Bathing in the Snow with the Yakuza

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What’s the best thing about winter?

That’s the question, and the answer isn’t Christmas (not in Japan anyway) its white, powdery and it everywhere!
And no, not cocaine, snow!!

I have often felt slightly ripped off by Mother Nature living in London, as although winters are bloody freezing, they really bring a lot if any snow. I am there fore a big fan of the white stuff and get a childish sense of excitement just from seeing a bit of brownish slush under a car tire in London, so when I decided to travel up to Fukui on the basis of my second round of snowboarding, little could have prepared me for the royal dumping that would be unleashed on the city, let alone the mountain ski resorts.

This was the following week from snowboarding, and having managed to get hang of and urged to again, of snowboarding I decided that I would take of on another expensive and epic journey northwards.
The idea of jumping on a train over 100miles into the cold to have to return by night boat just to make it on time for work, may seem a little extreme, but the chance to frolic in the snow with Denis and his pals was too good to miss.

Finishing u early on Friday I passed out on buses and shinkansens all the way to Osaka, exhausted ftomt he days teaching at my shougakko.
The ride from Osaka to Fukui on the slickly named Thunderbird express, began to reveal rather large dumpings of snow at each station we drew closer to Fukui prefecture, famous for, in no particular order, crabs, power stations and Denis.

I arrived to a snow fall, which rarely stopped for the nest 2 days, as a particularly cold and snowy period began all over Japan, including near my area, which is apparently even rarely. Perfect for a snow lover like myself.
We took off to feast on kebabs, the first since I arrived in Japan, and therefore the tastiest, and then headed onto an Indonesian restaurant. However, the name of the game was snowboarding and we hit eh sack early.
Fukui is also famed for onsen and so there area large number of sento’s (public baths, that are not heated from natural springs as onsens are). The rules in onsens are strict and mandatory, and I have broken most of them if you have ever read about my trip to Beppu, however, one that I have always adhered to is that you are not allowed into an onsen or sento with any kind of tattoo.
This is for simple reasons, as displayed on all entranceways to baths, that of the Yakuza tattoo. I’m not sure exactly why the yakuza are not allowed to bath, but it seems quite an obvious way to avoid trouble and the likes of those who wear it across their bodies.

This is the rule and is unbreakable even for foreigners with small tattoos they earned simply whilst drunk in Thailand, and not through associations with the Japanese mafia. However, in the sento at the top of Denis’s street, the rules have either been changed, or overturned, either by heavyweights or ownership of the local sento.

I am beginning to get into the onsen ritual, and have always enjoyed it at least for the experience, but for lack of any nsens in the immediate area I rarely get eh chance to go, so Fukui was a great opportunity to get out of the freezing cold and down and steamy with eh Yakuza.
I enjoy the onsen/sentos because each one sis deferent and a truly Japanese experience, but also because often bathing in Japan in the winter is not such a pleasant experience in my freezing house, and should be something done at a leisurely rate and with more of purpose than to just get clean.
When we walked into this particular sento I was a little surprised to find a woman who sat in a partition between the women’s and men’s section of the changing rooms meaning that you changed in front of the her, or rather took all you cloths off in front of her.
The woman took my 370yen (about 1.50) with a smile and gave me the miniature towel, just about big enough to retain, ones dignity.
We went 2 times and both times there were some old school looking, possibly retired yakuza. The second time the sauna was chock-a-block with tattooed gangsters, steamy away the remains of the day.
It is hard not to look when I guy has full back tattoos of kabuki actor and carps, quite beautiful, but with a certain sinister feel to them, but at least it distracted fro m the fact that you are naked anyway, although you’d be surprised how quickly you get over that.

The next day we set off early with Denis neighbor and one of his fellow teachers.
The roads were pure white in places and snow clearers had been driving all night to keep them safe.
It was a brilliant white in all directions in places on the way up and once again it began to snow.
Even outside Denis’s apartment in the city the snow was over a foot high and the silent sound of snow dropping brought a very calm and magical fell to the air that morning.

As for the slope, I don’t really know much about snowboarding but I though it was pretty amazing. A local favorite, with few people there, nestled in the mountains with superb views all the way back to the nearest town because of the clear morning air.
The snow at first was so fresh and powdery, that it was quite hard to snowboard, having only been once before, but after a while I remembered my legs. I used to skateboard for a couple years and so the balance that can maybe be a big problem was ok for me. The other thing I found with snowboarding s that, as the board is strapped to your legs you having no option to bail and thus you learn a lot quicker to stay up for fear of falling badly. In skateboarding, you always have the option to just step off with makes balance harder as you are not attached, and also always gives the option to just get off when the fear get you, and you can bail - and more often than not, you do.

