Threading the Tadami River

One of the many streams that come down to the Tadami river  

The grey valley road and the now dark Tadami river are woven together through the long valley between Yanaisu and Tadami itself. The third strand of the braid is the great Tadami railway line, a very determined mole with a one track mind bobbing in and out of the mountains in numerous tunnels. It is now hibernating beyond Kawaguchi . The road crosses many bridges, swapping sides whenever convenient like a career politician. Slightly warmer temperatures had warmed the tarmac enough for it to shed it's customary winter coat of a few inches of compacted snow and ice. Bike ride! 

Island in the Tadami river

These are places I haven't seen for a couple of months. With remarkably effective 'stud-less' snow tyres it is quite possible to travel more or less as normal by car - something that came as a surprise to an Englishman. England rolls over on it's back and whimpers pitifully at a few inches of the white stuff. Tokyo usually furnishes some entertaining news items showing slick city hipsters slipping onto their arses in even slicker shoes on any spot of unaccustomed snow.

While people here are perforce equipped for metres of the stuff , life naturally compresses into a smaller area, so it is great to be able to get the sanity machine out and pedal out of the domestic zone and into the blue.....you know, yonder.

Now breathe...

As you well know if you come from a childishly dualist tradition there are two sides to any road, street, idea, whatever: the sunny side - relatively free from patches of ice, and the dark side - shadowed and dangerous. Whilst Luke Skywalker (and various other archetypal fictional characters in stories so basic they only have two sides) may have had a choice, on an out-and-back bike ride there isn't one, and it takes a lot of care not to end up up-ended.  There is always a bit of shadowed ice around. Through the villages there were a few patches of snow to negotiate where householders had chucked their snow onto the road to clear it from their roofs and doorways. And in the shadows of the six foot walls of snow all along the road, stripes of ice.

Bird footprints on floating ice

It is important to hit the warmest couple of hours of the day, and on the way home it is a race against freezing point which returns rapidly with dusk even on sunny days. You are never quite on your own with the cold in Aizu, though. Getting back to my village and getting very chilly even with everything on, the cheery ba-chan in the shop was keen to know where I had been and how long it had taken. Outside a truck driver had stopped to get a coffee from the vending machine. I had never seen him before, he was just passing through, but without missing a beat he offered to buy me a hot drink. It is just what you do here. It almost makes you want to move somewhere cold, doesn't it?

The cold coming back to snow-jet and avalanche chutes near Showa. My bike looks small and worried. It's not a person though....is it? I knew that

Snow festival giant

Every house should have one: our 2.5 metre snow giant

It's Nakagawa snow festival at the weekend, and having missed the more famous Tadami snow festival once again through being in Tokyo, I decided to get with the programme and do something with the snow other than shovelling it away from the entrance. I shovelled it back towards the entrance.

There's a bit of a "Roy Wood and Hagrid meet that guy with the octopus beard in Pirates of the Caribean at Karl Marx's gravestone" kinda thing going on here don'tcha think?

Tadami festival apparently had a Taj Mahal with arches and arcades you could walk under made by the army, sorry, Ground Self Defence Force. My son and I decided to make do with a more modest one for our first go, though you can sit on it if you are under 10. He was a big help with gathering the snow, although much of it arrived in the form of big chunks tossed in the direction of my head - entirely accidental I'm sure. He made the hands and feet though, before reverting to the aerial bombardment. Where are the GSDF when you need them?

Road running in the Japanese snow

Iwabuchi-sensei elated at the end of the road

I usually avoid road running like a black plague, but when the road is not black with mind and leg-numbing tarmac, but white with ploughed snow and surrounded by mountains it is another matter. Walking isn't possible in this two metre deep snow until it hardens up, so it is great to discover (thanks Richard!) that some of the minor roads are ploughed and, with only a handful of shocked and bemused drivers to deal with, they make for great running.

