The snowapacolypse of 2014

I thought I knew snow. In fact I thought we were friends. I thought being Canadian meant I was prepared for all winter had to offer. I was wrong.

After two months of complaining about either not getting snow or getting not enough snow to cancel school, I was forced to eat my words. There was still snow left on the ground from the week before when over a foot of it had made our trip home from Tohoku nearly impossible. Then Friday morning, it began. I woke up to the beautiful silence of a heavy snowfall. I looked outside and saw a couple of inches had fallen in the night. It was then I made the best decision of the day, I walked to school.

The snow didn’t stop. All day it fell. My teacher’s kept praising me for being a genius for walking. At first I brushed it off. Really it was no big deal I just didn’t want a repeat of Monday where it took two hours to get my car back into my spot. But as school was cancelled halfway through and the kids were walked home in the now blizzard I was so glad to have walked. All I could do was watch mesmerized from my desk as a few inches became a foot by noon and two by the time Kyoto-sensei finally told me I should go home. I waded home and found my car was partially buried already.

Then I curled up for the evening with a good book. Right before bed I looked out the window again. The snow was well past the doors of my car and still falling!

The next morning, my car was gone.

The snow was impossible comprehend. Like nothing I’d ever seen before. Sure, two years ago we had gone to Shirakawago where they boast seven feet of snow but that was over months of collecting. What we had in Yamanashi was a meter and a half of snow from a twenty-four hour blizzard! And the world was silent. No cars. No people. Just the soft sound of a few final snowflakes dusting the mountains that had once been our cars.

After breakfast I bundled up and hurried out to see what had become of the world. By then a few plows had come by so the snow in the middle of the road was only a foot deep but I had to wade through four feet of snow to get there. An announcement over the PA system forbid the use of private vehicles. Cars were abandoned in the middle of the street. The only sound was the wind. It felt like something out of a disaster movie. A few tractors were making dents in the sea of white but the most they’d been able to do was a cut a narrow path right down the middle of the road. When I encountered one, I had to wait for it to stop so I climb through the snow bank passed it. At the 7-11 I found a coffee but all the bread was sold out. Little did I know that was the last time I’d see milk until nearly a week later. I also bought this packaged muffin to feed the fish at my favourite shrine.

The main road from here was now only a single track where people had to take turns passing each other when they met. I took this all the way down to Shimoyoshida and saw the shrine. From the main entrance it would be impossible to enter. I’d have to wade a hundred meters through four feet of snow so I tried the other entrance. Again it was blocked by snow. Not to be put off this time, I climbed over a mountain only to find myself chest deep on the other side. I had no idea it was that hard to walk through snow! It was impossible to get farther than a few feet. A man looked over at me from where he was shoveling the way to his car and laughed.

“Doko made?” Where are you going to?

“Koko made.” Here.

I could get no farther. I was forced to turn around and go back to the main ‘road.’ Poor fish, hope they got food somehow. Exhausted by my efforts I tried to walk home a different route only to come across a waterfall of slush coming down the hill! I have no idea where it came from or how but old men in hip-waders were the only ones able to get through it. Muri.

So I turned back the way I came and spent the next hour totally over the novelty of our new snowy world. At home I curled up in bed and promised I would not leave again until the snow melted.

The proved to be impossible for the next day was the same. Still no cars were allowed to drive, not that I could as my car was a six feet under with no way to get to the road. But the good news was we got the next day off school! This turned into three days off school which eventually turned into an entire week  as the city focused all its efforts on trying to get back on its feet.

It was then I realized I would have to go shopping. It was later I realized that a thousand people had thought the same thing and the combini was now at half-stock. In the next few days I’d realize that Yamanashi was cut off from the rest of the world. High up in the mountains with only a few ways in and out, all blocked because they are at snowy mountain passes, we were on our own. Yamanashi requested military help to dig us out and get food and water to isolated communities. Restaurants, supermarkets and combinis were unable to get fresh stock so supplies began to run low. On Wednesday I waited thirty minutes in line to battle hundreds of others for bread at the grocery store. It sold out in minutes. Still there was no milk or meat and the fruit and vegetables were starting to look a bit sad. It was really crazy to be living like that if even for a few days. For nearly a week I ate only instant pasta and frozen broccoli.

