Hakuba - Japanese Alps

I went snowboarding in the Japanese Alps for the last two weekends. Hakuba (white horse) is a town in Nagano prefecture at the base of the Japanese Alps, which is an amazing mountain range. Growing up in California, I'm used to a slow and gradual climb up to Lake Tahoe, where the resorts start about about 6000 ft (2000m) and go up to about 10000 ft (3000m). Taking the bus to Hakuba, instead of my usual 2 hours of climbing through the foothills, we climbed for about 20 minutes at the end of the trip. The resorts here start at about 800m and climb up to 1600m.

The mountains seem to come from out of nowhere and burst out of the unnaturally flat farmland. Looking around on the mountain top you can see 3000m peaks knifing up into the sky, and looking down you are surrounded by snow-covered farmland with perfectly straight lines between the different plots of land. The land is so flat it must have been leveled by farmers over the centuries.

Both weekends we stayed at the (Hakuba Alps Backpackers Hostel, which is a pair of nice places near the Hakuba Goryu and Hakuba 47 resorts run by a Kiwi / Japanese husband and wife named Troy and Sakiko. They converted a children's playhouse / nursery school with a windmill into their first hostel, which is now the quiet one. They recently opened a second hostel with a night club in the basement and they hold big parties there every weekend, it seems. They are great people, and have really interesting guests. I highly recommend these places.

The first weekend I spent in Hakuba we arrived a bit late in the afternoon, so Troy helped get us set up with our rental equipment at "Spicy Rentals" (I kid you not), and we hit the slopes. One of the neat things about Japanese resorts is that they give you a chip instead of a ticket. You put it inside your jacket somewhere and then wave it at the automated lift line gate, just like an automatic tollgate in your car. When you're done with it at the end of the day, you put it in a vending machine, and it gives you back your deposit.

We only got a couple of hours in that day, but that was no problem because there was a local festival on the slopes at night. They closed the lifts at about 5, so we headed in for some nice hot ramen to warm us up. Just as we were finishing dinner, they started a Taiko (Japanese drum) performance right outside the window. After the taiko, they reopened the slopes for free night skiing, which was great! They dug holes in the side of the snow wall next to the lift line and put candles inside them, which made the whole wall appear to glow from the inside.

At the end of the night we started to see a line of glowing lights snake it's way down the mountain towards the base lodge. After a little while we could see that it was people skiing with lit torches, but we couldn't see the best part until they got closer. As they approached, we saw a skier carrying a glowing ball leading a Chinese dragon dancing down the slopes! The dragon, which was made up of about 15 individual skiers, made its way down to the waiting crowd, where it proceeded to slowly wrap itself into an intricate knot. The finale was a beautiful fireworks show over the mountainside.

It was at this point that we noticed that the girl next to us was wearing the strangest bunny hat. Instead of big floppy ears, it was a stuffed bunny tied around her head, and it had the saddest look on its face, as if it wished it could be bounding through the meadows rather than spending the rest of it's days tied down to some girls head. I tried to surreptitiously take a photo, but I couldn't get a good shot, whereupon my friend Toru showed me that you don't really need to worry about that kind of thing in Japan. He simply asked her if he could take a photo, and she instantly popped into smiling peace sign mode. Japanese girls are truly gifted at instantaneous photo posing. I believe it may actually be impossible to take a photo of one without her somehow managing to slip a cute little peace sign in.

The snow at Hakuba is amazing, even though it's at a fairly low altitude. Great dry powder and beautiful sunny days. In the trees and ravines between the runs lives a very strange animal called a kamoshika. It looks like a cross between a pig or a bear and a goat or a deer. They have fat round torsos covered in long puffy fur, short deer like legs, and little horns on top. Several of us riding off-piste spotted one or two, and you can even see them from the lifts sometime. We were all a little confused as to what to call them. The most common guess was some kind of bear. Apparently they're actually members of the goat antelope family. I'm not sure if that's goats and antelopes, or goat-antelopes. The latter seems more likely, looking at them. Take a look at some kamoshika pictures and learn more about them.

