A Ski Season in Hakuba, Japan

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We arrived in Hakuba to the sight of brown hills - not the snowy white landscape that we were hoping for. The previous year it had started dumping snow in the middle of November, but it looked like we were just going to have to be patient. We kept being told that in Japan it’s not a case of if there will be deep powder snow, more a case of when. In the meantime we got acquainted with our new house - a shared house where we would be living for the season, provided by the hotel that we were working for. Everyone we were sharing with was really nice, but it was still quite a change for us going back to university-style halls accommodation!

It took a couple of weeks for the snow to arrive, and with not much work to do and not much going on in town, it was a bit of a boring start. But eventually the snow started falling and by mid-December there was enough to get out riding every day. And soon the big dumps of powder snow (for which Japan is famous for) started falling more and more regularly. When these storms hit, they hit hard, and the mountains are covered in deep, fluffy, light powder - like nothing I’ve ever ridden before. The feeling of flying downhill, floating above the surface, spraying snow into the air is pretty hard to beat! It transformed the landscape from a slightly depressing dark brown into a pure white wonderland. The trees turn completely frozen white, top to bottom - I have never seen anything like it. Riding through trees when they look this this is something special, it is like a different world. We would also occasionally came across what soon became my new favourite animal - the kamoshika, or Japanese serow. They are the weirdest looking animals I’ve ever seen - they have the body of a bear, the horns of a goat, and the face of a wolf. Yeh, imagine that! The first time we saw one we were convinced it was a bear before it turned to face us!

After a couple of months we were finding that the job wasn’t really working out for us, and made the decision to stop working at the hotel and instead to just spend our time riding. We are only going to do a ski season once and so wanted to make sure that we made the most of it and really enjoyed it. So we moved to another house a bit further out of town, in Sanosaka, which has a small ski resort just a five minute walk from where we were living. It is also a much more ‘Japanese’ part of Hakuba. Although Hakuba is a fun place to be, it is pretty overrun with foreign tourists. We knew that it would be a bit like this, but we had expected it to be more Japanese than what it actually is. It was why we had chosen Hakuba over Niseko (which is basically now an Australian town), so we were a bit disappointed that Hakuba often felt more like Australia than Japan. So it was nice to move out to an area that was a bit quieter, despite being a bit further away from all the action.

As a result we had to buy a car to help us get around, something which proved to be a great investment due to the freedom it gave us. Japan has certain types of car, known as kei cars, which you can buy reasonably easily and cheaply providing they satisfy a few conditions. These awesome little cars have to be smaller than a certain size and have a limited engine size (660cc), but it means that the taxes and insurance are much cheaper, and there are less hoops you have to jump through in order to buy one. You might think that a tiny 660cc car would be no good for getting round a ski resort, but we managed to get hold of a four wheel drive version, and as it is so light we had no trouble cruising up icy roads in the snow. However it did look comically small (a bit Inbetweeners style), especially for me (being 6’4). But now we were on the road amongst all the other weird looking Japanese cube cars!

The snow kept on coming throughout January, and in particular we had an amazing couple of weeks at the end of the month when some friends came out to visit and we were treated to several powder days. We also arranged to go on a guided backcountry day, which was a great experience as I’d never done anything like it before. We snowshoed out into the backcountry and had fresh lines in some nice deep powder through the trees. The snowshoeing, although tricky at first, was great - it’s amazing how a snowshoe will float on the surface of the snow when your boot will just sink straight in, allowing you to get out to much more remote areas. We skiied and hiked across a couple of valleys, eventually getting spat out onto a main road where we were picked up. We had great snow and a perfect blue sky day to top it off. It’s something that I’d definitely like to do more of as I loved the adventure of it all!

However, as we came into the second half of February, the snow just completely stopped falling and the temperatures began to rise. Spring had sprung early. We found ourselves with no more of that magical powder, and instead were faced with slushy and sticky conditions. Not so bad for me as a snowboarder as I was quite happy hitting up the park, but for Amy who loves her fast piste skiing it wasn’t as much fun. We kept it interesting by trying a few new things such as cross-country skiing and trying to ski all of the ten resorts in the valley in one day from top to bottom (which we managed to do with only ten minutes to spare!). I also spent a day under Amy’s tuition trying to learn how to ski, which was pretty fun. By lunchtime I had started to feel quite confident with my parallel turns, so she took me further up the mountain onto the steeper stuff, where all the confidence was knocked out of me as I tumbled down the slope, a tangled mess of arms, legs and skis! We headed back down to the mellower runs where I felt a bit more comfortable, and by the end of the day felt like I had improved a lot and quite enjoyed it - not enough to switch to the dark side though, sorry Amy… The lack of snow was a bit of a shame as we had become accustomed to the amazing powder and were hoping for a full season of it, but it wasn’t to be.

