For the first time since catching Covid on an ill-fated trip to the UK more than two and a half years ago, I had a fever when I woke up this morning, which reminded me of a curious cultural difference between Japan, the UK, and who knows how many other countries around the world.
As a pasty-faced, blonde-haired (when I was a kid, anyway, and still in possession of hair on my head) Brit, I’m very susceptible to heatstroke (aka sunstroke and in Japanese netchuh-shoh/熱中症) and have come down with it two or three times since coming to Japan, where the summer humidity makes it a constant menace – a serial killer, even. The first time I had heatsroke, though, was in France, where I stayed for six weeks as a homestay student in my third year at secondary school.
While there, I went for a weekend away to hot, sunny Provence with our chaperone teacher and his son, and as well as wearing long trousers and a long-sleeved shirt (to be fair, I think I rolled up the sleeves once or twice), I had no hat and, apart from a single bowl of orange juice, for some strange reason didn’t drink anything, either. Back at my homestay home in Savoie, I began to suffer from a peculiarly nasty headache – as if some kind of liquid metal or lava was sloshing around inside my skull. I didn’t go to school the next day and when my homestay mother returned from work, she handed me a thermometer and told me to take my temperature.
Now, being a Brit, I proceeded to pop the thermometer (old-school glass with a line of mercury running through the centre) beneath my tongue, and when mother returned to see the result, the look of astonishment on her face was priceless.
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘You’re not supposed to put it in your mouth,’ and proceeded to demonstrate with the power of mime where exactly I was supposed to put it. Use your imagination and I think you’ll get the idea, but basically, I felt even more unwell at the thought of where the thermometer had been before I used it.
To add insult to injury, she proceeded to give me some kind of medicine, which she crushed and mixed with sugar and water to make it more palatable. Not having eaten anything for about twenty-four hours, and certainly nothing so sickly sweet, I almost instantaneously threw up, although in retrospect, that may have been a good thing, as it probably cleared my system of any germs that may still have been attached to the offending thermometer.
So, UK = under the tongue, France = between the buttocks, and Japan, as it turns out = under your arm. The latter seems like a more sensible place to put a thermometer, although it can be tricky inserting it via the neck of your t-shirt or sweater, then keeping it from dislodging itself and reemerging at the top of your trousers. The other key difference is that the Japanese (like the French) use Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, and in conversation often abbreviate the result, so that 37.3°C, which was the temperature under my left arm at breakfast this morning, is referred to as simply ‘7.3,’ and 37°C, which was the temperature under my right, as ‘7.0.’
I took some medicine after each of my three meals today – although not with sugar and water – took it very easy apart from the usual six or seven hours of translating, and now feel a fair bit better, with a more manageable underarm temperature of about 6.7.
