The door to the woman's room was slightly ajar despite the biting cold outside.
"It's stifling, so I always leave it that way," an 82-year-old resident of a tiny apartment in Kobe said in February.
The woman is a survivor of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake. Her room is one of several in a nine-story public housing project kicked off to replace homes destroyed in the Kobe area. But she has almost no interaction with other residents.