This is Otaru

The city of Otaru is only an hour bus ride away from my town of Furubira, and in February they host a week-long snow lantern festival. Here are some no-bullshit photos of it.

2011 HAJET Sapporo-Niseko 雪祭り Tour

In February of 2010, I was voluntold onto the HAJET (Hokkaido Association for Japanese Exchange Teachers) Prefectural Council in the role of Social Coordinator. At the time, I wasn't sure what to expect for I largely saw the HAJET organization as little more than a group of people interested in setting up parties for Hokkaido ALTs.

"I'll be Home for Christmas..."

I’m living a holiday cliché.

I mean, I’m not yet stuck at the airport, surviving on chocolate bars and chips, sleeping on plastic benches, but I figure I’m getting pretty close to it.

Heather and I are due to fly out of Tokyo Narita for London Heathrow together just after 11:00 am on Thursday December 23^rd. As of Yesterday, Sunday December 19^th, London Heathrow was closed due to all the snow that has been dumped down on it. If this were a one-off, freak thing, I wouldn’t be so concerned, but seemingly the whole of England has been plunged into a snowy cold more reminiscent of Toronto or Hokkaido for several weeks now. It’s one of those places like Vancouver, where it rarely snows or gets too cold in the winter, so they’re not exactly prepared for it, and business will grind to a half when anything more than an inch or two falls and stays around on the ground.

But they’ve been getting feet of the stuff. One can imagine by how many orders of magnitude that had messed things up. Airport after airport in the UK had been closing, but—until Sunday—Heathrow had held out. Now they’re closed, and the Monday version of our same flight from Tokyo to London was cancelled. Here’s hoping that Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday make it through without any hiccups.

All of this is further complicated by the fact that we have separate flights booked down to Tokyo and back, and those flights are a good two weeks apart from one another. We’ve got one night of accommodation booked on Wednesday night after our late flight in from Sapporo Chitose, but if we try to head to Narita at the crack of dawn on Thursday morning, only to discover our flight to Heathrow has been cancelled, we’ll be doubly stranded: unable to make it to London, and without a flight back up to Sapporo. Further, as we’re nothing if not organized, we’ve both already shipped part of our luggage (the part containing the majority of our clothes and all of our たのしい Christmas gifts) ahead to Tokyo Narita so we could just pick it up and jump on our plane.

So this is me, now finished my lessons before Christmas and with only one and a half days of volleyball at my high school before I attempt to head to Sapporo for my flight down to Tokyo. As I stare out the window at rainy, warm-ish weather more befitting of England, I polish the golden horshoe I’ve had lodged in my colon for most of my life and try to devise clandestine, druidic rituals to appease the weather gods and grant me and my lady safe passage through to her ancestral home come Thursday.

Wish us luck.

Kiroro (An Undying Winter)

Winter exists, my love.

It has been hiding from us at the heart of Hokkaido, sheltered in from the coasts and the seas, in places you have to brave dangerous high passes to find. From December's first sprinklings you drive up and over mountains and down into the icy full of February.

At summit, you break the clouds momentarily and are reminded of the sun, of the blue sky, and then down you plunge, past other peaks where you can SEE the howl of the white wind as it curls over the top of them like they were so many tiny snow piles.

You dive down through blizzards that make your stomach drop when you look up and can no longer see anything out of the front of the bus, to ski-jos where the white around and the grey above is all so thick that they have to burn night lights in the day time in a vain attempt to glow orange through the soup of it.

It is here that winter has been hiding while we pined away for it for so long: here, hunkered down in these forgotten valleys at island's core, where it may well have waited out the whole of the long, hot summer.

Never melting. Only waiting to blow back out across Hokkaido.

And, from what I've seen here today, there is no doubt that it's coming.