Running through a remote village, with its population of elders busy shovelling snow

Trail shoes and a cap to keep the snow out of your eyes are a good idea. Studs with metal inserts would be even better. It feels like a trail run, or running through sand, as the resistance, slippiness and roughness of the snow pull you around as you run. Excellent. Care is required, as there is a lot of ice around, sometimes hidden under a few inches of powder. The snow ploughs do a great job of clearing the road, but seem to polish the snow surface. This makes for some amusingly bad free-form dancing when attempting to stay on your feet. Running in the deeper snow at the edge, or keeping to chained tyre tracks helps.

Road running Jim, but not as we know it. River near Tamonashi

Of course it is being out amongst mountains that makes it really special. Iwabuchi-sensei has a full marathon this weekend, so it was good to get out for three hours ata reasonable pace on Sunday, and we even made a full circuit of Numazawako - who knew those little roads would be ploughed? The people who live there and need to get about, that's who.

Children in their mountain village just off the school bus

When running a valley road with Richard we bumped into some of the children I had been teaching earlier in the day, no doubt wondering what on earth we were doing. What a place to grow up. Anonymous suburbia it is not.

A bit heavy on the icing sugar

The snow is at it's height now - what am I saying, there is more forecast this week. The extraordinary forms it takes, and it's transformation of everything, is a great pleasure - look, it even turned me into a 'road' runner.

Run Rudolph, run!

Child throwing in the snow

Snow-blowing the pavements and delivering the newspapers

The snow has been falling constantly for many days now, reaching intimidating 'end of the world' quantities - and what if it never stops? It is forecast for the next week too. Snow is piled up to the first stories now, and becoming too heavy for many roofs, so everywhere there are old people risking life and limb cutting big slabs from high up on their roofs. I'd like to help, but I know from past experience that an offer of help can be taken as doubting the ability to cope and an insult to proud and very capable people, however old they are. In fact the lady at the shop said it is shovelling snow through the winter that gives Aizu people their tough spirit. She is probably right.

There is a 2 metre hat of snow on everything, in this case a rice husking kiosk

So what would it be like trying to get about without the huge effort and resources put into clearing it? Having tested it today in what used to be the garden I can report that walking through a patch of virgin snow is....well, interesting. You sink into deep powder up to the crotch, which makes for hard work. Walking is possible, but not probable. Even snow shoes don't keep you on top of this stuff - I tried and sank in 30cm, which is still hard work.  If you were properly snowed in, you had better have a full season's worth of provisions. This probably explains Aizu people's love of all things dried and pickled and their cheerful 'We're all in this together' attitude.

How many times have I got to tell you? Not the face!

I have also conducted child throwing experiments. If you throw a medium-sized child into the air they sink a couple feet down into the very soft snow, which is satisfying both for child and thrower. These results may not be reproducible, and even then, as Hume pointed out during a particularly white Scottish Christmas, "There is no reason to suppose that the causal link we perceive between throwing the child and it sinking into the snow will always occur in the future." Perhaps tomorrow he will float off into the sky, then boy won't I be embarrassed about my reliance on instinctive inductive inferences.  

My son and I make inroads into the piled snow with our daily snowball fights. Ordinarily useless at ball games, my aim is getting better which should help in the unlikely event that I choose to add baseball onto my list of Japan-specific activities. The snow might have been specially engineered for snowballing perfection (no Dawkins, I don't mean it literally) - to grasp it is to have a sticky wodge ideal for chucking in quick-fire succession. It's just as cold down your neck and in your ear though. However, I have concluded that snowballing is about as efficient at re-distributing snow as the 'trickle down' theory is at wealth re-distribution. You still end up with a big pile in the same place.

A dangerous season

Tsubame gather together to get through the winter

Small birds fly up in a wheeling cloud and re-settle on the snow-covered rice drying rack. They have cause to be nervous - this is winter and they stand out in sharp contrast with the white ground, and there are eagles patrolling. People get together to get through the winter too. You need your neighbours even now that there are ploughs to clear the roads. In the old days life here must have become concentrated into a very small area, with travel all but impossible. People still have to keep on top of the snow, literally, especially if their roof is flat, unless they want it to collapse. The mayor's wife, no spring chicken, climbs out of her second floor window, then up a ladder to the flat roof, and leans far over to deal with the four foot cornice.

