世論 What Japan Thinks

In yesterday’s Seikyo Shimbun as part of an introduction to Warm Biz there was a chart of electricity usage in the average Japanese home, derived from data by JCCCA, Japan Centre for Climate Change Action, and their Low-Energy Home Electrics Fact Sheet.

Device	Percentage
Air conditioning	24.9%
Lighting	16.2%
Refrigerator	15.5%
Television	9.9%
Electric carpet	4.4%
Electric toilet seat	4.1%
Clothes drier	2.9%
Dishwasher and drier	1.7%
Other	20.3%

Lighting seems very high to me, and you’ll perhaps notice that washing machines is not noted: in Japan, most washers use cold, not hot water, so they need no heating element for water.

In my wife’s daily newspaper, the Seikyo Shimbun, there was a short article regarding statistics on old people in Japan who live alone. Whether or not old folk living alone is a good thing or not, I’ll leave it for others to comment, but one one hand both my grandmothers lived alone for most of their retirements, but in the sme town as our family so someone visited them almost every day, whereas in Japan they have adverts for a kettle that phones home with statistics of daily usage so you can tell if Grannie’s been making tea or not.

In 2004 the government carried out a survey, and discovered that there was 2,820,000 women over 65 living alone, about triple the figure of 910,000 for men. In the last three years alone, this figure has increased by 180,000. Over half of the women had got into the situation by outliving their husbands, around double the percentage for men outliving their wives. About 10% lived alone due to having never married, but why the remaining people are living alone, it is not recorded. Presenting the population of single seniors separated by sex and age, we get the following table:

Males 65-69	7.4%
Males 70-74	6.8%
Males 74-79	5.1%
Males 80-84	3.0%
Males 85+	1.9%
Females 65-69	16.0%
Females 70-74	19.5%
Females 74-79	19.5%
Females 80-84	13.0%
Females 85+	7.8%