On Sunday, I finally made it out to Kiroro: a surprisingly big ski resort, just inland from Otaru, that I'd been ignoring for no good reason (Niseko blinders?) all of last season. Even with the high winds keeping the gondola and higher courses closed, the resort was still able to open their hooded quad lifts, and one of those took a good fifteen minutes from base to top, which is an indication of how very much mountain Kiroro has to mess around with. The difference between Teine on Saturday and Kiroro on Sunday was quite literally night and day. I went from wet snow and sun/cloud conditions at the former to a gale-force blizzard at the latter. There were points when I was heading down some pretty steep courses at Kiroro and I was convinced that the strength of the wind coming up the hill might just succeed at stopping me in my tracks. By the time I finished my three hours of boarding, large parts of my gear had iced up, and I was starting to feel more than a little cold. It was all very much worth it as Sunday at Kiroro felt a lot more like proper snowboarding than Saturday at Teine had.

2010 - 2011 Moutain Day 2

Tiny False Prophets

The Yuki Mushi clamour in the air most days now, crying snowy WOLF to anyone who will listen. I barely notice them at all these days, or I dismiss their existence spitefully. I see what were once romantic harbingers now more as aggravating liars: tiny false prophets who will swarm your eyes and your nose and your hair to tell you...

nothing.

For there is no snow for them to herald, and all we've got to show for this end of November is a drawn-out, leafless indian summer. Under icy nights so clear as to cause the stars to pierce your eyes like pins, I pray to the full moon in the cloudless sky: that the cold she brings in the midnight hours should seep int the days; that it should cause all of this rain to fall in unrelenting curtains of white on the mountains; that its icy claws should ply our autumn coats, sneaking in through cracks and gaps until it forces us to once again pull on our woolies.

Snow Tomorrow.

The Japanese speak forecasts like they're a certainty. I guess that's partly because forecasts over here seem to be a bit more reliable than what passes back home. Where in Canada you'd get a "we're likely to see snow later this week, though it may just appear as rain showers."; in Japan it's more of an "it will snow Tuesday. In the morning. Approximately 8am."

...which is what I've been hearing from friends and co-workers since about last Wednesday or Thursday when the yuki mushi were really showing up in force. It's the kind of prediction I'd brush off at other times as being unreliable, but I've started to really believe this one. That's likely because I've got myself so wound up for snow this year. While the autumns in Hokkaido are mild and relatively rain free, they can hardly compare to the deep, fluffy, neverendingwhite of the winters.

Hell, I've been looking forward to the snow since some point in August. When I try to rationalize it, asking why I'm this wound up about it this year when I wasn't nearly so excited last year, all I can come up with is that now I know what to expect: a winter like nothing I've seen back home. Or maybe it's because back in January of last year I finally figured out how to enjoy the snow. I've loved snow since I was a kid and have always gone for long walks in it or burrowed tunnels through it, but I had last winter while riding a chair lift, alone, up Teine. I was staring out at the patchy blizzard blowing over the mountain, at the falling wisps of white that it shook free from the evergreens, and all of a sudden I was overwhelmed with the feeling that this had been what I was always looking for.

All of those long walks under street lamps made somehow more material in the cones of flakes they illuminated; all of that aimless lying in snow drifts in warm gear watching it fall around me: I had always been looking for a way to be out in the snow--looking for a reason to spend hours and hours bathed in it. Everything I'd done before had never seemed sufficient. Even skiing never gave me the right kind of immersion I was subconsciously craving. For some reason I can't explain, snowboarding does. Between the speed of the descent and the subtly clicking quiet of the lift; between the faceplants in snow banks and the barely landed "jumps" (if they can even be called that) off of low moguls; somewhere in the middle of all that I've found just the mix I never knew I was looking for.

Now that I've found that perfect way to be out in the blizzard; now that I found a place where it seems to snow more than I could ever imagine, all I want to do as the days get short and the nights get cold is to be able to take advantage of this coming winter, from its very beginning to its very end.

In that anticipation, all I can do is sit here and hope that all of those Japanese people who are so certain of snow tomorrow are right.

Yuki Mushi

The Yuki Mushi are thick in the air today.

Look at that. I say it like I'm some kind of expert; like Heather hadn't only just taught me what yuki mushi were.