Workmen tackle the flat workshop roofs at the back. I am helping my next door neighbour clear the snow in front of someone's garage. He leans down to pull up one of the heavy metal grids over the drain, and the one next to it comes crashing down on his wrist with a sickening weight. My cry is louder than his grunt. The flesh is crushed to the bone but he shrugs it off as I hurry him home so that his wife can take him to the doctor. He is a very tough man and his body has the easy swing of a teenager. He nearly stumbles into the path of a truck. Amazingly it isn't broken, but it is very deep and needs stitches. The nurse tells him off for looking forward to his nightly sake as a pain killer. "No! No alcohol for you tonight!" What a shame, especially as both he and the mayor's wife had kindly given my son a traditional gift of money today.

The village is disappearing. Roofs, trees and river cuttings are barely recognisable under great pancakes and wedges of snow. There is less than usual, apparently, though 4ft fell on Christmas Day, making the news as the most in the country that day, and it is colder than usual too. The clank of chains on bulldozers wake us in the early morning, and the drivers wave cheerily from the high cabs, kings of the season.

Honna station on the Tadami line

The weather is blowing in from Siberia, and there are avalanche warnings every day, but no quarter is given, and life goes on. A woman walks her Dachshund on the main road, hemmed in by five foot banks of snow, cars and trucks batting along, swerving around her, the dog reined in just in time.

Portents and eyebrows

If you want to live a long and  unmolested life, choose to be a tree in the grounds of a Shinto shrine. What do you mean, "Even if there were such a thing as re-incarnation, the chances of being able to choose your next form are slim to none,"?  My, we are in a literal mood today, aren't we? It's an image, innit? Take a closer look at the forms in the tree, smart Alec.

Teaching, in one form or another, came thick and fast on a six and a half hour ride that began in watery sunshine. That lasted less than five minutes. The rain began after two hours, turning to sleet, then snow as I climbed the first of two passes.

 

Another cyclist was on my mind today, an old man of about eighty, lying on the road in Tadami, the first town I passed. He was covered in a blanket, bloody cloths on his chest, his eyes closed. A group of people were with him, waiting for the ambulance. Along the straight road through the town groups of people stood around, waiting.

Route 289 from Tadami to Tajima

A raven rose into the air and flew straight towards my head. It didn't see me until the last minute, and reared up in front of my face, it's wings and tail spread out and filling the air before it shot up and away.

Route 400 climbing from Tajima to Showa

The weather joined the portent party, streamers of mist taking bites out of the mountains, curtains of rain, snow, and all forms in between dropping by for a quick drink, then outstaying their welcome.

That's all it was though, weather. The people I met along the way told another story, and this isn't going to end like a Jack London tale with a frozen figure punished for presumption in the frozen north.

It started with eyebrows. It struck me, as I headed down from the top of 289 towards Tajima, my speed limited by squinting through the blinding snowflakes, that I want some big ones. I'm talking great bushy shelves of bristle, topping craggy brows over deep set eyes. I'm talking Samuel Becket. I'm talking Denis Healey. I'm talking Frida Khalo. Mmm, a projecting mono-brow, there's a thought. You see, we forget what they are for, and rail against them, plucking and bleaching, trimming and cutting. In some cases shaving them off and pencilling in expressions of surprise. But blast down a mountain road on a bike and you realise what they are actually for: keeping the weather out of your vision jellies. Banish portents: grow 'em thick, baby!

Let's ride, the weather's lovely: full gear on the last climb

Then there was the charming lady, who when unable to supply me with my request for an-donutsu from her tiny shop, and having ascertained that I was cycling 'From where?!' 'To where?!" followed me out of the shop and gave me my money back for the chocolate I  bought.

On the grind up the last climb, still cold in all my gear, a car stopped and out popped Mieko-san and her husband, two of the instructors from our local Ski centre: more shock and a rare photo of a lesser eye-browed cyclist.