On the second weekend I went up to Hakuba, the wind was incredibly strong. They had to close the upper half of the mountain several times due to wind conditions. At one point, walking down an ice covered road, the wind was strong enough to push me about 10 feet down the road. Thankfully there were no cars coming. The wind caused the occasional snow whiteout while we were driving around town.

In typical Japanese snowboard trip style, we went to the onsen (Japanese hot spa) to relax both weekends. The wind on the second weekend made the rotenburo (outdoor bath) really spectacular. A good rotenburo is a great way to get in touch with nature. There's nothing like soaking in hot water while looking at a snow covered mountain or a beautiful ravine. On that night, however, Mother Nature was in a fierce mood, which made for a unique experience. The rotenburo was protected by a little bamboo fence which the snow had piled up against, and the wind was whipping tendrils of snow over our heads. Unfortunately, it also whipped all the heat from the water. Most people soaked a towel in hot water and put it on their head so their hair didn't freeze. In the end, I went back inside to enjoy the comforts of a glass-encased view and much hotter water.

One of the reasons why I like living abroad is that it forces you to give up control over parts of your life. In America, if I plan to do something, I can be reasonably sure that it will happen. In a country where you barely speak the language, you can be pretty sure your plans will be forcibly changed on a regular basis. Letting go of control is not something I'm good at, so this can be quite a challenge. Just going with the flow can also lead you to some very interesting experiences that you would have otherwise never come across.

For instance, coming home tired from work, I set my alarm on my Japanese cell phone wrong, and missed my bus to Hakuba in the morning. I ran off to the bus station to see if I could catch a later bus (at about 10 am), but it turns out the next bus was 3:30 in the afternoon, which didn't really work for me. I called up Sakiko, the owner of the hostel, and she told me how to catch a train to Hakuba. I got there late in the afternoon, and snowboarded for an hour using an old board and pair of boots that they had lying around (Sorels style, circa my 1994 snowboard boots). Thankfully the next day they loaned me a pair of Salomon boots they had lying around that just happened to be the same size and model that I have in America. All in all, I spent an extra $80 to get there and missed most of an afternoon of snowboarding, but I got several extra hours of sleep and got to experience riding a train through the middle of a snow field with incredible mountains towering overhead and not a single building in sight, passing remote railway stations on the edges of lakes with only a platform and a tiny roof overhead.

Another thing this trip reminded me about is the importance of attitude. I've always felt that attitude is the single-most important make-or-break aspect of a trip.

One of the best snowboard trips I went to was in Vermont and it rained like crazy all day long. They were giving out trash bags to the few hardy fools who still wanted to go out on the mountain, but basically everyone deserted the mountain. However, we went out with a group of about 20 people, and just had a blast! Since it was raining, it wasn't that cold, and the snow was soft, so we spent the afternoon goofing around, kicking up rooster tails, sliding face first down the mountain, and just general silliness. Most everyone else left the mountain and probably felt that they had wasted their day, but we wound up having an amazing time, and came home with a great story to tell.

I forgot this today, and almost let it ruin my trip. The weather turned very warm (the Japanese snowboarding season really only lasts till the beginning of April), and the snow was wet and heavy. My rental board felt like it had glue on the bottom of it, and I could hardly get enough speed up to try any tricks in the park. I felt like this was the worst snowboarding trip I had ever been on, and I just kept psyching myself out and making myself feel worse and worse. Then, just when I had decided to go to a different part of the mountain, they closed all the upper lifts due to high winds. After taking a bus to the neighboring resort, it turned out that all of their lifts were closed too, and none of my favorite areas were accessible. At that point, I decided to simply let go, and enjoy what was left of my day, and wound up having an amazing run down the mountain on a trail I would normally never take. After goofing around for an hour or two, we caught the last bus back
to the other resort with about 10 seconds to spare, if that, and a potentially catastrophic day was turned into a great day of riding. Even though the good snowboarding only lasted for an hour, it was enough to save the entire day.

Indoor Snowboarding

One of the great things about Japan is the way that they borrow something from another culture and craft it into something uniquely theirs.