But because it wasn’t so good, and we had the car, it meant that we had more time to explore some of the surrounding area. We tried out a couple of nearby ski resorts, Nozawa Onsen and Shiga Kogen. Nozawa is a smaller resort a couple of hours away, but with a much more Japanese vibe. We lucked out and got it on a powder day, scoring some fresh lines through some epic tree runs all morning before exploring the pretty town in the afternoon. Nozawa is an onsen town (an onsen is a hot spring where you can bathe in pools either inside or outside). They are usually segregated, and there are plenty of rules and etiquette that must be abided by, most notably that you have to bathe naked. It’s a little uncomfortable at first, but you quickly get used to it and realise that no one else really cares. Not only do you feel the cleanest that you’ve ever felt (as you shower before and after going into the hot spring itself), but it is super relaxing. There’s something deeply soothing about being outside, immersed in extremely hot water whilst looking out to the mountains with snow falling around you.

Anyway, Nozawa has a few public onsens dotted around town that you can use for free. We went into O-yu - a beautiful wooden building set on a corner in the centre of this quaint town. Immediately I was confronted with one of those ‘what do I do here moments’. I’d only just got to grips with what to do in a normal onsen, but this was nothing like the ones I’d been in before. Normally you shower off using all the soaps provided whilst sitting on a small stool, making sure you are thoroughly clean before getting into the main baths. Here, there was a line of low down taps with some small buckets laid out. The water out the taps was absolutely freezing. And washing whilst standing is a bit of a no-no. So the only thing for it was to squat down, naked, pouring freezing water over myself, hoping that I was doing vaguely the right thing (hope that hasn’t put you off your breakfast). When some other people came in later they wisely used the bucket to pour the hot onsen water over them instead. Confidently, I stepped into the main bath and immediately jumped back out, yelping in pain - this was the hottest water I had ever been in! Not wanting to back out I tried again, lowering myself down gently into the boiling water. I sat there for about three minutes, not wanting to move as any movement resulted in further pain, worrying about what damage this was doing to anything exposed to it. Was it possible for toenails to fall off if they get too hot? I couldn’t take it any longer and got out pretty swiftly. Once again it turned out I had managed to get into the hotter of the two baths - as they were labelled in Japanese I had no idea which one was which! Apparently it was 62.4 degrees… And to top if off the sulphur in the water made me smell like egg for the rest of the day. In fact, these onsens are so hot that the locals use them to cook - several times we saw people putting bags of food into smaller onsens on the street. A common thing is for eggs to be cooked in them (maybe that’s where the egg smell came from…), and you can just pick them out of small onsens on the street and put your money in the jar next to them!

On another trip, on our way to Shiga Kogen ski resort, we stopped off at Jigokudani Yaen Koen to see the snow monkeys. We sometimes saw them around Hakuba early in the season, but at this place there were so many of them all playing and bathing in the hot onsen water it was really cool to see. It’s a bit of a tourist trap but well worth a visit. We stayed overnight in the nearby onsen town of Shibu Onsen. Shibu Onsen has nine public onsens that can be used around the small town. People stay in traditional Japanese wooden ryokans (inns) and walk around the cobbled streets dressed in their yukatas (kind of like a light kimono), clip-clopping around in wooden flip flops, going between the different onsens. It has a wonderful traditional feel about the place. There are plenty of foot onsens too - great places to sit on the side of a street dipping your feet into the hot water and drinking a beer, and great places to meet people too - we met some of our best friends in Hakuba in a foot onsen. Each of the onsens is known for having different healing properties - the onsen for curing cuts and skin diseases was given a wide berth on this occasion…

We also made some side trips to Nagano, in particular to see the famous Zenko-ji Temple, and to Matsumoto to see the 400 year old timber castle, both of which were nice days out of the Hakuba bubble.

We’ve been in Japan for a while now, and have come to love some things, and have also come to find certain things a bit annoying (or maybe it’s just that we don’t understand them…). So here’s a few of my thoughts on Japan so far...

Tiny doors. Most door frames are only about 180 cm high, and I am 193 cm tall. You do the maths. I have scalped myself so many times since being here. I haven’t been through a doorway that I haven’t had to duck for - and I frequently forget and find myself writhing on the floor in agonising pain. It’s a vicious circle - the more I forget and hit my head the more likely I am to forget next time, as I feel like I am losing brain cells every time!

Ridiculous amounts of plastic packaging. The Japanese are known for their hygiene and cleanliness, but this takes it to an extreme. For example, an individually wrapped banana. It already has a bloody wrapper! It’s called a banana skin! Or a bag of rice crackers, with each rice cracker wrapped individually. It drives me crazy!

