Snow

It has only snowed properly a couple of times so far since I've been here but even so I have noticed an interesting peculiarity of Appikogen snow; it doesn't fall, as the word would imply, top-to-bottom, rather it arrives in very much horizontal fashion, arriving across the landscape in a howling fury.

This makes certain things like being outside something of a challenge, amongst the many challenges of living here. Driving to and from the office in this weather has been an interesting experience, with visibility down to a metre or two at times. But it does make for pretty patterns as the snow dances across ground in eddies and swirls.

There is also a lot of it, and I say this knowing that we ain't seen nothing yet, as the peak season for snowfall is towards the end of January. That said it is not, apparently, like prefectures such as Niigata where houses have a second front door on the 2nd floor so you can exit onto the snowdrifts rather then into, I assume that is because they are on the Japan Sea coast and get the full force of the snow clouds, I wonder if Akita, to the left of Iwate, gets the same...?

I must say I have great admiration for the boffins who invented snow tyres. Here they don't grit the roads so once the ploughs have been past about an inch of compacted snow is left on the road which quickly turns to solid ice. Walking to your car is a hazardous experience, fraught with arse-over-tit opportunities, but the cars are as sure footed as mountain goats, as long as you are careful, obviously. I mentioned after the skidpan experience that I was impressed with ABS, and this is so, and coupled with snow tyres it shows how far car safety has come in the last 30 years. Impressive stuff I must say.

Oh, and well done England. It is important to keep traditions alive in this ever changing world and losing heavily at the Gabba in December will always be a cherished part of our heritage, like incompetent Prime Ministers or selling weapons to third world despots.

Warning

You get a lot of odd noises at night in the countryside, this was brought home to me last week, when I was roused from my slumber by a ear-splitting noise at 3.30am. It sounded like an old WW2 air raid siren and, I can honestly say, scared the shit out of me at the time. 

Following the siren there was a muffled voice came over the tannoy that was difficult to make out but didn't seem to be explaining exactly what was going on. As my phone didn't go off, and I couldn't feel any shaking, I pretty quickly guessed that it wasn't an earthquake. The next thought to go through my mind was that it was indeed an air raid warning and maybe Krazy Kim was lobbing another missile over northern Japan. Then I thought it might be a bear sighting, then perhaps a bear attack. Then I realised it was winter and they are all hibernating at the moment (but were probably just woken by the same alarm so likely to be pissed off too). Of course another part of my mind was having a conversation along the lines of:

"you should get up!"

"why, nothing is happening"

"something is about to happen, that's what alarms are for"

"but it's really cold"

"you'll be colder when Krazy Kim drops a nuke on your head and you're dead"

"if he drops a nuke on me cold won't be a problem"

etc

But nothing did indeed happen and so once the wildly beating heart was stilled somewhat and the overactive imagination silenced I dropped off to a doze...

Only to be woken about an hour later but another loud voice giving us more information but in decidedly less strident tones, it could have been an all clear, but from what they didn't exactly say and thankfully this was not accompanied by the air raid siren. The conversation around the breakfast table with my houseguest, whose Japanese is far better than mine, was along the WTF lines as he hadn't been able to discern the nature of the alarm either but had, I'm glad to say, had the same internal conversation re cold vs imminent death so had stayed in bed too.

Later that morning we had to drop into the resort office to pick up some papers so thought we'd ask about the siren, in case we were meant to have done something (proceed to marshalling area #1 in full battle gear) but hadn't. Helpfully the first person we asked said 'what alarm?' Clearly not a resident of these parts.

But the second person finally explained, 'oh yes, that was a fire alarm'

'Wait what!? My house was about to burn down!? Where were the fire engines and flashing lights?'

'Oh, no, if there is a fire anywhere in Hachimantai city then all the alarms go off...'

Now Hachimantai covers quite a large area but it appears to be true, if there is a fire next door or 10 miles away, the fire alarm next to my house will go off and wake me up. Misery loves company, as the saying goes, so the authorities here have deemed it a good idea to make sure everyone knows when something has gone wrong somewhere. I guess in one sense might foster a feeling of community, of everyone in it together, to borrow a hollow Tory platitude, but really, waking everyone up at 3.30am to let them know but, crucially, not saying where the fire actually is...?  

Since then no more alarms but it's only a matter of time.

Skid row

 So on Tuesday last week I got to leave the middle of nowhere to travel to the thriving metropolis that is Morioka, the reason being was that I had a date with a skid pan...

