A Furry Weekend

This past weekend a pile of us (10 in all) descended on the Niseko Kogen Youth Hostel (officially our favourite, most soulful accommodation option in the Niseko area) for a weekend of group boarding. It was my third weekend in a row in Niseko, which I felt might be getting a bit cliché, but having so many people along, as well as the hijinx we got up to, made it feel like anything but a repeat. Chief among the hijinx was an idea we got from Dani, another 2010 Toronto JET who came up from Chiba to board with us the first weekend in January. When we set out for the hills on the Sunday of that weekend, Dani went out dressed like this:



And she didn't last long before she got frustrated by how hot and restrictive the suit was. However, that limited stint in the furry suit was enough to inspire us. So on our way into Niseko last weekend, we stopped by the Coop in Kutchan and picked up the following:

This is not as weird as it may look. You catch people boarding in these things all the time. We saw a dude in my same batman outfit when we were in Niseko at the beginning of January, and on the hills a random girl started talking to me until she realized "Oops. Wrong Batman."

Not all the suits made it out onto the mountain, but Patrick scored the most points for wearing his Marimokori outfit both days. He also scored MASSIVE popularity with Japanese folk. The character he was wearing is one of Hokkaido's unofficial mascots: a sentient algae man with a very obvious boner. His name, Marimokori, literally means "algae ball boner." Says a lot about our island, eh?

It should be noted that I wore my batman suit all day on the hill Saturday, even when I was giving Nick Small his first boarding lessons. (Here he is as a Tanuki/Racoon(though it's so very much more than a racoon), rocking the board on his first day)

However, as I was the guy behind the camera, there's all of zero photographic proof of it.

Mark and Perry ditched the suits very quickly on Saturday, but they did wear them all day Sunday, which is a bit of an accomplishment when you consider that we went off-piste that day, through the An'nupuri peak gate, and down into the An'nupuri bowl.

There were, of course, those who elected to look like normal people for most of the weekend:

But I'm certain that they didn't have nearly as much fun.

Though it snowed for most of the weekend, we were treated to remarkably clear mornings both days. I missed out on Saturday, mostly because I hung around the lower slopes to show Nick Small his way around the board. However on Sunday, when we were once again treated to a clear blue morning, I made sure that we took the lifts all the way to the top of the mountain so we could benefit from the view before the clouds rolled back in.

And we also took advantage of the break in the weather to take on the An'nupuri Bowl: an off-piste section of the mountain, complete with trees and such, that runs down into a valley, right along beside the groomed runs of Niseko An'nupuri. It was the first time I'd really done anything like that, and it wasn't as challenging as I was worried it might be. It was a lot of fun, even when the clouds did come back in and cut visibility down to almost nothing, even when we all got separated and only Mark, Perry, and I came out the bottom: leaving Patrick to break a ski poll and Lindsay to wind up somewhere behind a hotel when she elected to follow a stranger back into the trees.

And now: random air.

Perry


Mark


Lindsay (her first time off a jump...ever)


And the whole crew:


2010 - 2011 Mountain Days 9 & 10

Yer Spring

or Why Hey Rosetta! is Poised to Take Over the World With Their New Album.

It's the triumphant return of Music Fridays! (I swear I'll retcon in some more interesting stuff soon). This Friday, another one from the Boys (and Girl) From The Rock: Hey Rosetta! Possibly my favourite Canadian band (Hawksley doesn't really count). They made the following video over the Christmas/New Years period in St. John's, I think, and it's got all kinds of Rock culture, from Newfie ballerinas to MUMMERS! It's also, you know, touching, and dance-inducing, and it builds in that same awesome way of so many HR! songs. Check it out. It's beautiful like little else, and it's done a good job of giving me a necessary dose of Canadian.

I hate to be a bit of a douchebag like Alan Cross at the Polaris Prize this year (when he said that he always knew Broken Social Scene was going to make it big) but, for me, ever since I saw just Tim strumming and pianoing alone on stage before a Sarah Slean concert, I've known there was something wild and fantastic about Hey Rosetta! They did pretty well with their last album, "Into Your Lungs...", but I hope that their new disc, "Seeds," is going to be the one that really sees them explode onto the Canadian scene.

Mountain reunion

Heather and I went for a chill weekend of boarding at An'nupuri this weekend, electing to shack up in the Niseko Kogen Youth Hostel for the evenings. It was the first time we'd seen each other since I wished her pip-pip-cheerio in London, and it was good to be back in Hokkaido together, with good food, onsen, and SNOW.

The boarding Saturday was mostly eclipsed by the ridiculous amounts of snow Saturday night and into Sunday, which resulted in the closure of broad swathes of the JR train system around Sapporo. A journey that should have taken Heather maybe 4-5 hours wound up taking closer to 9 as she had to rely on buses, and, eventually, freaking expensive cabs to make it home. I got lucky as I was only heading as far as Wing Bay in Otaru on the Sunday, but even there I had the unprecedented experience of having a JR dude order me through a ticket gate without my ticket because the train I wanted to catch was there, waiting, and it might be the last one that day.