Having to take your shoes off all the time. Shoes are almost never worn inside, and definitely not on any tatami mats. It’s probably the only thing that a Japanese person would shout at you for. Any change in floor level normally means you should be changing footwear, and anxiety sets in when there is a step and no other obvious sign that you should be doing something with your feet. Sometimes it gets a bit silly - we stayed at one place where we took our shoes off when we came in the front door to change into slippers, went into our Japanese style room and so took the slippers off to walk on the tatami mats, then to go to the toilet involved putting the slippers back on before walking about 3 metres and needing to change into special toilet slippers. And then the reverse on the way back. No wonder all Japanese people seem to like slip on shoes - big lace up boots are not the way to go. But after being here a while, I do get it. The thought of ever walking inside our flat at home now with shoes on kind of appals me - why would you bring all that outside dirt inside onto your carpet?!! So OK, hands up, I’m a convert on that one.

Tiny portions. Don’t get me wrong, Japanese food is fantastic. It’s so varied and absolutely delicious. But I never leave a restaurant full. And if I do, I’m hungry again in a couple of hours. I know it’s because the food is more healthy and has less fat etc. but it is killing me! I’ve lost so much weight here it’s unbelievable - 13kg in 3 months now! It’s the same in the supermarkets too - we have to buy six tiny cans of tuna just to feed the two of us for one meal. And combined with the over-packaging, shopping can be infuriating. I’ve started picking things up and assessing what I think it should weigh - if it’s nowhere near then it’s back on the shelf. A big box of chocolates?? Ah, only weighs as much as a small packet of crisps - no thanks.

The lack of sensitivity to the landscape. Japan is beautiful, it really is. Mountains, rice paddies, temples and shrines. All obscured by electricity wires and pylons. It is almost impossible to take a picture without one in! And every river bed is coated in concrete. Hideous dams scatter the mountain passes. Whereas a lot of other countries have buried their cables, and thought of ways to blend any necessary service equipment in with the surrounding environment, the Japanese seem to have just whacked in whatever they want, wherever they want. And it has really spoilt a lot of what is beautiful countryside. I lost count of the number of times I looked at something and thought that it should be a nice view, but it wasn’t because of the manmade things around it. Perhaps it is due to the rapid modernisation of Japan, I’m not sure. But I hope that one day they make the investment and try to bury some of this stuff!

OK so now I’ve whined about the negatives (only five, I think that’s pretty good?!), on to the things we have found that we really like here.

Firstly it’s got to be the Japanese people. They have to be the most polite people on the planet. You can’t spend more than a few minutes in Japan without hearing the word sumimasen being uttered everywhere. It has a few meanings but is usually accompanied with a slight bow and is used as a light apology, or a way of saying excuse-me - just a way of being respectful really. There is pretty much zero confrontation and everyone is extremely helpful, even with the communication barrier people are more than happy to try and give you a hand. I suppose a good example of how respectful and polite the Japanese are would be with the face masks. You see Japanese people wearing these all the time. Our initial thought (as selfish Westerners) was that this was because they were worried about getting ill from other people. But no - in typical Japanese fashion they wear them when they are ill themselves or feel like they are becoming ill, to try and prevent transmitting it to other people!

The lack of crime. No one locks up their bikes - even in Tokyo. And people leave their cars running with the keys in the ignition whilst they nip into the convenience store. It’s a super safe place to be. It’s really refreshing to be somewhere where you know that the vast, vast majority of people have respect for you and your possessions, and wouldn’t even dream of taking what is yours.

Convenience stores. Actually convenient. And they are everywhere. Need something printing? Head to the konbini. Need to pay your bills? Do it at the konbini. Need some hot fried chicken and a hot latte? Yep, they’ve got it at the konbini and it’s pretty good too. A lot of them have seating areas with microwaves and hot water where you can heat up the ready made meal you’ve bought and eat it right there! So handy (and cheap). Why do these not exist in the UK? Why do ours have shelves of chickpeas and lentils instead of doughnuts and ice creams?

The Japanese dining experience. OK it might not leave me full, but I do really appreciate the way a lot of the Japanese restaurants work. Often you can just order what you want at a vending machine (this is Japan of course), it'll be brought to you within a couple of minutes and you can do your appreciative slurping at the bar and get out of there. Quick, surprisingly cheap and efficient. No waiting around to pay your bill. And the quality is almost always excellent, even in the cheap places to eat.

Alright that’s enough for now. We’re now heading on a bit of a tour of the country for the next 3 weeks in the car, so I’ll do an update in a few weeks time. And typically it’s started dumping snow just as we’ve sent our boards and skis home!

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