The Climatic Element at Hotspring Resorts and its Therapeutical Effects

Abstract

To treat patients with thermals, it is necessary to know the climatotherapeutical effects of the resort. But in Japan according to my investigation this time, there are only 6 hot-spring sanatoriums or institutes, which make meteorological observation among 15 institutions. And 5 institutes use meteorological data to the treatment or researches.
Now this cause was investigated and the reasons will be presented.
(1). Meteorological data of 37 weather stations in Japan were studied. Data for max. and min, air temperature, daily change ef temperature, relative humidity and wind velocity were quoted from the Monthly Report of the Japan Weather Bureau.
To exclude the climatic differences caused by different air masses, 15 days were picked out in which one airmass overlies all over Japan (“H” type according to my classification, that is high atmospheric pressure type) between Sept. 1966 to March 1967.
Results:
A. Northern parts are colder than southerns. At the high grounds it is colder than the others.
B. The daily change of air temperature is big in the interiors and small at seasides or islands, as learnt from the text-book. But some places in the heights show small daily change in air temperature.
C. The relative humidity is high at seasides or islands. But the heights have not always low relative humidity, contrary to our expectations.
D. The wind velocity is big at capes and islands but some heights show small wind velocity contrary to our expectations.
From these results it is noticed that some places show unexpected climatic characters. Therefore meteorological observations must be carried out ourselves about our resorts at first.
(2). In Sept. 1966 daily air temperature at the Yokohama weather station was compared with those at the place ca. 1km. apart from the station.
Both temperatures agreed with each other generally but in some days there were a little differences between them.
(3). The use of air conditioning has been spread all over Japan today. Therefore the dry bulb and wet bulb temperature were compared in a room and out of the door on 21 March 1967, from 6 am. to 12 pm.
From this investigation it was noticed that there were distinct differences between them.
Conclusions:
Our knowledges about climatic characters of highlands, seasides or islands and inlands can not be applied without caution.
There are some differences between the actual conditions and the knowledges which are learnt from the text book.
Attention must be paid to local enviroments furthermore. And it is better not to use the data of the near-by weather station, because there may be some differences. Therefore meteorological observations must be done ourselves about our resorts.
More attention must be paid to the environment inside a room, because the air conditioning is used widely today.
But the climatotherapeutical effects of many resorts are not yet known in Japan today, and climatotherapeutical researches about the environment inside a room are scarcely done.
By reason of this, climatotherapy is not used in practice widely in Japan.