And at the even smaller shop in the gathering dark, one of those shops where you wonder if it is a shop or a few bits in someone's larder shed, and it takes a while to work out they are actually selling anything at all.....an-donutsu. Dolops of sweet aduki bean paste surrounded by fried dough and a liberal dusting of sugar - now that will keep you going a while longer...

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Snowshoe shuffle

Looking down to Nakagawa and the Tadami River, Kaneyama-machi

Now that the snow has compacted down, from three metres of leg-swallowing powder into a metre and half of layered icy globules, it is snow-shoe walking season. Routes have to be chosen with care, as the mountains bear the scars of many small avalanches, where the snow scours away at the steep slopes, and edges may be corniced. Flat shelves of land and the forestry roads are comparatively safe. I say comparatively. We descended some steep zigzags on what must have been the only road up to the village by Lake Numazawa at one time. "Oh, that is where the doctor went off the side of the road on a snow-mobile with a patient on the back, thirty years ago." As far as I know, the Hippocratic Oath does not encourage that kind of treatment, and I doubt the patient was too impressed either. Still, no lives lost, so not to worry, eh? Next up, ambulance drag racing.

An anonymous mound on the edge of the snow-covered fields on a high plateau turned out to be a samurai grave from the fifth century. This sombre and time-laden fact did not detain the children for a moment. They were  off, scribbling tracks across the huge blank paper of the snow, delighting in being the first to make a mark. Their small leaf-shaped plastic snow-shoes lent them a pixie-like appearance ('strewth, how many hyphens does one-sentence-need?). Some of the elders in the valley still use circular home-made (whoops-there's another) bamboo and rope snow shoes.

A cry went up from the leading group, and a mountain hare bounded at impossible speed up the hillside, resplendent in it's winter fur. No snowshoes required there, and a good thing if you ask me. Don't though. They are hinged at the toe (hyphenated, you might say), which means that they are always in contact with the snow. If you want to turn round when you are standing still you have to lift your feet up high. I know that know of course.  If I'd known it then, I wouldn't have suffered the very-un-hare-like indignity of keeling over into a heap. It contrasted a tad painfully with the authoritative tone I had adopted a moment before about the nature of some footprints. I always like to adopt an authoritative tone when I am talking complete bollocks, don't you? 

Kamoshika: grey eminence of the woods

This splendid creature is a Kamoshika, or Japanese Serow. Any animal that can survive the winter in the woods here deserves the utmost respect. It is the floating phantom of the forest, getting by on the leaves and moss they can find on steep pitches where the snow has slid down. They are very shy, and their footprints are seen more often than they are. I have seen them at a distance, or disappearing through the trees, but the only other time I came close to one I didn't have a camera with me. On that occasion I was on a run and came across one sheltering from rain under a cliff (characteristic behaviour), on steep ground above the village. We contemplated each other for a while. I don't think it was keen to give up the only dry ground on the hill to a usurper. It only moved off when I moved again.

Then yesterday I was on the road bike on a beautiful narrow road climbing above the Tadami river, and happened to look down to find this ball of grey fur staring back at me at close quarters. At first glance the scent marking glands below it's eyes made it look as if it had two pairs of eyes.  It looked very wide - was it a pregnant female? On close inspection you can see it has a horn missing, so perhaps it was a male that lost one in a fight.

I had time to get my camera out. If I had been one of the Jomon period hunters who inhabited this area 5,000 years ago and more, I would have had plenty of time to draw a bead with my bow and arrow. Now they are protected - very protected. We have been advised not to go anywhere near a corpse we come across in case someone thinks we did it. "But officer, I am vegetarian!" might not butter any parsnips. Disgusted with my continued fluorescent yellow presence, it suddenly snorted, and thundered down the steep hillside at impressive speed, grunting and expressing loud blasts through it's nostrils. It turned at the bottom and looked back up at me, still complaining, still not at all impressed with me.

As I write this it is dark, raining and blowing a gale outside. I hope it managed to find a nice cosy overhang to curl up under tonight.