While I'm sure that many of the snowboarders back in America will not agree with me, indoor snowboarding is one of those things that I love about Japan. After riding in the mountains for 10 years, I was ready for a change of pace. And snowboarding inside a giant building in Japan is definitely something different.

In all fairness, this is not for everyone. Some people just love to escape into the wilderness and breathe in the fresh mountain air. Not me. I've always been more interested in what I can do in a place, rather than where it is or what it looks like. For snowboarding, this means that even though I go to the mountains all the time, I'm a park boy at heart. Instead of looking to battle the forces of nature, I look at man-made obstacles and see all the possibilities. Unfortunately, I can rarely realize those same possibilities due to a meager supply of talent.

And this, my friends, is where indoor snowboarding comes in. As they say, practice makes perfect, and inside a 3 story building is a great place to practice, because you certainly aren't enjoying the scenery. Indoors they can control the environment much easier, so you don't have to worry about coming down a run and finding that your favorite jump has turned to slush or people have scraped away all the snow on the landing, as so often happens in the mountains. Once you don't have to worry about the jump conditions changing, you're free to concentrate on whatever trick you're working on. The jump faces are hard packed so they're basically identical every time you ride them.

The runs are also much shorter (i.e. one jump), and this allows you to try the same jump over and over again in quick succession. While you're walking up the moving escalator on the side, ignoring the automated warnings in Japanese to mind your step, you can think about what you just did, and what you want to do next time, and then do it! There's no 15 minute wait where you lose focus or forget what you were trying to do. Just one jump after another, until you're plumb tuckered out. Which, indoors, is a couple of hours rather than a full day.

In fact, indoor snowboarding is such good practice that I was able to nail 2 tricks I'd been working on for a couple of years in the space of a few months. Granted, I was going once or twice a week after work, but I'm still happy with the results. After struggling with 360's for a couple of years, I finally learned to do them in all directions: frontside, backside, regular, and switch. I also learned to nail a solid boardslide on some decent sized rails (5 meters).

I usually went to Snova 246 in mizonokuchi, near where I was staying at the time. They have a 3 story building with a slope about the size of 2 or 3 basketball courts. One side has a halfpipe, and the other side has a slope, and a 4 meter kicker to practice jumps on. They also have a quarterpipe at the bottom, and they regularly add fun boxes and rails into the mix. There's a moving walkway going up the side where you can relax until it's your turn to climb onto the top of the jump platform and drop onto the slope. There are a couple of 12 year old kids there who come 5 or 6 times a week. I was so jealous, and they are going to be so good when they get older.

Now, I will admit that when I went to Hakuba after 3 months of indoor snowboarding, I really enjoyed it, but being able to actually land my favorite tricks consistently made it that much better. I was a little bit nervous as to whether or not the skills I'd learned indoors would translate to outdoors, so I was very pleased to find out that I was able to step up to the more varied conditions outdoors and still be able to fly through the air the way I wanted to.

One of the things that I really enjoy about snowboarding, and all of my other sports for that matter, is flow. When you really connect with the board and it feels like a part of your body, all your turns are effortless and you float over the snow. This level of flow is an amazing feeling, but it only gets better when you can add obstacles to your path and perform tricks while maintaining that same flow. It's one thing to be able to feel at peace with the mountain as you glide down the slopes, and it's entirely another to feel at peace with a 30 foot jump or a rainbow rail.

There's a natural beauty in motion and I love the feeling of willing my body into a complicated maneuver and having it flow effortlessly into a perfect landing.

White Day

Today is White Day, a very unique Japanese holiday. The Japanese have taken Valentine`s Day and turned it completely around. Of course, they`ve kept the basic formula of candy and romance, but in the other direction. On Saint Valentine`s Day, girls buy chocolate for the men in their lives. It:s not all romance, though. In fact, women are supposed to give chocolate to almost all of the men in their lives. This brings us to giri choco, or obligation chocolate, which women buy for their bosses and male coworkers. Apparently, Saint Valentine`s Day was introduced to Japan in the late 50`s by a chocolate company that saw a good way to make money.