Finally by Thursday the trains were running and I could escape, even for a day, with Kevin to Tokyo. We had a fabulous snow-free day and ate at T.G.I.Fs. and had sakura lattes at Starbucks. Before heading home we both stopped up at a combini and bought milk and bread as there still wasn’t any in Yamanashi.

A week after the snow had first fell, life returned to normal but still mountains of snow are left at the sides of the road and in field. I will be surprised if it can melt before I head home in four weeks! When all is said and done this snow storm broke all the records. Never before, since they began keeping track in the 1800s, had this much snow fallen at one time.

The days in between

I'm just going to admit it. I've gotten lazy. I've gotten comfortable in Japan. It's become home and I no longer see it as this constant foreign experience. Using chop sticks, practicing with the katana, speaking Japanese, praying at a shrine and earthquakes have kinda just become a part of my daily life so I no longer report on every experience. In a way it shows how I've grown here and it shows that this has really become home. In another way I'm worried I might regret it if I don't try and keep track of all the things that made me smile in these past three years. So here is my attempt at a bit of summarizing between winter and summer.

First and foremost. I officially got my black belt certificate. It truly didn't feel real until I was holding the actual thing in my hand. Unfortunately with iaido I don't get an actual black belt but the meaning is the same when it's on a piece of paper. This is because in Japan it's not call a black belt it's called 'shodan' and all it really means is I'm a level 1 of taking myself seriously as a samurai martial artist.

Then it was my birthday. Turning 27 was a bit harder than I was expecting. No that's a lie, it was just as hard as I was expecting. I'm no longer in my early 20s, past my mid-20s and now embarking on my late 20s. When the kids ask me how old I am (because they forget every single time and ask me over and over again) they no longer say 'oh you are so young.' They ask 'are you married?' When I say 'not yet.' They give me that look that says 'you aren't so young anymore Sarah-sensei.' Eeep! Anyway, with such a big number looming over me I flew under the radar and Kevin and I just hung out and ate chicken and cake on a snowy evening. But before that I visited my favourite shrine in the snow and it was spectacularly beautiful!

For my birthday weekend we went to Tohoku because that's what I most wanted to do. We hadn't been volunteering in over a year and I was really missing it. Instead of trying to fill the car, Kevin and I went alone. It was an adventure. Friday night was wonderful. We drove to Sendai in record time, ate a fabulous western style dinner and then spent the night at a quaint inn. It was Saturday that gave us problems. Not only was Kevin in loads of pain because of his back but he ended up with a fever. Backtracking just a little, we met up with Kousuke and Satoko who took us to the Yume na Ie, dream house, a community center for those affected by the tsunami. Along the way we stopped at this ruined building. it took a full minute of staring at it to realize what we were seeing was a building on its SIDE. I had no idea water was powerful enough to push a four story building off its cement foundations and on to the ground. In the distance there was a hill with a hospital atop it. Kousuke said the water went as high up as the first floor way up on that hill. It was impossible to believe. So here we were, at the dream house, painting when Kevin falls ill. And then it snows. And snows. AND snows. It stopped being beautiful just as I tucked Kevin into bed early with lots of medication and started being a hazards by the time I woke up and found two feet of it on the ground. What followed was nearly a twenty hour journey home a full day early. It took Satoko and I three hours of digging to even get the car to the road and then many MANY hours drive to get us back to Yamanashi where the majority of the roads had closed letting in only a fine (very backed-up) trickle of traffic. At least Kevin began to feel better but still we did not get home until three in the morning.

I slept at Kevin's but the next morning I had to be up at six to dig out my own car, drive home, shower and be ready for school by nine. In the end there wasn't class but I still had to sit there, exhausted, miserable and knowing I had three feet of snow waiting for me in my parking spot when I returned. At least Sheena lent me a shovel and my wonderful neighbour cut down my shoveling time by half so it only took two hours to park my car and turn in for the night.

