Tokyo’s Edogawa Ward, home to several waterways and workshops of traditional Edo Furin wind chimes and Edo Sensu folding fans, may give off a pleasant summer vibe.

And there was a time when flat and round hand-held fans, wind chimes, electric fans and mosquito coils were enough to get us through the hottest months.

But in recent years, the searing summer heat has proved a health risk for residents around Japan, including the central Tokyo ward with many waterfront parks.

In July and August last summer, 284 Edogawa Ward residents were taken to medical institutions for heatstroke. Elderly people accounted for 60 percent of them.

Knowing that money-conscious seniors tend to turn off air conditioning to reduce electricity bills, Edogawa Ward authorities have started a pioneering program to subsidize air-cooling expenses for households with elderly members.

Simulations by the ward government showed that keeping the air conditioning on from 11 a.m. through 4 p.m. costs 7,000 yen ($48) in power charges over the two midsummer months.

Around 70,000 households with at least one resident aged 75 or older are eligible for the ward’s allowance, which comes on top of the central government’s subsidy to cover part of summer electricity bills.

The Edogawa Ward assembly approved a budget of about 500 million yen for the measure.

“We are offering 3,500 yen each month to safeguard our residents from heatstroke,” said an official with the ward government’s welfare department. “We urge our residents to turn the air conditioning on, without constraint, during the height of summer.”

NEW TERM FOR HEAT

The measure appears well worth the effort, given the succession of record-setting “mosho-bi” (extremely hot days) across Japan.

The term mosho-bi refers to days with maximum temperatures of 35 degrees or above.

The Japan Meteorological Agency introduced the wording into its weather forecasts only in 2007.

Agency officials thought the existing terms “natsu-bi” (“summer days,” with maximum temperatures of 25 degrees or above) and “manatsu-bi” (“midsummer days,” with maximum temperatures of 30 degrees or higher) were no longer enough.

As an elementary school boy, I never worried about mosho-bi but would often hear about cool summers.

I was taught, for example, that the phrase, “He plods about at a loss during the cold summer,” a passage from a famous Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) poem, is about cold-weather damage on farm crops.

In junior high school, I took pleasure in reading books with titles like, “A glacial age is coming” and “Earth is cooling.”

What was the fuss about global cooling in those days when fake information on social media and video-sharing websites did not exist?

“Oh no, that was no fake information or a false rumor,” said Yasushi Tange of the Norinchukin Research Institute. “The word ‘abnormal weather’ usually referred to cooling until the first half of the 1970s.”

Tange, a 66-year-old certified weather forecaster, has been studying the impact of weather on history.

He said air temperatures actually continued dropping, in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, during the 1960s.

British Broadcasting Corp. and other media outlets also reported heavily on global cooling in the 1970s.

At the time, the global cooling theory competed with the global warming theory in the circles of weather experts. The JMA sent officials to the United States, Africa and elsewhere to ask people how long the cooling trend would continue.

The issue was all but settled only in the mid-1980s, when enough measurement data had been accumulated. Experts agreed on the following two points: (1) the globe is warming, and (2) human activity is a factor that increases the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.

That put an end to a controversy that harked back to the 19th century, Tange said.

We did not need air conditioning, even in midsummer, 50 years ago, when I was taking the global cooling theory seriously.

What will summers be like 50 years from now? Will humankind come up with groundbreaking air-cooling technology? Or will unprecedented intense heat lead to the decline of humanity?

I shudder at the thought of a science fiction-like future with endless “global boiling.”