(from http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=95861)
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Japan's Hardy Snow Country Now Faces a Test of Time
January 9, 2006
Tsunan Journal
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
^ Children made their way along a street on Saturday in the city of Iiyama in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. The coldest winter in decades has brought record snowfall to the area, known as Japan's snow country.
^ Workers from a construction company cleared roofs and streets on Saturday in Tsunan. In recent days, the town lay under 13 feet of snow.
TSUNAN, Japan, Jan. 7 - After clambering out a second-story window on Saturday, Kimie Kuwahara, 80, stood atop the 10-foot-high wall of snow surrounding her house. She surveyed this region called the snow country - the starkly white mountain range that spread out in the distance behind her, the record snowfall that had blanketed all but the triangle-shaped roofs in her neighborhood.
Pushing a plowlike shovel with both hands, Ms. Kuwahara was busy clearing the fresh powder to a recessed pile several feet away under which, she swore, lay a pond with carp. Her husband, Naoji, also 80, had climbed a ladder onto the roof, where he deftly plied his shovel to send chunks tumbling down.
"It's a never-ending job!" said Ms. Kuwahara, who had left a "village on the other side of the mountain" to come to this town as a bride a half-century ago. "After you've cleared the snow, the place is covered with snow again two days later."
Smiling from ear to ear, Ms. Kuwahara, who maintained that snow-clearing had kept her the "fittest person in the neighborhood," said cheerfully: "Ah! The snow country! What can you do?"
The snow country, ensconced between the Sea of Japan and the Japanese Alps, is one of the world's snowiest regions and typically lies under a dozen feet of snow for several months a year. But the coldest winter in decades has brought record snowfalls to the region in recent weeks.
The snow has buried cars and houses and trifled with Japan's famed bullet trains. It has flanked plowed streets with 10-foot-high walls of snow and transformed towns into white labyrinths inside which human beings scurry as if they were mice.
One of the hardest-hit areas, the town of Tsunan here in Niigata Prefecture, lay under nearly 13 feet of snow in recent days. Old-timers say it is the heaviest snowfall since 1945, a year remembered here as much as for its 23 feet of snow as for the end of World War II.
To Seiji Kuwabara, 69, a neighbor of the Kuwaharas', life here in the snow country means "to endure." Yet this winter's snow has revealed both the region's hardiness and fragility. In a region depleted of young people, like other rural areas in a rapidly graying country, septuagenarians and octogenarians have been toiling to save their roofs from collapsing and their homes from being entombed - the husbands typically going up on the roof, with the wives staying below.
Nearly 70 people nationwide, most of them older, have succumbed to the winter. In this town, where a third of the population is over age 65, an 81-year-old man clearing snow died after falling into a river; another man, in his late 70's, was buried by snow that fell off a roof.
Snowbound and enveloped in dim light for months, the snow country is part of the less developed "backside of Japan," as it is called, in contrast to its "front side," which faces the Pacific. Yasunari Kawabata, in his novel "Snow Country," chose this region's gloomy atmosphere as the setting for a doomed love affair at a hot spring in Yuzawa, not far from here.
Until the advent of regular snow removal in the 1960's, roads became impassable to cars, and walking to Tokamachi, less than 10 miles away, took five hours. The snow was piled so high that people were forced to climb out of their homes. Shigeno Tamura, the owner of the Takaraya pork-cutlet restaurant, most vividly remembered seeing the boots of pedestrians at the top of her house's ground-floor windows.
Still, not all the memories are of hardship.
"When we were young, we played by playing jump-rope over power lines," recalled Fumi Kazamaki, 66, who was shoveling the snow in front of her house as her husband, Michio, 65, labored, naturally, on the roof.
"We lived by using the positive aspects of snow," she said, adding that the snow bound the community together. Children nowadays stay indoors when it snows to play video games, she said, but in the past they made igloos. "I remember the light of the candle inside the igloo. It was like a fairy tale."
"We lived in the snow itself in those days," she added. "Now we live by conquering the snow."
The snow country, or this corner of it at least, began conquering the snow in the late 1960's. Sprinklers were installed in the middle of streets, the first one here in 1972; electrical pumps nowadays send mild underground water to melt the snow all over Tsunan. Some streets, especially those near the train station, are heated. Snowplows clear the roads for the town's 12,000 residents, thanks to the $1 million the town spends on snow removal from its annual $50 million budget.
"These days we can walk outside in ordinary shoes," said Takaaki Takahashi, who was leading the snow removal efforts for the town office.
Around the same time the battle against the snow began, Kakuei Tanaka, one of postwar Japan's most powerful prime ministers and a native of this region, brought highways and other huge public works projects here. Thanks to Mr. Tanaka, who was later forced from office because of the bribery scandal involving the Lockheed Corporation, even the bullet train reached this neglected region.
"People in the cities, in the front side of Japan, remember Tanaka for his corruption," said Fumio Kazamaki, 53, the owner of the Tomitaya Inn here. "But we here in the backside of Japan remember him for changing our everyday lives."
The lives were perhaps not that different any more from those on the other side of Japan, though this winter's snow was a reminder that snow could not be conquered completely.
Harunobu Shiga, 74, was standing outside his house, waiting impatiently for the weekly Tsunan Newspaper. The delivery man came every Friday around 4 p.m., but it was already nearing 5 p.m.
"Maybe he's lost because of the snow," Mr. Shiga said, a worried look on his face.
He looked with appreciation at the snow bank next to his house, built some eight decades ago when his mother, now 103, came here as a bride. Because the snow had piled up so quickly, he said, the bank did not contain the usual layers of crusted snow.
"I wonder if this will melt by April or remain until May," Mr. Shiga said.
He preferred to look on the good side. It was thanks to the snow, he said, that the region had pure water to produce the country's best sakes and rice, Uonuma Koshihikari, of which a 22-pound bag sells for about $61.
"Maybe I shouldn't say this because of the people who are suffering right now," Mr. Shiga said, "but the snow is our treasure."
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