Little did I know what was in store for that next weekend or I would have never complained about all that snow then.

When history comes to life

Looking back three years I’m not sure what brought me to this point. I’m often asked why I came to Japan. My answer varies vaguely from “I’m interested in the culture” to “the landscape is beautiful.” I usually mention that when I first came here in 2008 I loved it so much I knew I’d want to live here someday. The point is now I find myself asking me why I came here. I think I can only know now why I came after seeing all I have gained from living here: knowledge of a second language, an outsider’s perspective of my own country, a black belt in iaido, a friend that I hope I’ll always have, thousands of awesome pictures and an understanding of Japanese history I could never acquire from books alone. It is because of this last point that I went to Sekigahara. Okay that and Nikki really wanted to go. So off we went early in the morning like true crazy people, driving halfway across the country on local roads, to fulfill our quest: see the ancient battlefield that changed the way of Japan.

The first day was really long but we made lots of stops at omiyage shops, combinis and even a random beach that required nearly killing us as I veered off the highway to circle around these funny turns until I eventually found a place to park. I have a sixth sense for getting to beaches. We had to do a bit of bushwhacking along an overgrown trail, take a set of rotten wooden stairs up and over a fence, and pass beneath the highway but finally we reached the beautiful beach! It was a warmish day so we took off our boots and sucks and jumped through the surf, (yes in winter!) until we noticed the waves were big enough to threaten our abandoned things. We rescued them just in time and then went shell hunting. I found some really cool twirly shells. The waves were so massive and the wind fierce. Finally shivering, we headed back for the car, covered in sand and salt but it was so worth it.

As the day waned we finally made it to Nagoya which was a terrifying city to drive in. I could have probably tried to avoid it but there was a shrine there that I needed to complete a list of three, the sacred places that enshrine a sacred treasures of Japan. The imperial palace in Tokyo holds the jewel, the sacred shrine in Ise houses the mirror and finally the Asuta shrine in Nagoya is home to the sword. While you cannot actually see the treasures, they are far too sacred for mere mortals, it meant something to me to be in the places of them because of a book I’m writing. The precinct was large and heavily wooded. The sky over head was marbled with blue and white as the sun began to set. And if not for the hundreds of people celebrating hatsumode, the shrine was peaceful. Though unable to approach the main altar, if the visitor is respectful, they can walk a wooded trail around it. As the sword has a legend revolving around the dragon king, I lead Nikki around spinning a tale of the great dragon and how he still watched over the treasure entrusted to him.

As the sun set we drove through western Nagoya and I stopped to snap a quick shot of the castle before we carried on to Ogaki. The last part of the day was brutal. The driving took forever and because we took all local roads there was no direct route so we were forced to take side street after side street. It took forever to get to our hotel but when we did we were pleasantly rewarded with an excellent location and the softest of beds. We went out for dinner than tucked in early for our big adventure the next day.

At the hotel I’d seen a poster of Ogaki castle. I hadn’t even realized such a thing existed so of course we had to go check it out. We set out early, driving the sleepy streets of the town along a canal (that would have been simply gorgeous in sakura season) to the castle. We wandered around the castle grounds to this little inari shrine where red tori gates wrapped around a massive tree and the locals were feeding stray cats. While a reconstruction, the castle was really quaint and had an interesting museum inside. At the top I looked out the south window and saw where the valley of Sekigahara lied in the distant mountains, the climax of our adventure.

