The turkey is thawing in the living room. This is not, as you might imagine, a health hazard because the living room is only slightly above freezing.
Freezing cold rooms in wintertime are a normal feature of Japanese homes. Rooms are heated individually, not centrally and every room has a door so that you can shut it off from its chilly companions. Each room also has a nice draft so that the fumes from the gas heater (which gets its fuel from a gas outlet plumbed into the wall) don’t asphixate you. It’s a practical arrangement (though less frugal than you might think for a variety of reasons concerning lack of home insulation and the price of heaters) which makes me pine for the luxury of central heating.
Luckly, the turkey doesn’t care.
