Add a new word to your vocabulary: chilblains.

Over here, they call it both shimoyake and, mistakenly, frostbite. But it's actually chilblains.

For several months now, probably since the beginning of winter, my fingers and toes have been suffering. During this time, my fingers and toes have usually been a bright red or a nasty-looking blue, and occasionally they feel like they are on fire. The skin on my fingers has also been rather dry, and my fingers have sometimes been slightly swollen.

I've had this condition before, but never to this degree. The other times it's happened, I thought there was some sort of tie-in to the fact that I was doing a lot of swimming in public pools at the time. I figured I must be allergic to chlorine or the chemicals in the swimming pools or whatever. The condition never lasted very long and didn't seem to have anything to do with the weather.

So this time, when my condition started, I also thought perhaps the ol' chlorine allergy was kicking in again, especially since I was swimming once or twice a week at the time. So for a while, I quit swimming. But that had no noticeable effect on my skin's condition.

My next hypothesis was that perhaps a pair of my shoes that I wore rather often was at fault regarding the condition of my toes. I figured that maybe the shoes were old and perhaps crawling with nasty bacteria or something. So I bought a new pair of shoes. But that also failed to cure the condition of my toes.

Could it be the socks I was wearing? Were they irritating my skin? To find out, I did a little (unscientific) experiment. Last week for about three days, I wore a sock on my right foot and went without a sock on my left foot. Oddly, both feet felt great. So that experiment didn't solve my problem, either.

Of course, even if I had discovered that my shoes or socks were the culprit regarding my toes, how would that explain my red fingers?

Is it really the cold weather that's causing the problem? That doesn't make much sense to me, because as cold as it is here, I've lived in much colder places and never had such trouble with my fingers and toes. And I almost always wear gloves outside. And I've been wearing two or three pairs of socks at once to keep my toes warm.

Nevertheless, I've been patiently waiting for the weather to warm up to see if my problem will slowly go away as the temperatures rise. But that's not happening fast enough.

So I finally went to see a doctor yesterday. First, a nurse scraped some skin off my toes and examined it under a microscope to look for signs of mold. Negative on that. Then, the doctor came in and looked at my fingers and toes. Within two seconds he said, "shimoyake."

Several weeks ago, I showed my hands to a junior-high-school student. Within two seconds, he said the same thing: shimoyake. And after I got back from the hospital yesterday, I showed my hands to Moto. He also immediately said, "shimoyake."

I don't get it. If I showed you my fingers and my toes, would you say, without hesitation, "chilblains?" Would you immediately think the redness was caused by the cold? Or would you wonder if I burned my skin, or were allergic to something, or was bitten by an insect, or touched poison oak, or ...? How can everyone here come to the same instant conclusion? Is shimoyake a bizarre Japanese disease that everyone gets at some point in their life?

For now, I'm using a cream that the doctor prescribed. But I'm also going to go see a chiropractor. And I'm thinking about getting a massage. And perhaps I'll even give acupuncture a shot. After all, the cream is just a remedy. I want to find a cure.