Yuki Mushi (雪 虫): Snow. Fly. Insects with an indexical relationship to winter so precise and unwavering that they have become iconic of it: their tiny white filaments, their lazy, almost wind-blown flight path. The snow(adj) flies(n) are so iconic as to have become literal: "how long now unti snow(n) flies(v)?"

Though I never noticed them last year, now that I know about them, I see them everywhere--just like you do when you're a kid and you get your first dog, and all of a sudden you can't believe how many dogs you've been missing in your neighbourhood: like the bloody block is chock ablock with the mutts all looking to sniff your crotch and pee on your tree.

It's like that with the yuki mushi now. Where before they were fleeting glimpses, almost thought to be greying fruit flies at the corner of your eye, now the flurries of them hold my eyes ransom as I try to scan past the windows. With the grey clouds unbroken above, and the icy Hokkaido nights starting to crowd into the autumnal Hokkaido days, I am given to wonder if we might not just skip the interim this year: go straight from unseasonably warm summer into unbelievably siberian winter with only the meagrest of falls from one into the other.

That inbetween lingers just long enough to give rise to the snow flies: our harbinger of not long now 'til snow flies. That middle ground between sun and snow will fall away so suddenly that not even the yuki mushi will see it coming: fall from that perfect equilibrium that breeds and sustains them to a chitin-shaking cold to make their tiny corpses into first flakes as the dancing swarms of them fall, too. They will blanket the fields and the roads and the houses like their namesake. Like stubborn spectral soldiers, they will hold their ground in death; not able to melt away until the long months of this winter have come and gone.

And, even though we've hardly had a fall at all, I'm ready.

Spring Snowboarding

I’ve been getting a bit behind on these things this month, but I figured that since stuff was still going on, I should endeavour to catch up.

Least there be any doubt, there is still snow in Hokkaido. Heather and I struck out to make the most of it by getting in our last boarding weekend of the season at Hirafu/Niseko. Though the HAJET musical/after party/late night/our 11 am check out time and plans to meet up with Sonomi and Mark for lunch in Kutchan all conspired to keep us off the hill for most of the weekend, we did get in a few hours of boarding on Saturday.

It was definitely the latest in the season that I have ever been out in the snow in a meaningful way, but I would say the conditions were as good as my last visit to Niseko, if not a little better since, well, we could actually use a lot of the hill. A guide had described the base as “corn snow,” and I have to say that I far prefer it to the slushy alternative that Ontario yields late in the season. Though it’s not as forgiving when you fall as the standard Niseko powder, its granular consistency makes turning a breeze.

Foolishly, I got either over confident or ambitious and decided to leave Heather in the low lands while I rode the lifts as high as they would go on Hirafu that day, heading to the top of the peak chair. It was somewhere I hadn’t been since that first weekend on a board with Mark back in January, and I was determined to show up the mountain with how far I’d come in the interim. From near the peak, I was treated to a spectacular view of Mount Yotei, Kutchan, and the surrounding towns…

…but it was all down hill from there{sic}. While the lower elevations with their corn snow were in some happy transition between winter and spring, the peak area held on to winter tenaciously. This late in the season, there hadn’t been enough snow to coat it in powder, and what snow there was had frozen up into a slick sheet on one side and a rocky field of micro glaciers on the other. Being unable to get much purchase on the slick sheet, I took my chances with the glacier field and wound up going down hard on one of the ridges of ice knee-first. I could almost hear the mountain laughing at me and my confidence.

In all, though the boarding was fun, seeing the mountain so far along in its melt was a little sad. Every time I’ve rolled up on Niseko this season, it has been a postcard example of a winter wonderland. The consistent soft white of it has inspired Heather to draw comparisons to a wintery Narnia. And yet now, though the majority of the runs are still good and snowed in, the trees and the cliffs peek out along their peripheries a little too much these days, killing our ice age fantasies more and more. It’s like coming back to what was once a perfect, crisp ice sculpture, only to find it a far, sagging, watery cry of what it once was. You can still see what you saw in it, but the loss makes it almost not worth the second glance. I guess I’m happy to be done with the mountain for this season, happy to allow it to return to summer on its own, happy to wait until December before I return to it for another run.

