Study finds 'cold hands, warm heart' a myth

2008/11/8

Muneyoshi Yanagi (1889-1961), who founded the Nihon Mingeikan (Japan Folk Crafts Museum) in Tokyo, found beauty in everyday household utensils made of earthenware pottery and wood. In his book "Teshigoto no Nihon" (Japan and handicrafts) from Iwanami Shoten Publishers, Yanagi noted that folk handicrafts are beautiful precisely because they are fashioned by the human hand.

One thing that distinguishes the human hand from a machine is that the former is connected to the heart, Yanagi asserted.

"The hand does not just move," he went on. "It is always attached to the heart in a deep way. ・The heart lets the hand enjoy its labor and makes it honor morality." In the eyes of this respected connoisseur, every handicraft item is ultimately a work of the human heart.

On the hand-heart relationship, an amusing news item emerged in October. According to research by a team of psychologists from two U.S. universities, the old adage, "Cold hands, warm heart" seems to have no basis in truth: Their research found that people with warm hands did tend to be more generous or kinder to others than those with cold hands.

For instance, subjects holding a cup of hot coffee tended to have a more favorable impression of a stranger they met than those holding iced coffee. The same tendency was also noted in a similar experiment using hot or cold therapeutic pads.

Is this proof, after all, of the inseparable relationship between the hand and the heart? It appears the warmth one feels in one's hand reaches one's heart, even though one may not be aware of it.

The season's first snow has arrived in northern Japan. Friday was ritto, the first day of winter in the traditional calendar. The transition from autumn to winter seems smooth this year, and many leaves on trees in a copse in my neighborhood are changing color. On a showery day when you can hear raindrops falling on dead leaves, it must be good for the heart to gently wrap one's hands around a hot drink.

A poem by Machi Tawara goes: "'It's cold,' I say/ The warmth of being with someone/ Who responds, 'It's cold.'" This conjures an image of a couple rubbing their hands together, breathing out white clouds in the winter chill.

The same exchange--"It's cold." "Yes, it is."--is likely being heard in a wave moving southward from the northern parts of the country.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 7(IHT/Asahi: November 8,2008)