In the 16th century Japan was at war. Japan wasn’t even really a nation yet, it was a collection of many states that all had a warlord. In theory they were united by the emperor who ruled in Kyoto but he was mostly only ever viewed as a figurehead since the first shogun around the 12th century. The warring era began during a time of conflict with the Ashikage shogunate and after a series of earthquakes and famines. Japan became rather a free-for-all for a couple hundred of years. This was the time of Takeda Shingen, Uesugi kenshin, Date Masamune and all those other ancient samurai I like to gush on about. They all played a role but it was the three unifiers who changed the course of history. Oda Nobunaga first proposed uniting Japan under his rule. He was succeeded by Toyotomi Hideyoshi when he grew too corrupt and was killed. Finally Tokugawa Ieyasu was the one who saw their vision become reality. When Toyotomi passed away he left his son to inherit his power and his five most trusted generals to serve his son until he came of age. Of those generals were Tokugawa and Ishida Mitsunari. Ishida was loyal to his overlord even when he was dead. However, Tokugawa was an opportunist and as he was of a strong bloodline, if he conquered Japan, he had the potential to become shogun, a title awarded by the emperor to the elite.

Some time passed (insert montage here of samurai preparing for war) while Tokugawa readied his armies to the east, where powerful lords like Date ruled, and then in 1600 on October 21 he marched on Ishida’s forces from the west. The battle was the most decisive of Japanese history and took place in a remote mountainous area in the middle of the country: Sekigahara. The west hardly even stood a chance for midway through battle many of Ishida’s forced defected and turned against him. The battle was finished. Ishida was left looking over the battlefield from his camp and realizing he had lost to a former comrade. Okay well that last bit is probably mostly my speculation but all this was going through my mind as we hiked up the wood stairs to Ishida’s camp and looked out over the snowy fields where over 400 years ago hundreds of thousands of warriors fought the to end the age of the warring states. In the end Tokugawa was successful and, with only the exception of the Siege at Osaka castle three years later, there was peace until the Meiji restoration 250 years later. What’s most interesting to me is that the Meiji restoration is rather like the sequel to the battle of Sekigahara for it was the losing clans’ descendents in the west who eventually rose up to overthrow the Tokugawa government after centuries of resentment.

So here we were, driving up this silent little road in the middle of inaka looking for signs of this ancient war. Sekigahara is not really a place of tourism but that’s what made it so charming. It was like a scavenger hunt to find these places that existed so long ago and after a bit of research and fine use of my kanji-reading skills we found what appeared to be an abandoned theme park. Further investigation revealed it to be ‘Warland,’ a concrete reconstruction of the battle that was not entirely abandoned after all. We paid the nominal fee for the park and spent the next hour being the only ones to wander through the warriors frozen in battle as we were overtaken ourselves by a blizzard. It was a strange day full of surprises: first an entire park of stone warriors, then a snow storm when we awoke to blue skies and sun. There were secret omiyage shops to buy souvenirs and the nicest old lady who toweled Nikki and I off when we entered her store soaked from our hike in the snow. There was something very magical about the day. My favourite part was standing atop of Ishida’s camp and looking over the field half concealed by the snow storm. It took some imagination to see the whole valley stretched out before us but I imagined what it must have been to be a commander and watch your army fail you. Oh why must I be in love with the losers of history!? For Nikki’s sake we also visited the Tokugawa camp as she is a champion for the east. Then we waged war in front of this awesome poster I wanted to steal and take home with me.

 

 

We drove through the battlefield, turned rice field, past countless statues marking fallen warriors and important points of the battle, past half-frozen persimmons and trees dressed in snow and all the while we were alone in the countryside. It seemed as if we were the conquerors of Sekigahara. All too soon it was time to return home and as I set our course north I felt that history had truly come to life for me for just one day.

A weekend of Miyagi

Oh the wonders of the Seishun 18 ticket. For so cheap Nikki and I traveled to Sendai. The only catch was, as usual, it took all day to get there. But eight hours later Nikki had finally made it to the domain of Date Masamune, only the coolest feudal lord from Japanese history. I myself have been quite a few times now but I never regret going again. Sendai is about the size of Vancouver and nicknamed the ‘city of trees’ and for that it is a place I really connect with.

We spent the first day exploring the city. Going to the mausoleum of Date, the castle ruins and the Hachimangu shrine which was the family shrine of Masumune. Other than it being winter, when I’d last visited in summer, it was just as wonderful as I remembered. I would go into detail about the history of such a lovely city but I’ll leave that to my summer post from a couple of years ago. That day it just felt nice to explore with new eyes and enjoy a place I love so much with my best friend. We had a wonderful afternoon shopping and snacking and tucked in for an early yet relaxing evening with a wonderful movie.