But I will be back in December, and I will ride back up to that peak, and the joke’s on the mountain because this time she will be mine.

Oh yes, she will be mine.

Mountain Day 12

Yuki

Somewhere between the parking lot and the summit, Maggie comments on how this is the second weekend she’s skied with me, and this is the second weekend that the sky has settled low over the mountains, the clouds breaking up and coming down in torrents of flakes.

I smile and point to the yellow symbol on the crown of my snowboard helmet. I tell her how a kind witch of the north placed it there, as if in celebration of her novel discovery of her icy birthright. She placed it so that it would call to the skies, and she called it a sigil: a guidepost for gods of winter. With it, they would find me, wherever I may go, and they would let their blessings fall around me in cloaks and curtains of powdery white.

“So long as I wear it,” I tell Maggie “where I go, the snow will follow.”

And as if in evidence, the wind whips up, and the clouds settle in closer. They consume what remains of the mountains and fill the space in between with white until the banks of electrical light have to blaze prematurely and the skiers around us pass in and out of view like ghosts.

Mountain Day 11

Alpine Equinox

Me and Becca, Roz, Maggie, and Kyle spent the first day of spring on the mountain. Well, we spent the day before and the day after on the mountain and would have done so on the Vernal Equinox as well were there not a first-class, hurricane-strength blizzard raging across the mountain. It was a good weekend to be among friends, though, shacked up in a warm little school house hostel while the storm kept us from what we'd intended.

With the impending equinox, the melt had begun in the low parts of the group of mountains that make up Niseko. As the snow turned from ice to water to vapour, it began to slowly release the spirits of summer and autumn that it had taken captive all that time ago when it first fell in November. They swarmed up, newly awakened as spirits of spring, and they wove themselves into clouds and fog, their movements slow, languid as their sharp spirit minds were still waking from their long hibernation.

As the day wore on, the warmth from below rose, beating back the alpine chill, and the spirits thawed out and awoke ever higher on the mountain, spreading their still, sleepy mist and crowding in thick between one another. By the late afternoon, they had grown so thick in the air around the mountain that they began to rain down upon it again as water. But the sun soon set behind the clouds, and as the warmth went out of the day, the water turned back to snow.

And then sometime in the night, those spirits awoke fully, and they realized that the cold ghosts of winter were trying to imprison them anew—to lock their bright hearts away for an ice age, if they could. And the bright spirits of spring weren’t about to allow it, and in the dark witching hours, they took their warm resistance to where winter huddled, at the very peaks of those mountains.

At the peaks, they clashed: at Niseko, at mountains all over Hokkaido and down into snowy Tohoku. Throughout the night and into Sunday, the first day of spring, the spirits of spring and the ghosts of winter fought, and their clashes set off wind storms all across the snowbound stretches of Japan. The combination of cold and warm setting off typhoon winds that kicked up snow to dance in the air until one could almost see the forms of titans in it.

As little snowboarders huddled in their schoolhouse hostels, outside the seasons raged against each other all day and long into the night. Those brave enough to venture out in low-lying areas did so in full snow gear, and none were allowed up onto the mountains, where the true battles were being fought.

By early Monday morning, most of the fight had been fought out, and the first vestiges of sunlight began to beam through the torn clouds. The winds would gust up form time to time, snow would pelt down, and those brave enough to take to the higher altitudes on the selectively open mountain lifts were treated to glimpses of the kind of driving whiteout that can cause even the most hardy of mountaineers to curl up and go to ground in the face of it.

The mountains opened more and more by the hour, and by the afternoon, when sun and blue sky shone strongly through intermittent, patchy clouds, it was clear that spring had won out in the clash.

