Reply #13: Right

[Someguyinjapan]

Wow-I've been told. I stand corrected; central heating and insulation in Japan are indeed known...

Central heating for single-family homes is impractical for most of this country-- it would require the consumption of much larger amounts of electricity and natural gas

Which could be avoided if the houses were insulated in the first place. Did you happen to miss the implied relationship due to the juxtaposition of the words "central heating" and "building insulation" in my post, or did you think that was an accidental occurrence? By the way, "impractical for most of the country" would suggest a lack of the aforementioned accompanying insulation, would it not? Which would further suggest most homes here are uninsulated.

My electric bill alone in the winter is nearly 20,000 yen-- and half of that is for heating one or two rooms for a couple of hours in the morning and 3 or 4 hours at night.

Sounds like you are living in an uninsulated home/apartment. I should know because my electric bill is similar each month here in my uninsulated apartment, and I'm not in a particularly cold area of Japan either.

As for insulation, a lot of new homes and apartments are built with insulation.

"A lot" is not "all". "A lot" is not even "the majority". And "a lot" of new homes being built with insulation (whatever that number may be) clearly implies that there are new homes still being built without it. Now, is there something substantive about my discussion with "the Japanese are our technological overlords" guy that you disagreed with or are you merely interested in nitpicking points disguised in sarcasm that you can clearly recognize ("yet to discover" meaning "not widely used" or "not as commonplace as one would expect in the world's third-largest economy" in case you had trouble with that) but are nonetheless perfectly true?