Feeling left out in the cold, other candy companies decided to create White Day, where men give gifts in return. Legend has it that White Day was created by a marshmallow company, hence the name, but nowadays if a man gives a woman marshmallows it means he doesn`t actually like here. Men are supposed to give women candy, or accessories, such as a nice purse, if they like her enough. In keeping with the tradition of making money, men are supposed to spend between one and a half times to ten times as much as the woman spent on them. The Japanese seem to be very big on rules and proscribed methods of behavior. It certainly makes it easy to decide what to do if there`s exactly one correct thing to do. I`m not sure, however, how everyone keeps track of exactly how much things cost so that they now how much to spend.

Of course, not all Japanese celebrate Saint Valentine`s Day and White Day exactly the same. In my office the women banded together to give a group gift to all the men in the office, and the men did likewise for White Day.

Tatami & Shoji

I just moved into a new place in the middle of Tokyo. It's a room in a big gaijin (foreigner) guesthouse, so we share all the common areas.

I have a traditional japanese room (peace room in Japanese), with tatami mats and shoji sliding doors. Tatami mats are the thick straw mats about 1m x 2m that cover the floor (my room is 10 of them; that's how they measure things here). Shoji screens are the sliding doors with a thin wooden grid across them (each square is about 6 inches wide), covered in rice paper. They slide to the side and open up to an indoor porch looking out into a garden with trees and semi-artistically placed rocks. (it's a rental, so you only get semi). It's really nice, but the tatami and shoji aren't very good for keeping the room warm, and the room is a little bit too big for the AC unit to keep up.



I like it, though. It's nice to live in someplace more traditional, instead of a giant faceless apartment building (also common here).

The house next door is deserted, apparently because one of the Aum cult families used to live there (the Aum Shinrikyo cult was responsible for the Sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subways in 1995, killing 12 people and injuring 6000), so no Japanese want to live in the house now. Kind of spooky, and quite a contrast to my "peace room".

These kinds of gaijin houses are quite popular with short term foreigners, because the Japanese housing market is awash with rules and regulations. For instance, in order to rent an apartment, you need to have a Japanese guarantor who can be financially responsible for your rent. Most of the hassle is actually just the way they do leases, rather than any particular rules. Unlike the states, almost all leases have identical lengths and terms. In order to rent an apartment, you have to commit to a 2 year lease, put down two months of "key money" (shikikin - similar to a deposit, although you probably won't get any back), pay one month's rent for the rental agency fee, pay the first month's rent, and pay one month's rent as a "gift" to the landlord. Since housing is very expensive in Tokyo, this can be quite a bundle, especially when you're just moving into the country.

Given how much hassle renting involves, plus the fact that gaijin guesthouses come furnished, it's no wonder they're so popular here.

Snow in Tokyo

It snowed today in Tokyo. I love taking the train into work when it snows, because the scenery is just beautiful. Many of the suburbs around Tokyo consist of 2 or 3 story modern-traditional houses and apartments. They all have traditional Japanese tile roofs, which look beautiful in the snow. From the passing train you can look down on the jumble of narrow, twisting alleyways and snow covered roofs and even see the occasional Japanese temple.

The houses are packed together tightly with low walls around them, but everyone still tries to find space to plant a tree or two in their yard. Since space around Tokyo is so scarce, there are a lot of odd shaped lots with small houses at strange angles to the surrounding walls. The combination of alleys, angled walls, random trees, and tile roofs gives the cities a very old and organic look.

At work yesterday, everyone told me to go home early because a big snow storm was expected and the trains might stop running. Of course, we only go a couple of inches of snow, but I think they just wanted to use the snow as an excuse to leave work early.

During lunch I was able to walk over to the Imperial Palace (only a block from the office) and see the giant stone moat walls and traditional guard houses covered in a light dusting of snow. It's really amazing to be able to watch koi and swans swimming in the water and see trees as far as the eye can see behind the ancient stonework, and then turn around and see nothing but enormous modern glass and steel skyscrapers. Tokyo is definitely a city of interesting contrasts.