had ice in summer. They
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did, just not you. For centuries, Japanese lords stored winter ice and snow in special pits called himo ice houses dug into shady mountain slopes and packed with straw. A thousand years ago, the court writer Seaagon listed shaved ice with sweet syrup served in a
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new metal bowl as one of the most elegant things in the world. Elegant and only for aristocrats. In the Edeto period, there is a famous story that the Kaga domain far away on the Sea of Japan coast sent ice from its ice houses to
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the Shogun every summer on the first day of the sixth month. Runners carried it across the mountains to Edeto, racing against the melt. It is a wonderful image, but historians point out that the Kaga domain's own records do not clearly
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confirm it. What we do know is that people in Kanazawa still celebrate that day by eating special sweet buns called Himurro Manju. If you cannot have the ice, at least you can have the bun. For ordinary people, real ice only became
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normal after the samurai age. In the 1860s, ice was shipped into Yokohama all the way from Boston across two oceans.
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Imagine telling a carpenter in 1810 that one day people would sail ice around the world just to sell it to him. Now it is evening and this is the part of summer Edeto people actually loved. As the sun
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goes down, the city comes outside. Shopkeepers put wooden benches in front of their shops. Neighbors sit on their doorsteps in thin cotton robes, fanning themselves and gossiping. Children chase each other through the freshly sprinkled streets. This was called Yuzuumi,
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enjoying the cool of the evening. And the best place to do it was the river.
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On the 28th day of the fth month, the Sumida River was officially open for the summer at Yoboku Bridge. From that day for about 3 months, people were allowed to go out on the river in pleasure boats for evening parties. Rich merchants
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rented roofed boats with lanterns, food, and musicians. Small boats sold snacks and drinks to the bigger ones. Thousands of people crowded onto the bridge and the riverbanks just to feel the air moving over the water. And they had
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fireworks. The usual story says that river fireworks at Yoku began in 1733 when the shogun Tokugawa Yoshimun held a ceremony for the many people who had died in a terrible famine the year before. Some historians now question that story. But by 1810, fireworks over
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the Sumida were a summer tradition, and two rival firework makers, Kagya and Tamaya, competed to impress the crowd.
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When a good one burst, people on the bridge shouted the makers names. Tamaya, Kaga. People in Japan still shout tamaya at fireworks today, more than 200 years later. So, the hottest season of the year was also the season of the biggest
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parties. Survival Edeto style. But eventually, the party ends and you have to go home. Back to the alley, back to the heat, and back to the real enemy of an Edeto summer night, mosquitoes. Edeto was full of canals, ditches, rice
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fields, and water jars. In other words, it was a mosquito paradise. And without screens on the windows, the only thing standing between you and a night of bites was a kaya, a mosquito net. A kaya was not a small net over the bed. It was
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a whole room made of fabric hung from hooks in the corners of the ceiling, big enough for the whole family to sleep inside. In early summer, net sellers walked the streets calling out their wares in a long, slow, singing voice.
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The most famous nets were dyed a soft green with a red border. One old company from the Omi region, which still exists today, tells the story that its founder chose the green because it looked cool and calming, like fresh leaves. There
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was an art to getting inside. You fanned the bottom of the net to chase away any mosquitoes, lifted the edge, and slipped in quickly, low and fast, so none could follow you. Every Eeochild knew the move. Before you went in, you might also
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burn a smoky little fire of dried leaves, wood shavings, or pine needles near the door. This was called kayi, the mosquito chasing fire. It made the room smell like a campfire, but the smoke drove the insects away. What you
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definitely did not have was the green spiral mosquito coil that every Japanese summer is famous for today. That was invented much later. A businessman named Uama Aido created a stick-shaped insect repelling incense in 1890. And the famous spiral shape came a few years
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after that. Reportedly inspired by his wife who saw a coiled snake. So if you ever see an old samurai movie with a mosquito coil in it, now you know that is a mistake. Of course, even with all of these tricks, summer could be
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dangerous. The people of Edeto had words for heat sickness. They talked about being struck by the heat. Shokiatari when someone became dizzy, sick, and weak in the hottest days. Food spoiled quickly. stomach illnesses spread. And the summer festivals that look so joyful
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today often began as something darker. The great Geon festival in Kyoto started in the 9th century as a ritual to calm the spirits that people believed caused epidemics. People fought back with what they had. One of the most famous summer
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medicines was bioto, a tea made from loquat leaves and other herbs. Its main shop was on Karasuma Street in Kyoto with a branch in Edeto. And in summer, they did something very modern. They gave it away. According to an
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encyclopedia from 1712, the shops prepared the tea in front of the store and let anyone passing by drink it for free. Street sellers carried it around in a box with a kettle, brewing cups for tired people on the road. It was free
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samples 300 years ago. And then there was the bath. Most ordinary people did not have a bath at home, so they went to the public bath house, the sento, often everyday. On the hottest days, many people also took a guild. You filled a
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big wooden tub with water, left it in the sun until it warmed up a little, and then sat in it in the backyard or the alley, washing off the sweat of the day.