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Kaneyama ski centre

The magnificent setting: two children and Mikagura-dake from the top of the lift

If Lake Numazawa is what makes Kaneyama-machi so special in the summer, then it is the ski centre that does the same for the winter. All the children get a free season pass, there are a number of races and events through the season for those with a competitive bent, and the views are wonderful. 

Looking down one of the main slopes

Except for race days and free pass days it never gets busy, and during the week you may have it all to yourself. That's great for me, as, call me picky, but I usually prefer to do without an audience when I am falling arse over tit, in this my first try at downhill. It's a bit like riding a bike downhill, only without brakes. Silly really, but everyone else is doing it, so it must be OK.

Children on the beginners lift

Expert skiers in search of a challenge might prefer a bigger centre, (there are no black slopes currently open) but there are several courses, including a beginners slope with it's own lift, a scenic route suitable for all levels that winds down through the woods (a lot of fun and with a dodgy corner that often decks me), and variations on two courses that are steep enough to provide sport and excitement for most, in a lovely wild setting. The restaurant does nice basic food at reasonable prices, and has a good view, and you can book skiing and snowboard lessons - one of the teachers speaks good English if you ask.

Two of the staff smiling on as they officiate at a school race day in sleety rain

You can't tell from my shadow that I am a rubbish skier. It's when I get off the lift that the trouble starts

Starving slowest

At this rag-end of the winter life is at its hardest and cheapest for the birds and animals of Oku Aizu. It is two months since there was much vegetation showing, the snow is a compacted meter and a half deep, flopping over everything in a badly cut carpet. We are at the furthest point in time from abundance in either direction.

It is not a question of finding enough to eat. It is a question of who starves the slowest. The big black ravens sit around waiting it out. If they sit on that pole for long enough, something is bound to come along and die. Some small spark will be extinguished and their slow furnace will burn darkly on for a day or two more. The semi-wild cats of the village leave their paw prints across blanketed paddys, off on their secret rounds, on mousing odysseys never to be told, staring balefully at you if you dare to notice them.

It is the snow that makes it clear which houses have been abandoned, at least for the winter. There are a lot, markers for an economy that has moved elsewhere. That in itself is an inevitable process, nearly as old as the ravens, but being human, it seems sad. We don't like to think our houses are temporary shelters, like glorified tents.

Satelite TV, but no people now

But there are compensations for the householder still in residence, cupboards stocked from the Co-ops weekly delivery, kerosene stove glowing nicely, tea brewing. It is the contrast that gives it meaning. Comfort is not too easily won, not that fuggy townish superabundance that makes for a peculiarly modern brand of discontented complacency. 

There is no doubt at any point that a hot drink is indeed a wonderful thing, that a dry, soft place to sleep is not something to take lightly, and that every day of health and the company of your family is worthy of note.

And for those brought up without much of it, snow is a transformational shock of surprise every morning. So much of it. So beautiful. And in six weeks or more it will be gone. We have entered the last phase of snow, when it is hard enough to walk on. Beneath it waits the quickening green.

A bridge on the Tadami railway

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Not going gentle

On a vegetable mission: giving it some welly up the hill

There is no reason to get lazy, just because it is midwinter. The sun is shining through half-hearted cloud, the road is clear, and there are vegetables to be brought, the green gold of the valley. Batting up an incline on her Mama-chari (short for Mamma Chariot),  this woman was demonstrating one of the reasons why old people in Oku-Aizu are not old in the same way as in other places. They brook no opposition to their routine and keep going no matter what.

Many of the householders were taking advantage of the lull in the snow to make inroads into the prodigious piles around their houses and sheds. The young ones, in their seventies, were doing the hard shovelling, while their parents, in their nineties, were merely sledging it round the corner, sometimes thirty yards, and into a stream or off a bank. These citizens are not going gentle into that good night, snowy or not, any time soon. Their vigour comes off them in waves, from their flushed cheeks to their steamy breath, every pedal stroke and shovel-full a lesson ready for the learning.
 