Fun times.

2010-2011 Mountain Day 8

A Year In The Life (Part Deux)

100 posts in 2010. A first full year in Japan. I started it off alone in Kyoto, outside a temple in the snow, listening to the largest bell in Japan gong 108 times, and I finished it up with Heather in Warwick, England, in a big old house far older than my home country, surrounded by her family and her closest friends.

Last year at this time, snowboarding was some "I should get to that..." pipe dream that I was kind of terrified of trying for the first time. Now I'm pretty damn decent at it, if not--in fact--good, and of the four weekends I have in Japan this January, three of them will be spent on the hills.

When I started the year, I had already told my Board of Education that I'd be staying on for a second year of JET (nearly two months before the deadline for the decision). The year ahead was nothing but wild Japanese adventure potential. Now I head into 2011 very sure that, come August, I'll be leaving Japan. I'm suffering from Warwick withdrawal, and Japan is very much starting to feel like some bit of fantasy that is slowly breaking up and falling away--a dream that will soon vanish and maroon me on the shores of reality.

Yeah. I watched far too much Inception on the plane to, as well as on the plane back from England.

It's true, though. Come January on the JET program, it's time to make big important decisions about the next year of your life as the February recontracting deadline looms. Last year, I chose to extend my strange, Japanese, hedonistic (in terms of responsibility, at least) vacation as there was still so much to see and so many people to spend time with. This year I choose to get on with my life, I suppose, and I have to already start planning how I'm going to see all the people and do all the things I want to do before leaving this place.

What's cool about it, though, is that I get to take a part of this place with me as Heather and I are already concocting devious plans for our next year together. More on that later, though.

This is getting random.

So. 100 posts in 2010. I figure that ain't bad, even if I did SPAM Four Points posts and excerpts from NaNoWriMo. I'm certainly not going as balls-to-the-wall on Japanawriting as I was at this time last year, so here's hoping I can get back to it in a bigger way. If nothing else, I'll at least endeavour to keep on posting photos.

I can say that 2010 treated me nice, though, and that's a bit of an understatement to be sure. There was Craig and My Dad and sharing Proper Japan with them, as well as where I live. There was The Month of Adventures (also known as February), and with it snow and boarding and more snow and girlfriends and lacks of drift ice. Shit. There was the passing of Ross...

...and there was also golden life and sakura. There was the joy of being a part of HAJET, which may wind up being one of the best decisions I ever made over here. There was a whole lot of hair and camping and mountain climbing and JET town festival invasions. There was the return to Canada with its attendant weddings and boats and Amys and Vancouvers and Torontos and my Dad inadvertently and timelyly reminding me that I shouldn't forget. There was dripping, sweaty Aomori (christ! I never really wrote about Aomori!) and manly log pushing and moving out of expensive fucking apartments and Four Points and birthdays. There was NaNoWriMo and the promise of snow, then its dearth, then its glut.

And, finally, there was England, and a New Years Eve that was hundreds of miles from the last one I lived through, no matter what physical or metaphorical scale you used to gauge it.

2011 has got some big shoes to fill.

Once the snow starts...

Our first board of 2011 went down in the Niseko area (because we're unoriginal like that) on Grand Hirafu Saturday and Monday, as well as on An'nupuri Sunday. It started snowing on the Thursday before the long weekend, and it hadn't really let up by the time we finished up on the Monday afternoon, with more than two meters having fallen in that timespan.

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It was a good welcome for fellow Torontonian JET Dani Guo, who came out to Japan with us in 2009:

However, the conditions made driving a pretty major pain in the ass for Mark and Lindsay, who ferried Dani and I around all weekend.

The worst of it had to be the Friday night, when Mark (with me as his co-pilot) attempted to drive to Sapporo New Chitose airport to pick up Dani, but was only able to make it as far as Teine, just outside Sapporo, as the conditions were so bad that they shut down the expressway. That was a harrowing drive that left us, at times, completely unable to see the road in front of us. There were points where the blizzard outside seemed to continue far deeper into the coastal tunnels than it had any right to.

We were staying at Mark's place on the Friday and Saturday night, so on Sunday morning we took a run at Iwanai-dake, his local ski-jo. It was a short, very powdery thing, and the best part was being able to snowboard down past the chalet, down the hill into the parking lot, and right to the rear of Mark's car without unstrapping.

Sunday night, Ross let us crash at he and Risa's fantastic log cabin in Hirafu village, and he also let me amateur around with his 10-24mm lens.

2010-2011 Mountain Days 5, 6, and 7

A Post Apocalyptic Tokyo

As I've been spending my two days in the Bored of Education between my winter vacation in England and my long weekend away boarding primarily crawling across the whole breadth of the internet, rather than doing anything truly sensible, I've been gifted with a lot of time to find interesting things. Here's one of the most beautiful things I've come across: post-apocalyptic reimaginings of prominent bits of Tokyo. Below are some of my favourites, but all of them can be found over on the Pink Tentacle.