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Tokyo Is BurningJapan saves energy by keeping office buildings at 82 degrees. Is this foresighted or perverse?

By Daniel GrossPosted Friday, June 26, 2009, at 10:25 AM ET

Portrait of a man adjusting his tie. Is it worth it to keep office buildings at 82 degrees?I should have suspected something was amiss when we—the group of journalists I'm traveling with in Japan for 10 days—showed up at the offices of the media company Nikkei, and our Japanese counterparts, columnists, and editors apologized for not wearing ties. We had received instructions that meetings were business formal, jacket and tie. But after a few minutes, we understood why our Japanese colleagues had gone business casual. The air conditioner in their brand-new Tokyo office tower seemed to be on the fritz. It was as hot and muggy as Miami.

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Shuttling about the city, I thought I had discovered an epidemic of air-conditioning malfunction. The same experience of tieless Japanese officials welcoming sweating Americans was repeated at the Foreign Ministry, the Bank of Japan, and the headquarters of the Democratic Party of Japan. A conference room at the Japan Iron and Steel Federation was like a sweatbox. This was a true mystery, since Japan is famous for 1) business formality and 2) developing cooling technology. Every morning, I marvel at the wall-length bathroom mirrors in my hotel on which a perfect rectangle above the sink remains miraculously steam-free.

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Anne Applebaum declared that the Kyoto Accords weren't the solution, either. Brian Palmer explained how exactly a country might measure its carbon emissions. Will Saletan lamented the delusional effect of air conditioning, and Doree Shafrir offered up a few portable fan options.

But I soon solved the mystery of the failing air conditioner. Japan has eagerly embraced technology and practices that will reduce emissions and combat global warming. It invented hybrid vehicles, has extensive mass-transit systems, and uses wind power. In 2005, Environment Minister Yuriko Koike, a pioneering female politician, was seeking ways to slash energy use. And she came up with the Cool Biz campaign. The idea: Government would cut energy bills by keeping thermostats in its buildings at 28 degrees Celsius—82.4 degrees Fahrenheit—during the summer. It quickly produced results and was adopted by the business establishment as well. Since Japan's energy mavens realized that simply unbuttoning a shirt collar can make people feel about 4 degrees cooler, dressing down became part of the Cool Biz mentality. (Here's an ABC News story on the phenomenon.) The only people we met with this week wearing suits, ties, and cufflinks were Americans—diplomats at the embassy and the boosters from the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan.

The progenitor of Cool Biz practices what she preaches. Koike is sort of the Hillary Clinton of Japan. A former television anchor and reporter, she served as the nation's first female defense minister and then mounted an unsuccessful challenge for her party's leadership. She's still trying to break Japan's iron ceiling. We visited Koike in her (boiling) district office, discussing politics while a highlight reel of her broadcasting career played on a television. "It's important that we create a low-carbon society," she said. "It will make our economy more wealthy." As we exited the building, finding relief in the heavy evening air, Koike was whisked away in a Prius.

Don't get me wrong. Turning up the thermostat in the summer and turning it down in the winter is a fine way to reduce energy use and fight global warning. But if we're going to go down this road as a global business community, we might consider allowing professionals to show up to work in shorts and T-shirts.

And it struck me that Cool Biz might be counterproductive for Japan. Japan is currently facing something of an existential crisis. Its economy has grown very slowly for more than a decade, and its population is declining. It's as if the nation has lost its capacity for hard work and procreation.

Kiyoaki Fujiwara, director of the economic policy bureau of the Japan Business Federation, laid out some stark charts showing a rapid population decline over the next 50 years and the dire economic impact it would have. But maybe there's some connection between Japan's demographic/economic issues and the Cool Biz program. For a good chunk of the year, the heat indoors saps the desire to write a business plan or to increase the population. As the noted Japan expert Cole Porter memorably put it: "It's Too Darn Hot."

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Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter. His latest book, Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, has just been published in paperback.

Photograph of a man in a tie by Medioimages/Photodisc/Getty Images Creative.

COMMENTS

This article isn't about Japan being energy conscious, it is about them being extreme.

Look, the standard temperature for offices in the US as determined by ASHRAE is 73 degrees Fahrenheit. Some offices go a degree or two under or over this median, which is conducive to normal people wearing business attire, and not simultaneously sweating like nervous goats. I will admit that, in the current economy, many people are sweating like nervous goats for reasons unrelated to the air conditioning.

But this makes me fear for their sanity. If you told me that the Japanese had decided that strong action was needed and they were going to up their thermostats to, say, 76 or even 78 degrees, I would say, "that is admirable that they are doing something positive for the environment." But jumping up by 10 degrees is just extreme.

From a more practical standpoint, (I work in the HVAC industry), if they've jacked up their temperature setpoint by 10 degrees for interior spaces in Japan, that means that they're running HVAC equipment that is grossly oversized for the duty that it is being used for. The inevitable result is that, soon, they're going to start having problems in their buildings related to excess humidity, from damage to paper and drywall to mold, mildew and fungus.

-- Texwiz
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This seems like another obvious cost-benefit calculation. Determine temperature impact on productivity. Compare cost of lost productivity to savings of electricity and pollution. (I say pollution b/c they evidently care. But an individual company internalizes most of the benefit of a/c and externalizes most of the environmental cost).

-- right then
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