Snow scenes and cherry blossoms

SNOW is seldom seen here in Kyushu, and when it does appear, it seldom survives more than a day. That’s just the way I like it.

Snow on the ground is a daily companion a few months out of the year in other parts of Japan, however. One man told me about moving into a rental house in the northeastern part of the country in midwinter. He didn’t realize there was a fence around the property until spring came and the snow melted.

The opportunities for outdoor fun in Snow Country would seem to be limited to skiing, snowboarding, ice skating, and swapping frostbite avoidance strategies. That’s not how the people who live in that part of Japan see it, however, particularly the people of Yamagata. For example:

They play soccer in the snow.

For the past seven years, the folks in Yonezawa have a soccer tournament played on a snow-covered rice paddy instead of a pitch. They think it’s safe to assume there will be enough snow to hold the event every year. In addition to creating a chance to act goofy, the idea is to attract interest in the local Onogawa hot spring resort.

The rules have been modified to suit the playing conditions. The rice paddy pitch is 20 x 40 meters, the match is played with futsal rules with five members on a team (at least one of whom must be female), the players wear rubber boots instead of spikes, and using piles of snow to deliberately obstruct an opponent is not allowed.

The reports from Yamagata suggest the players of snow soccer have just as much fun when they fail as they do when they succeed. Footballers find it hard to run when their feet sink into the playing surface, and hard to stay serious when they fall on their face after kicking snow or air instead of the ball.

They go mountain biking in the snow.

For the past 17 years, the city of Higashine has staged a winter festival that includes an endurance race on mountain bikes over the local tundra. The bikers hit the trail on a special circuit laid out over 2.5 kilometers near another hot spring resort, and that location can’t be by accident. The course even includes jumps.

Contestants are divided into three groups: Men 50 and older, men 49 and younger, and women. Speaking of endurance, it takes about an hour to run the 2.5 kilometers, but that’s to be expected when tires are spinning in snow sherbet or in the air after the rider takes a spill.

They also have races with radio cars.

The engineering school of Yamagata University in Yonezawa sponsors a race over the snow for radio-controlled cars put together by the students. One of the objectives is to have students with different specialties work together on the same team, and this time five teams participated. It’s a timed race over a course that features jumps and other obstacles, and the course was laid out to require travel over snow of different consistencies.

All the entries were hot-rodded radio cars already commercially available. One team of students outfitted the wheels with belts instead of tires, and another added aluminum wings that rotated to bite into the snow and prevent slips. One team’s car didn’t get anywhere at all — the tires never got traction and they had to withdraw after the battery ran down.

Of course they have snow fights. In fact, in Hokkaido, they have international snow fights. With teams.

They’ve been duking it out in the snows of Hokkaido’s Sobetsu-cho over two-day competitions for 24 years now. The objective is to be the first team to reach the summit of Mt. Showashin. They’ve got more competition than the average gladiator match — according to reports, 150 teams with 1,500 members in all participate. That includes several squads from Europe, one of which last year was the winner of a similar event in Sweden. International exchange in the snow!

The Japanese media didn’t report on the rules governing the competition — there must be some — but this is what it looked like:

They don’t waste their time with mere snowmen, either. Back in Yamagata, they build snow monuments.

An estimated 70 snow sculptors in Oishida-machi created what they call a soba mascot in front of the JR Oishida Station. That’s the sort of monument people put up when they live in a town known for soba noodles.

The monument was 10 x 17 x 4 meters, with a “soba mascot” rendered on the front in a style of drawing traditional to the area called kotee. They also sprayed on the color, white alone being insufficient to create the desired effect.

The group consisted of members of the local Lions club, a construction industry association, an art group, and high school students. They also made snow slides and lanterns while they were at it. Odds are they made their way to a hot spring for a good long soak after all that cold weather work.

Speaking of snow lanterns, they make those in Yonezawa too. Those are for the annual Uesugi Toro Festival, a toro being a type of lantern. The event is held over wide area that includes the Uesugi Shinto shrine and Matsugamisaki Park. More than 103 local groups pitch in to make 248 of the snow toro, as well as a candle pyramid and 3,000 smaller lanterns of a different style.

In fact, the slogan for the event is “One lantern at each house”.

They even have flower festivals in the snow in Yamagata. With real flowers!

The festive winter flowers there are tree peonies, known as botan in Japanese, and the festival has been held for more than a decade at Takahata-machi. Perhaps for variation, they also had some flowers shipped in from Shimane, which is known as the peony capital of Japan.

The flowers are displayed on 35 straw mats that are a meter high. The main attraction is a six-meter mat with the flowers arranged in a special hina doll design. (Hina Festivals will be held throughout the country the weekend after next.) Adding to the fun are snow slides and peony miso soup with boar meat.

Yes, that’s what the report said. I read it twice to make sure.

Winter in Yamagata has several attractions for aesthetes as well as the type of people who play snow soccer. One of them is snow monster viewing at the Zao ski resort in Yamagata City. Local atmospheric conditions combined with falling snow means that the trees on the slopes are covered with hoar frost that hardens into unusual shapes. Snow monster fans from throughout Japan visit for the views, the skiing (on 14 slopes over 305 hectares with 42 ski lifts), and the hot springs resorts. There’s one outdoor hot spring at Zao that can accommodate up to 200 people at once, presumably of the same sex. Then again, the air’s so cold there’s plenty of steam, and people probably sink in up to their necks, so all that nudity would go to waste.

If all this talk of snow, ice, and numb runny noses has you longing for the warmer weather of spring, take heart — it’s already started in another part of Japan, despite the date on the calendar.

Way down south in Nago, Okinawa, they have a slogan: Spring in Japan begins here. That’s because for the past half-century, they have the country’s first official hanami, or cherry blossom viewing, at the Nago Sakura Matsuri at the end of January. Now that sounds like my kind of place.

In addition to the usual boozing, flower appreciation, singing, and more boozing, there are parades, dancing by women’s groups and other groups in period costumes, and performances by youth groups.

And I’ll bet they all relax at a hot spring when it’s over!

*****
Here’s a brief video of the Zao snow monsters in Yamagata.

Through one of the quirks of the Internet, one of the suggested videos at the end is of a bunch of people in France shopping at a department store in their underwear.

And the media thinks Japan is weird!

UPDATE:
Now here’s some good news.

Kumamoto, the leading watermelon-producing prefecture in Japan, just made its first shipment of the year on the 19th. Yeah, they were grown in a greenhouse, but they sure look good, they weigh four to five kilograms each (bigger than usual), they’re about 11-12 on the sweetness scale (average, and yes, that’s the first time I’ve heard of a sweetness scale too), and they’ll fetch JPY 4,000 – 5,000 in Tokyo and Osaka department stores. (If you have trouble believing that some people still buy produce in Japanese department stores, remember that the customers are of a small market segment that doesn’t worry about how much it spends.)

The shipment of 2,800 melons was sent out from Ueki-machi. They’ll ship an estimated 2.4 million by July. I’m ready now, but I’ll wait for summertime prices.