But when you rode the lifts as high as they would go on that day, to the foot of the still-shut peak chairs, and you witnessed the blizzards that would blow in fitfully, temporarily eclipsing the white peak, there was no doubt that, though they’d begun their retreat from the low lands, the icy ghosts of winter still reigned at the mountain’s summit.

Mountain Days 9, 10

Adventure The Second: Friends Board

This second instalment of the “It’s February: GET OUT!” series features our intrepid group of JET adventurers hitting the hills at Niseko United for some snowboarding. The lion's share of our group were doing it for the first time, so when the already-reluctant Japanese snow school told us that their morning classes were full, it fell to Perry and I (but mostly Perry as I'm still a newb) to get The Ladies up on a board for the first time.

There's something simple and fulfilling in helping your friends.

No matter how many times I had to haul one of the Ladies up on their boards this weekend; no matter how many board-knee collisions I had to endure; it was worth it. At one point I sat on the slope just below the An'nupuri gondola in the blowing snow for what must have been half an hour to make sure each of the girls got up and got going. It was exhausting, it was cold, and it might have been a high point of the weekend. Every time they got up and got going on their snowboards, I felt good about it, and I got a decent amount of practice in myself from having to shadow/avoid them. I'm not sure I truly taught them all that much, but I know I kept them practicing.

What's more, boarding with Perry and Random Aussie Andy, who we met at The World's Greatest Hostel, pushed me to try harder at this whole snowboarding thing. You try chasing someone who is better than you down the hill, and all of a sudden you're cutting faster and roving wider across the surface of the mountain. Hell, I followed the two of them down a black diamond mogul course and into an old narrow riverbed strewn with trees. I handled neither gracefully, but they were the kind of places I never would have ventured without Perry and Andy pulling me on.

Burt the Board performed magnificently. When I told Andy that I'd picked him up, bindings and all, from a recycle shop for the equivalent of $100 CDN, he was floored, which I guess bodes well for my uninformed snowboard impulse buy. Andy told me that Burt was likely a 2000-model Burton Charger that looked like it'd seldom been used. I think Burt was one of the main reasons this weekend went so well. I find myself all the more invested in snowboarding now that I have my own gear. The fact that a lift ticket is the only cost keeping me from the hill makes this whole thing rather addictive.

Or maybe it's the conditions that make it so addictive. Before I got here, I was informed that Niseko, one of the closest mountains to where I live, is known world-wide for the quality of its powder. My limited, uninspiring time spent skiing years ago left me clueless about the significance of "powder." It sounded like some snotty word ski bunnies used to illustrate their prowess.

However, it would seem that our area of Japan is subject to nothing but powder snow. Gone is the slushy, sleety, damp mess that falls from the skies in and around Toronto. Everything that comes down here is light and fluffy, and Niseko seems to be at the heart of the light and fluffiest of it. Granted, I've only spent two weekends on the mountain, but it snowed every one of those four days. Niseko gets so much quality, consistent snow that they don't own snow making machines—devices that seem to be requisite at all the Canadian ski hills I've ever been to. With the snow dumping down day and night on the mountain, you're hard-pressed to find an icy patch on Niseko. When you rove out to the edges of the runs, as Perry and Andy taught me to do, you find deep, essentially unspoiled drifts of powder snow. And's that's on the shoulders of the runs, mind, not the treed sections between runs where the powder is so deep as to stop you dead if you're not ready for it.

Long story short, in the four mountain days since I started snowboarding, I feel like I've progressed exponentially. And for that progression, I mostly have my friends to thank. Over the course of this board weekend, my extended ALT/JET family made the times off the hill as enjoyable as the times on it. I'm glad we all found each other in this northern, snowy outpost of Japan, and I'm glad we were all able to take the time to do this thing together.

Adventure The Next: we all descend on Furano, another skiing destination in Hokkaido, for a little work and a lot of fun on the hills. Maybe the snow at the geographic centre of Hokkaido will be even more epic than that at Niseko?

Maybe, but I'm not holding my breath.

Mountain Days 3, 4