Iwate and Tohoku get a lot of snow and I, being a person who has not driven a car in snow before (or actually owned a car at any point in my life) figured I should probably try and get prepared for this - or rather the Guru rightly thought I should. So Tuesday night down to Morioka on one of the infrequent Hanawa line trains (the reason you need a car) for a night on the tiles in a city that doesn't have a roofing emporia. I got to the city, found the hotel and realised I was surprised to see groups of people again, which was weird as I'd only been living up here for about 10 days, but walking through the station mall trying to find somewhere for dinner was quite odd for some reason.

The reason for staying the night was that the driving lesson started at 9. 30 and was some way out of the city, so up early, a few work emails then a taxi to the driving school - that the taxi cost nore thhan the lesson was something we'll not dwell, then again the alternative travel arrangements were not, as we shall see, particularly plentiful. Oh, and a note to say that Tuesday night was the first snow of the season...

I was shown to a portacabin that nicely warm and waited, slowly the room filled and in total there were 8 of us, though only 7 to begin with as one bloke went to the wrong driving school site - oops, glad it wasn't me. So two groups of 4, our group gets to watch the obligatory videos first while the other group gets to have fun in the cars. The videos are pretty much what you'd expect - it's slippery, drive carefully, take it slow and smooth, don't give it plenty of welly on a curve if you don't want to come a cropper - that sort of thing. Of course while we were watching there were all sorts of interesting noises coming from the skid pan and a quick look out the window confirmed the drivers were having fun. 

The other 3 guys in my group (#3 finally arrived late) were all employees of Kirin beverage, in fact all the participants except me had been sent by their companies, and all had been transferred up to Iwate recently - cue lots of knowing smiles, the company, huh... They seemed like nice guys and were pleasantly chatty so I was thinking that if I asked one of them they might give me a lift back into Morioka (everyone but me had driven to the pan), so keeping that in mind we headed out once the first group were done.

As is typical with driving lessons in Japan you share a car with 2-3 trainees and one instructor, which for me is another oddity but there you go, I graciously allowed the other guy to go first, how nice of me, as this was all being done in Japanese and while I was doing pretty well at following everything, watching someone else do the drills first seemed like a smart move on my part. Added to this was the fact that this, it suddenly dawned on me, was the first time I was going to have driven a car in over a year. Oops.

The actual driving bit was quite short in all honesty, you got to make 4 passes through the pan with varying degrees of 'try to brake/turn, see what happens', the first runs without the ABS switched on and then with. Goodness me ABS makes a difference! How did people drive safely before? Then the last bit was a handbrake turn to make you skid properly and then attempt to steer your way out of the slide - let's just say if this happens to me the roads better be pretty wide...

It was useful though as I have never been in an out of control car before so being in one in a controlled environment was really helpful and a bit of an eye opener. But then I had to get home. So as I mentioned I had been thinking to ask one of the nice Kirin guys for a lift but, as I was the only non-company person there they all got to leave while I had to go and pay, and as I was doing this everyone else buggered off. As I didn't want to call a taxi (it would have been doubly expensive) I asked the instructor chap if the bus stop was 'over there?', gesticulating vaguely. He looked at me as if I was mad and asked how I got there in the first place and another instructor piped up with "taxi" and a smirk, Smiling amused smiles to themselves the main instructor then, kindly I must say, offered to drive me to the bus stop, which was good of him as the weather was changeable to say the least.

So we hopped in the car for the short drive to what turned out to be the bus depot, though that's stretching it a little. Out side I asked a lady what time the bus for Morika left, she looked at me as if I had asked  to bed her daughter and scurried inside to ask (turns out she was a cleaner so fair enough), she returned with 1155, so a 20 minute wait, ok. As it was chilly I went inside the depot as they had a waiting bench, cue stunned silence from the 2 people working in there, reminiscent of the pub in American Werewolf in London. I smiled, they stared. To break the tension I asked how long roughly it took to Morioka, about an hour maybe? This led to much shuffling of paper and frantic searching as if no one had ever wondered such a thing, what was really odd was that the driver was sitting there and you'd ave thought he'd be able to knock that one out of the park straight away but apparently the appearance of anyone, let along a Japanese speaking gaijn, at the depot had struck everyone temporarily dumb. But it was confirmed, about an hour - I thought prudent at that point not to try and engage them in any more small talk.

The journey back itself was rural and quite interesting, but only in a once-is-enough kind of way. However because it took so long I did miss the 12.47 Hanawa line train back to Appikogen and as is often the case in this part of the world the next train was at 16:40. What to do with 4 hours to kill in Morioka? Sit in the library and work seemed to be the best option, at least the wifi was free.