Chizu Snow Festival

---

With the help of our friend Kasumi we boarded a local train and headed south of Himeji towards Okayama, then headed north into the mountains. The photos show rural scenes as we climbed the hills to get to the snow.

We were entertained by a local television crew who joined our train for a few stops and then departed at a very station, the birthplace of a very famous swordsman in Japanese history who is featured.

Chizu is a small town that was a 'post' town or way station in the 1600s. At this time the rulers in Edo - now Tokyo - wanted to keep their dominance peacefully across Japan so they instituted a system that required the best fighters and administrators of each shogun or local lord, plus either the lord or his sons (and their families and retainers), all to live in Edo for one or two years at a time. This meant that the best organisers, fighters and the bosses, were all kept busy in Edo and couldn't either gang up on the ruler in Edo or fight with each other over territory.

The 'post' town or way station was created to enable the delegates from each shogunate and their entourages who WALKED to Edo, to stop and rest at night. So they have good accommodation, meals, a saki brewery and other services required by the delegates. They also did a fairly good passing trade for messengers sent from the shoguns to their delegates.

For this year's snow festival, climate chaos had the effect of there being far less snow than usual at this time of the year. I understand that usually the town would be covered in at least a foot if not a metre of snow.

The snow festival is fun. We walked across from the train station to the town information centre. In front of it small kids were having fun on snow slides. Festival participants were given soup or a hot drink from the lees of saki (supposedly non-alcoholic) with mint and ginger and a map of the town with the activities at different times of the afternoon and evening. Of course to add to the fun there were stamps to collect at different parts of the festival; collection of all 5 stamps enabled snacks to be received on returning to the information centre.

Suitably revived, we wandered the streets of Chizu in relative sunshine to see the small snow sculptures the residents had made for the festival. We also observed many locals 'searching out' buckets of snow as at 5pm, candles are lit on the streets and lamps lit outside and lights turned on inside to brighten up the town for a festive evening. Some of the snow sculptures are featured in the extra photos at the end of the blog. Not the 'sustainable' practices of using carrots for eyes, berries and leaves for ears etc etc.

Of course there was lots of festival food - from pink tayaki - which are those wonderful fish shaped warm pastries with beans or custard in them, roast sweet potatoes, freshly made soba noodles, all types of yakitori- meat on sticks and even wild boar sushi served with local saki. And you can see the wonderful sunshine to sit and eat with your friends.

Our last activity was a tour of a large 100 year old house that had been lived in by a local family - now it is a museum. I have included a photo of the garden, you can see that the gardeners build shelters over the bushes to keep the snow off them; and of course the gold fish or koi, have to be sheltered too! As part of the festival they had a jazz concert from 5-7pm in the large entrance to the house.

As the sun set we headed back to the train station. I had every layer of clothing I own on and could feel my hips stiffen as we returned. It would have been fun to stay and see all the sculptures in the candle light - but we would have frozen.

---