Having only been going for about 40 minutes I hit a snag in that the bolt on my borrowed board came loose and dropped out somewhere in the snow.
I had no choice but to walk down the mountain. I got about 20 minutes down then decided to take a shortcut through the trees to reach the ski lift down. This was not the best idea, I thought as I began to sink deeper into the snow. When I was about shoulder height in the snow I thought that maybe I should turn back, however, I found to my surprise that I could not move my limbs at all.
This would be the first of many times that I became lodged in snow, and it was not that fun but a good lesson in survival. I now know what to do if I am ever unfortunate enough to step in quicksand. I managed anyway to grab the very end of a twig of a branch of a tree and eventually after about 10 minutes drag myself out of the snow. From there I kind of rolled towards the sloe and eventually appeared covered in snow, and very tired.
I walked the rest of the way as I was told I could take the lift down.
I managed to fix the board with a spare bolt and went on to have a fantastic day on that slope.
We only left when it got so cold that both my gloves and sideburns froze and we called it a day.

Next we decided to cure our ailments with another onsens, although this was as real onsen, and considerably more posh and expensive.
This was more of and onsen complex, which was packed with people bathing and eating and getting massages etc.

This was like a theme park onsens and you could rotate around various different themed onsens. Highlights included, the slat water onsens, outdoor heated flat rocks you sat on, outdoor onsens and electrified onsen, which sent electric shocks through the water into you as you sat. It made all your muscles crimp together and your fingers curl and distort. Comfort is not the word, but it is interesting.

We feasted on Malaysian chow, and discussed whether water constituted the majority of beer, or whether beer was in fact a separate entity. The answer is of course on the periodic table, where there is a big space where beer should be if it wasn’t in fact mostly water.

Fukui even delivered the goods on a night out and we headed off to a club where I could have been back in London, rocking the breaks, house and lack of interior design - nice!
On the way we even managed to squeeze an epic snowball fight instigated by someone and carried on up until eh club. At this point the snow had been coming down for almost 2 days and a white blanket covered everything with a foot of snow.
As we stumbled back in the early hours through the sea of white, we stumbled on yet more giant snow plows, slowly chugging back and forth like big robots from some Japanese animation.

Denis managed to power me out of bed the next morning, although I think that the look of pain and hunger for sleep almost in y face almost broke him.
Man his house is cold. When you go to the toilet, it’s like taking a steam bath, and as you breath the breath momentarily would fog my glasses.
It was probably bordering on the 0 degrees mark in the house and made me fell like my house was a tropical paradise. Hard to get up to say the least, but much easier to rise for a another day of snowboarding than for work and so off we set again, this time to s place called Ski Jam, a much larger, more popular and busier slope, especially because of the heavy fall during the night, which had not yet stopped and you wondered, how much snow cold physically settle before being compacted into ice.

Denis’s little rental　car which he had because his was in the shop due to a dink form someone from the ice on the road, struggled to get out and eventually got stuck, and so we had to borrow shovels to dig her out and eventually managed to get on the road, although much later that the day before.

We met another Japanese friend of his, who had lived in London for a while. He had got a job on the TV show Robot Wars, a little random, but it brought back memories of England, Craig Charles, and of course robots.
It’s a small world. Someone in Fukui working for the BBC can be a bit of a surprise but then there is a woman on my island who lived in Golders Green.

The second days snowboarding was great except that we took an off piste route through deep snow and I ended getting stuck for a about an hours crawling through the snow, and cursing Denis.

But it was another good survival experience, if a little intense.

We rounded up early to head back for another Yakuza onsen, but also because we needed to prepare a recently bought touring bicycle for a journey with me back to the Inland sea, in preparation for a epic cycling trip to the volcanic island of Kyushu, japans 3rd largest, in the south this spring.

This was as you can imagine yet another challenge, and constituted 3 trains in Japanese rush hour and 2 ferry journeys, but I got it back and learned a few lesson for the future.

I arrived back at 7.30 in the morning on the same boat as most of my teachers take soon after rising out of bed to get to school.

I dashed home, and changed into my suit, shaved and name tagged myself; arrive 10 minutes early for work, with a tired look in my eye but a smile in the back of my mind.

It may a little extreme taking the measures for the sake of experience and enjoyment, but then that’s why I cam here and the clock is ticking.

Thanks again Denis, you’re a great host and you cook a mighty fine bacon and egg sandwich.

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Photos

Off piste.
Near where I was trapped for an hour.

Bicycles
Fukui Ken

Woweewoowahweii!!
The mounts of Fukui ken.

Old school trains
Fukui Station

Snow by night.
Beginning to pile up.

Back seat audience
The strange practice of putting TVs in the rear back seats of cars for the car behind to view.