WHY DO JAPANESE PEOPLE WEAR COATS INDOORS?

I’ve been thinking about how the way people wear clothes has differences based on culture. I’m not talking about fashion sense here, I’m talking about general behaviour with regard to when and where to put on certain attire. 

I mentioned in an older post how I’d noticed the strange phenomena (at least from a Western perspective) of how Japanese people in winter keep their coats on in classrooms, in cafes, etc, in places where westerners would take them off. The Japanese do this even if the aforementioned indoor spaces are well-heated.

From my perspective this is both incomprehensible and, dare I say it, nonsensical. Yes, the old cliche uttered by British mothers from time immemorial comes to mind : “Take your coat off otherwise you won’t feel the benefit of it when you go out again.” 

A coat is, by definition, a garment designed to be worn outside, and those puffer jackets are pretty restrictive to one’s more subtle movements: Try sitting at a desk writing while wearing your full winter gear, as Japanese university students do - it’s kind of tricky and awkward.

So what’s going on here? I have asked them, and they invariably come up with the unhelpful answer “I’m cold,” even when being in a stiflingly overheated room, which doesn’t make a lick of sense.

It’s probably hard to have to suddenly explain ingrained behaviour that is so ubiquitous you’ve never thought about it before. Like if someone were to ask me why the hell the British have carpets in their bathrooms and a separate tap for hot and cold water in their sinks - I’m not sure I could give a coherent or logical explanation on the fly to explain those particularly ‘odd’ conventions.

Anyway, I think I’ve finally come up with the answer.

It’s about the fact that western and Japanese cultures have different liminal dichotomies. Before you reach for a dictionary, I mean that the boundaries between environments is different, which explains the differing behaviour. (I’m glad you didn’t reach for the dictionary, because I’m not entirely sure I used those two big words correctly…).

Westerners have an inside / outside dichotomy that dictates when they wear coats. When you’re inside a building, you take off your coat, when you’re outside, you put it on. 

The Japanese, however, work on a home / not-home dichotomy. Home is the place where you don’t wear a coat (and you take off your shoes). Everywhere else is not-home, and so shoes and coats stay on. Accordingly, the inside-outside difference doesn’t matter to them. Classrooms and cafes are not-home - you have your shoes on, and so it’s logical to keep your coat on. A traditional Japanese-style restaurant would be classed as home, because you have to take your shoes off, and so the coat comes off too.

What do you think of my theory? I could be wrong. The only thing we can really prove is that I have way too much time on my hands if I’m thinking about such trifles, but how else to fill the daily two hours of commuting…