Shinrin-yoku, an eloquent word that translates as “forest bathing.” It captures well the feeling as the snow falls around us and onto the muscular branches of oak, beech, and birch trees at Suginohara Ski Resort. Goggle-faced powderhounds disembark from Mitahara High-Speed Lift No. 3, which leads to Super Giant Trail and Super Mogul Trail. For all the poetry that exists in the Japanese language, little of it is wasted on ski lift and trail names.
It’s snowing so hard that even the kamoshika, an endemic goat-like deer we had spotted earlier traversing through the birch forest, seemed stunned. After a brief mid-morning rush, the small crowd of skiers and boarders has dispersed. I chase my kids down Super Giant Trail, each of them sending out contrails as they straight-line through thigh-deep fluff.
“Obscene amounts of snow,” was the colorful forecast provided by Craig Oldring, a Canadian expat friend and English teacher-turned-entrepreneur, when we visited him in Hakuba three days ago.
Winter in Japan can seem like a utopian fantasy come true for a skier, and it is an undoubtedly popular fantasy these days. In search, I set off in a campervan with my wife and two daughters to explore ski culture in the Japanese Alps of Honshu, the largest island in the archipelago.
Our first stop was Hakuba Valley, a destination that emerged slowly from obscurity following the 1998 Winter Olympics hosted in nearby Nagano. Hakuba was also Oldring’s first Japanese winter experience. After growing up at Whistler-Blackcomb, in 2000 the then 20-something snowboarding musician packed up his board and his turntables and moved to Japan to teach English. He took a job in Shiojiri, a small town an hour’s drive south of Hakuba. His plan was to stay for a year then move on, maybe to South America to study Spanish guitar. Life had other plans. On a day off from teaching, early in his first Japanese winter season, he drove a winding and snowy road into Hakuba Valley. It was the powderhound’s equivalent of a Spanish conquistador discovering El Dorado, that fabled locale in the Americas whose buildings glitter with gold. Except Hakuba Valley was real: as much powder as anybody’s legs could handle and virtually nobody else on the lifts.
“My first day riding was at Hakuba 47,” Oldring recalls, over an espresso at the popular Lion Café. “There was untouched powder in every direction. I went wild and never looked back.”
And there was more.
Bowls of ramen were cheap and delicious, and you could cap a day of powder with a soothing dip in one of several local onsens, those gender-separated, quintessentially Japanese bathhouses where one strips naked with strangers and soaks in piping hot thermal springs. Best of all, most rule-abiding Japanese skiers kept it between the lines, leaving the trees untouched.
“I would go back to Canada and tell friends about it, but nobody believed me,” Oldring says with a laugh.
Back then there seemed to be cheap real-estate everywhere. A boom of ski resort and real estate development in the 1980s was followed by an economic bust, resulting in fierce price competition for skiers and mountain towns awash in vacant buildings and property bargains.
It’s the reason Oldring heeded the sage advice of some of his physician father’s colleagues to bail on his long-term plan to pursue a career in medicine. Instead, he seized the opportunity to buy a turnkey hotel with a fellow expat. Morino Lodge was born and Oldring’s roots sunk deep into the Hakuba Valley.
Twenty-five years later, the secret is out, to say the least. Wandering the winding streets of downtown Hakuba on a January afternoon, Aussies outnumber Japanese. While happy-hour après-ski specials fill the bars, we follow a slushy path among thousand-year-old cedars toward steep stairs that lead to Hosono Suwa Shrine. Long before it was a ski destination, Hakuba was a farming community. Villagers would visit this Shinto shrine to pray for rain and an abundant harvest. There was no need to pray for rain the day of our visit. We had arrived on the heels of a snowstorm and the cusp of a warm spell. A light drizzle had been falling all day.
Thankfully, the day before we skied warming powder under blue skies at Tsugaike Kogen. Watching a “lecture video” got us an arm band and access to Tsuga Pow DBD (double black diamond) – basically, steep tree zones laced between the groomed runs.
Conformity is a hallmark of Japanese culture, as evident at ski resorts as on a Tokyo subway train filled with businessmen on their grueling office commutes, uniformly dressed in monochromatic grey or black suits. At ski resorts, this conformity manifests in tightly controlled terrain access that can be mystifying to foreigners, but also beneficial.
The next day rain was falling to the mountain tops, so we explore Shinto shrines and soak our limbs at the Highland Hotel Onsen, known for its mountain views. There are none that day.
The following morning the thermometer had dropped, so we roll over to Hakuba 47, where Oldring caught the Japanese powder fever years ago. Conditions for us are not fever-inducing. The entire mountain is cloaked in thick fog. Visibility is zero. The scratch and scrape of edges on frozen corduroy add an arrhythmic percussion to the bossa-nova grooves of “The Girl from Ipanema” piping oddly from speakers mounted on the lift towers. A light snow falls stubbornly, in what we hope is a foreshadow of things to come.
We grope around in the fog for a few hours, amused now by Hakuba 47’s on-hill jazz soundtrack. With temperature and snowfall heading in the hoped-for direction of “obscene”, we depart for Myoko Kogen and its collection of small resorts strung along the shoulder of volcanic Mt. Myoko. Oldring had referred to Myoko affectionately as the “wild west.” I was intrigued.