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night, 
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
 
Though wise men at their end know dark is right, 

Because their words had forked no lightning they 

Do not go gentle into that good night.
 
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright 

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
 
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, 

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, 

Do not go gentle into that good night.
 
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight 

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height, 

Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. 

Do not go gentle into that good night. 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

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Only the women

A path had been dug through the snow to the smaller of the two Shinto shrines in the village, the one perched on a steep slope beneath a bamboo plantation. Bears had damaged the doors trying to get in earlier in the year, presumably for some food that had been left as an offering, but the small wooden structure survived.  About the size of a garden shed, this is one of those very local shrines that only serves a few houses. It has probably has for a very long time, as the worn and headless statues of monks by it attest. Their heads have been replaced with round pebbles. My mother in law, who grew up in a big family just down the road, remembers skiing and sledging down this slope in the days before the Ski centre was built.

The shrine is also used for a more serious purpose one day a year. The 15th of January is a special day for the women of the village, who still troop up there to make offerings and celebrate their year of hard work. Traditionally this was their one day off a year, the one day when they didn't have to cook, clean, farm, and look after young children. The one day from 365 when everything was done for them, when they needed do nothing at all.

Now there are a few modern women in the area who grew up in the city and are married to professional men who moved here to work. They are housewives with enough leisure time during the day to enjoy shopping and dining in the nearest city. If there are young women who grew up locally and married local men, they invariably work too, as wages here are not high and two salaries are needed to build up enough savings, for future safety's sake.

Aunty Kiyoko-san says that it used to be that the man of the house would cook on women's new year day. There would usually be between ten and fifteen mouths to feed, what with eight or nine children, mother and father, paternal grandparents and maybe a great grandparent and an uncle or aunt. Schools didn't used to provide meals, so cooking breakfast and preparing the lunch boxes (O-bento) for everyone was a major production. Then there was the evening meal, the washing, keeping the house in order, and any spare time spent on the vegetable or rice fields. It was the man's job to bring in money, often having to live away from home while seeking work in Tokyo during the winter months. These days, with only three of them left in the house, Kiyoko-san even cooks on this one day. "He doesn't know where everything is, and it isn't worth the mess just for us three."

The footprints in the snow up the steep path to the shrine are getting fewer, as it is only the older women that still observe this day. In a few years who will remember to go?

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My friend the rain

After extensive testing I can confirm that the bicycle does not make an efficient snow plough

In Aizu in winter, rain is the cyclist's friend. If it is raining, it means it is not snowing. It means that, being a few degrees warmer, there is a chance that the usual two or three inches of snow and ice on the roads - the roads that are ploughed at least - might have melted. It means that you can brake and turn a corner without sliding. It means a blast of wet freedom and the chance to get your lungs and heart going. Some of the pent-up energy that buggers up the spirit, accumulating like the piles of snow by the house, can be swept away.

The walls of snow and ice by the side of the road turn each one into a Cresta Run, and all is transformed. It is hard to believe that these are the same mountains that sang with green flames in the spring, the same valleys whose golden fields were heavy with rice in the autumn, the same roads that hummed with vibrating heat in the summer.

Under the avalanche canopy, on the way to as far as the road will go, a gang of men were checking  and peering up at it, scattered across the road. One of them, a very friendly local  father, gave me his usual cheery greeting. As I disappeared up the road in the teeming rain I heard him giving what was probably a necessary justification, in the circumstances. People don't go out in the rain without a good reason here, and cycling is probably not a good reason. "Oh, he's training for skiing," which is something they are more familiar with, but somewhat wide of the mark. Having recently joined my son on the slopes and tried it for the first time, it's fair to say that my technique owes more to Olympic diving than my afternoons slumped on the sofa watching Ski Sunday as a child. "Oh, and that's a lovely tucked triple corkscrew with pike, finished in characteristically brilliant improvisational style with a landing on his head in a snowdrift, just lovely." I find that I can fall over on the piste in an extraordinary variety of ways without any training at all.