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So now we have the house, the street, the sounds, the clothes, the food, the river, and the net. But numbers and customs only tell you so much. To really feel an Edeto summer, we need to meet someone who lived through it and left us
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his own words. His name was Kobayashi Issa and he was a poet. Issa was born in 1763 in a small mountain village in Shinano in central Japan. His mother died when he was a little boy. His stepmother did not like him and when he
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was 14, his father sent him away to Edeto to find work. For most of the next 35 years, Edeto was his base. He was poor, often on the road, moving from one rented room to another, slowly becoming one of the greatest haiku poets Japan
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has ever had. Issa did not write about fine gardens or rich men's summerhouses. He wrote about fleas, flies, mosquitoes, and sweat. He wrote about the kind of life you are living right now in your back alley. In one of his haiku, he
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writes about the cool wind in summer and how it came to his home twisting and turning. Think about what that means. A breeze from the river has to squeeze between the shops, turn into the alley, bend around the well and the rubbish
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heap, and only then, at the very end, does it reach a poor poet's door. Even the wind had to work hard to find people like him. He wrote about mosquitoes so often that you could fill a little book
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with them. And he wrote one of the most famous summer poems in Japanese. Do not swat it, he says. Look, the fly is rubbing its hands, rubbing its feet as if it is begging you for its life. That
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is an edeto summer through the eyes of a poor man. You are hot, you are bitten, you are tired, and you still stop to look at a fly and laugh and feel sorry for it. Esau's life was not easy. When
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he finally went home to his village and started a family, his children died one after another while they were still small. But his poems survived and they are still read by school children in Japan today. Every summer, millions of
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Japanese people meet that little fly again. Now, before we go back to your alley, I promised you one last layer.
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The coolest clothes in Japan made on top of snow. Far to the north of Edel, in the snow country of what is now Nigata, winter buried the villages under huge amounts of snow. Farmers could not work the fields for months. So families spent
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the winter doing something else. They spun rani fiber into incredibly fine thread and wo it into cloth. The damp winter air of the snow country kept the thread from breaking. So they could make fabrics so thin and crisp you could
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almost see through it. The most famous of these fabrics was called chijimi. A rammy cloth with a tiny crinkled texture. The crinkles meant it barely touched your skin, so it felt cool even on the hottest day. And when the weaving
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was done in early spring, the weavers did something extraordinary. They carried the finished cloth out into the fields and laid it flat on top of the snow. They left it there in the bright sun. As the snow slowly melted under it,
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the cloth was gently bleached and softened. This was called yukisarashi, snow bleaching. Then that cloth traveled south over the mountains down to Edeto into the shops. And in summer, wealthy towns people and samurai wore it to stay cool. In 1837, a merchant from that
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region named Suzuki Bokshi wrote a book about life in the snow country, and it became a bestseller in Edeto. Readers sweating in the city could learn how their summer clothes were born in the cold. The coolest [snorts] summer in
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Japan was made out of winter. Let's go back to where we started. It is the middle of the night in your alley.
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Earlier this evening, you and your neighbors threw yesterday's bath water onto the street. You sat on the bench outside the shop with a cup of cold sugar water and watched the sparks of the fireworks over the river. You washed
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in a tub of sunwarmed water. You burned a little smoky fire by the door, waved your fan along the bottom of the green net, and slipped inside fast and low.
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You are still hot. You are still sticky. But now there is a sound. The glass bell under the eaves next door rings once, then again. Somewhere out there, a breeze has left the river, squeezed between the shops, turned into your
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alley, bent around the well, and found you. You do not have air conditioning, but you have a whole city of tricks. And for the first time tonight, you fall asleep. So now I want to ask you, if you
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were dropped into one Edeto summer with no electricity, no fridge, and no fan except the one in your hand, do you think you would survive it? Yes or no?
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Tell me in the comments. And if summer was hard in a house built of wood and paper, winter was its own kind of battle. In the next video, you can find out how samurai survived freezing winters in those same paper
Topics:Edo periodJapanese historysummer heattraditional architectureuchimizunatsu dressingnagayaJapanese culturepre-modern coolingwind bells