 

 

The next day we went to Matsushima. The sky was blue with only a few clouds but it felt as if it had dropped quite a few degrees since the day before. This might have also been because we were now out at the edge of the ocean and the sea breeze was not kind. First we went to my favourite bridge in all of Japan! Well that’s not quite fair as I have so many of them: the vine bridge in Shikoku, the megane bridge in Kyushu, Saruhashi of course and just about every little red bridge that I come across. Well if nothing else, this one is the longest red bridge I’ve ever crossed and it leads to a little island. We walked around a bit and took these stairs cut into the sandstone down to a secret little beach where I’d played that first summer.

After, we went back to the mainland for some omiyage shopping and to see some of the sights like shrines and the stone Buddhist caves at the temple. We ate French fries and watched the ocean and finally went to the aquarium.

I always think Nikki is the one dragging me to the aquariums but it always ends up that I’m the one more excited and this was no exception. Affected by the tsunami there were still a few signs of what a disaster it had been but luckily it seems most of the fish survived. There is a sign on the penguin exhibit that shows how close it got though. It was bizarre to think I would be chest deep in ocean had I been standing there on March 11. To cheer us up there was a seal show going on across the way and Nikki and I went to watch what I thought was only in movies! A seal was balancing all sorts of things on his nose and playing volleyball with his friends. I was very entertained. But the best part by far was a dolphin I befriended. I can’t remember its actual type but it was nicknamed ‘panda dolphin’ and it was easy to see why.  I had never seen one before. I went up to the glass to marvel at them when one came right up to the glass and started doing little spins. I ran my hands along the glass and he followed. When I went to the other window he followed me there too, playing around in the water the entire time. He was simple adorable and if I could have taken him home I would have. I settled instead for a panda dolphin stuffy Nikki bought me at the shop instead. It was hard to say good bye yet I was convinced to leave because of the ‘penguin walk.’ The keepers actually let the penguins out of their tanks and they walked around the entrance way to the delight of the audience and myself included. Like I said, I think I enjoyed the aquarium way more than I thought I would.

But alas, cold and tired we headed back to Sendai. We were just about to stop for dinner when the most amazing thing happened: We walked down a covered shopping street with the illumination glowing around us and the sound of a recorded shamisen playing traditional New Year’s melodies. For three days we passed what appeared to be a little shrine tucked down the narrowest of alleys but for three days it seemed closed and unwelcoming. Each time I would stop, looking towards it wishing I could sneak down the alley, ring the bell and awaken the spirit there to listen to my prayers. Instead we kept walking until on the last night we passed by and it radiated warmth. The narrow alley was not lined by cold steel doors as I’d previously seen, it was lined by tiny shops selling green tea, amulets and incense that summoned us towards the shrine at the end. There people were bowing to the gods within and praying for a good New Year. As beautiful as it was I felt I was intruding and turned to leave with Nikki. Just as we did so a man caught up with us and in English asked where we were from. For some reason I chose to play the part of a tourist for once and politely replied I was from Canada leaving out that I lived in Japan. He suggested we go back to the shrine to pray and I looked back as if beckoned there. Before I knew it he’d whisked us back towards the shrine and up the stairs asking us to take our shoes off so we could enter the room and kneel down before altar. There he guided us through the simple cleansing ritual in his broken English. Humbled by his offering I kept my Japanese to myself for he seemed so much more powerful than me in that moment and there was no room for my pride. He put incense on our left hands and told us to rub it all over and on our faces and bodies to cleanse. We prayed, thanked him and bowed to both him and the gods before exiting back down the alley and back into the chaos of the city. I almost thought if I looked back the shrine, the priest who had blessed us would no longer be there.

The last morning we woke early to grab breakfast and catch the train home. I’m so glad I got to bring Nikki to Sendai at last and if there was any reason to justify staying this last year, that was it.