Some of the marooned signs are still  flashing their messages like mad street preachers shouting their visions to an indifferent snowy congregation. Personally, I have learned to treat all signs with a healthy suspicion, miraculous or otherwise. Symbols, on the other hand...I always welcome a good symbol.

The next day...

The rain had turned to wind-blown snow, but not enough to cover the valley road, so it was time to sneak in another ride before it got serious. The side valley, being less used, had more slush and snow on it, but I continued while it was still in patches, only turning round where it became continuous.

Getting home was hard work, my weariness seeming more than the previous day's ride warranted. I must be more out of shape than I realised, I thought, until I got home and looked at the bike. Every surface was covered in built-up ice, including the spokes - the kind that makes planes crash and cyclists tired.

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New Year in the mountains

I bumped into him on New Year's Day on the snow-filled pavement leading from our house. At first I didn't recognise him in his best suit and newly opened face, his gold-rimmed incisors shining in a grin cracked like a safe. It was an aunt's husband, usually reticent  and serious, a maker of fine home-grown and prepared soba noodles and grower of some of the best tomatoes I have ever tasted. "Ah, ha, domo, domo, happy new year! Please come to my house anytime today!" Well, New Year seems to agree with him,  let's take him up on that, I thought, in my everyday slobby clothes and with my blurred and ambivalent relationship to this pivotal day in the Japanese calendar intact.

Home grown and hand made soba noodles, now re-packaged in our stomachs

He had kindly sent some of his wonderful soba accross for us to eat as is traditional on the 31st of December in many parts of Japan, though not here in Aizu. This was partly as a thanks for the portrait I had given him earlier in the year, partly in honour of my daughter's visit, and partly because generosity is a natural reflex in Kaneyama-machi.

This first day of the new year my next door neighbour was also in his suit. I had misunderstood his joined hands and gesturing upwards as hoping for the snow to let up, and laughed and nodded like an idiot, whereas of course he was indicating that he was off to pay his respects at the small shrine up the hill, a rather more serious business. As a daily forager in the mountains for wild food he needs the luck, and his family worry about him. More social gaffs than a whaling ship, that's me. Whoops, there's another one. 

We decided to do the same, and had the place to ourselves, the sound hushed and muffled by the snow. The things that lend the place an air of cheerful, unstuffy normality in the summer were gone, the swings and see-saw dismantled, and the all-important gateball gear safely stashed under the shrine.

Such small, obscure country shrines as ours are as much worth visiting as their well known counterparts, which can be swamped with people queueing round the corner for that special brand of luck that seems to be available only there. The relationship between the shrine and the few houses around it is a natural one, often of centuries long standing, and I can manage without the razmataz of food stalls, frenzied lucky charm buying, and madding crowds dropping in before hitting the departo sales. New year in Kaneyama is an altogether more peaceful affair, based on seeing which of your city-flown offspring can make it back to the nest through the snow and the motorway jams. Children are particularly appreciated, and can make a tidy sum handed over in used notes and slim envelopes.

We called in at auntie's house much later, but still beat the man of the house home. Along with the other men of the village he was doing the rounds of other houses, he had been out some time, and they were starting to worry. It is traditional to take a cup or two of sake in each house, and there are a lot of houses for one man to get round and still remain concious. They get the good stuff out for this special day, and by that I mean strong, and he doesn't normally drink. One wonders if the history of New Year in Aizu is littered with the corpses of men just having a little lie down in the snow, so soft, so inviting, on the non-too straight way home.

It was clear when he arrived shortly after dark that he had managed to make it round most of the houses in the village, and was now feeling really very sociable indeed. He probably spoke more words than he had all year, gesturing and waving, and at one point keeling over completely. Still, no bones broken, no harm done, except for the hangover of Bandai-san proportions heading his way like an avalanche in the morning.

He had earned his day in the cups. It turned out that it was he who had cleared the path to the shrine that morning at six thirty, sledging it off by hand so that the rest of the village could walk there easily, while we were still sleeping.

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