On the way out of Hakuba, we stop at 7-Eleven for sushi pockets and coffee and are soon skirting the edges of beautiful Myoko-Togakushi Renzan National Park. A delightful sight greeted us as we pass through small villages: the locals are gearing up for a looming snowstorm. When frigid Siberian air sweeps across from the continent, scooping moisture from the East Sea, magic happens, depositing up to 50 feet of snow annually on these mountains. So far, this year had been low tide for snow but there was now a palpable meteorological energy in the air.
True to national character, the Japanese have turned snow removal into a fine art. Elderly men and women arrange quivers of snow shovels against their garage doors. Others tinker with fire engine-red snowblowers in every shape and size. At highway maintenance yards, platoons of loaders and graders with chains on tires are poised for action, ready to be dispatched as soon as the flakes begin to fall in earnest. And fall they do.
Just in time, we shoehorn our campervan into the parking lot at Morino Lodge Myoko. Snowflakes drift lazily at first, sparkling in the streetlights. Like a freight train with faulty brakes, the weather gathered intensity. We had arrived in the wild west.
Anticipating the legendary powder for which we had crossed the Pacific, my wife and I take advantage of the hotel’s wonderful outdoor stone-laid onsen pools. A flight of saki serves as an adult night cap before the four of us crawl beneath the duvets in our cozy van. The next morning, a winter wonderland appears together with a beeping symphony of snow-removal equipment at work, the skier’s alarm clock. In the real-time snow globe of Suginohara, we ski knee-deep fluff and happily watch tracks being erased in the time it takes to ride the lift.
A group of young Japanese military recruits, decked in fatigues, leather ski boots, and skinny skis, are getting ski lessons in the storm. Their archaic gear is reminiscent of another era when skiing was first introduced to Japan. In 1911, Austrian Major Theodor von Luch was sent to mountains near here with the utilitarian task of teaching mountain warfare and skiing skills. Twenty years later, the Japanese government recruited another Austrian ski legend, Hannes Schneider, to visit Nozawaonsen and help spread the gospel of skiing and the joy of sliding through snow. Apparently, it worked. Today, there are more than 500 ski resorts in the country between the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido.
After an all-you-can-eat day of powder, fastidious Japanese skiers were whisking away snowflakes then towelling off skis before loading their rooftop boxes. National character manifests in many ways, and this scene of Japanese orderliness would make any foreigner feel comparatively sloppy and unkempt.
That evening, snow crunches underfoot on the main street of Akakura Onsen village as we search for a restaurant to accommodate a hungry foursome. We find a table at a ramen joint called K-Kitchen and sit elbow-to-elbow in the small space meagrely warmed by a lone space heater. A team of chefs sweat over a grill, methodically churning out steaming hot bowls of spicy ramen with pork – Japanese mountain food at its simple best.
The next few days are spent doing what the conditions demand: gorging greedily on powder. With the storm snow well settled, I join photographer Steve Ogle to explore the slackcountry between Akakura Kanko and Seki Onsen resorts. We drop into a steep line cutting through the birch forest. The snow is downy. Face shots frost our buffs as we thread turns through avalanche fences protecting a valley bottom road. Besides a trio of smiling Japanese split boarders, we have this secret stash to ourselves.
As a family, we were getting cocky. We had begun to peel away the layers of Japanese life and were beginning to understand this winter culture. After a week on the road, we were feeling well practiced at our daily rinse-and-repeat ritual of powder skiing, exploring the wonders of Japanese cuisine and 7-Eleven sushi, vending-machine curiosities like cans of surprisingly delicious hot coffee, and nightly onsens.
That is, until we visit Nozawaonsen, that wondrous, eighth-century town of narrow cobblestone streets and more than a dozen free public bathhouses with a reputation for natural thermal water hot enough to scorch tourists and boil duck eggs. Dotted with boulangeries and patisseries, the village has an Alpen undertone, a legacy of Hannes Schneider’s visit some 80 years ago and his far-reaching influence in the skiing universe.
On the sprawling slopes of Nozawa Onsen Ski Resort, Schneider’s name is immortalized with a sign at the top of one of the mountain’s more puckering black diamond runs. Most of the fresh powder is now well tracked. Moguls are forming. Spoiled by a dreamy four days of deep snow, we call it an early day and dodge the crowds on the long, scenic Skyline Course back to the base. Leg muscles crushed by a vertical kilometer of turning on firm snow, we conduct our happy hour in the campervan, until the rotten-egg odor of sulfur draws us toward Karahara yu Onsen.
My wife and daughter disappear through the women’s entrance. I head solo through the men’s.
A sign on the wall reads 45C. “I’ve got this,” I tell myself. All modesty is checked at the onsen door. I strip and sit on a cold wooden floor and per custom, lather and rinse off. I gingerly dangle my lower limbs into the pool then quickly retract, as though I had just stuffed my baby toe into a light socket. I supress a painful moan. It feels like a Medieval torture. On the other side of the wall, I hear the muffled shrieks of my girls. I fidget poolside, naked, cold, and ridiculous, next to a local who sits calmly submerged to his neck.
“You must plunge quickly then stay completely still,” he kindly volunteers.
I summon courage, follow the advice, and to my surprise it doesn’t result in a third-degree scalding. Instead, the mineral-rich water wraps me in a sumptuous and rejuvenating embrace.
If skiing were only about turning left and right, there would be no reason to leave your home hill. It’s the in-between moments, the little things that make traveling for snow so appealing. That’s winter in Japan, an amalgamation of wonderful little moments. Throw in the most incredible powder, and the fantasy is complete. Luckily for us, the Japanese winter dream lives on.
