My experience as a Westerner living in Japan for many years is so obviously different than yours (I never had sound issues when I lived in apartments, my new ho

My experience as a Westerner living in Japan for many years is so obviously different than yours (I never had sound issues when I lived in apartments, my new house is shockingly well-built and designed when compared to the American houses I'm used to, I've never seen a non-electric powered kotatsu outside of a museum, etc.) that I think we'll just have to agree to disagree for the most part. However, regarding the lack of central heating in Japanese dwellings, I think that's a true cultural difference between Japan and America. It's strange for an American to wake up in a cold room or have to turn on the heat (or AC in summer) when we move into the bedroom after dinner--but it's equally strange to a Japanese person when they see we're heating an entire American house 24 hours/day. It some ways they're right: when the entire family is in one room watching TV or using computers, why should you waste energy heating the entire rest of the house when you could just heat one room--or even just heat up 6 or so cubic feet of space underneath a kotatsu or electric blanket?