Jackie in Japan - So Much Snow!
No, I'm not in Japan at the moment, but the Danish weather forecast said there would be blizzard-like conditions this evening, and that made me think of the time in Japan when I experienced "ooyuki", which translates to "much snow".
This was in January 2018, in the Kanto region, more specifically Tokyo and Yokohama, at least that's where I was. It's more or less based on my journal entry for the day of the snowfall and the following day, but since dumb me in 2018 excluded an important part, I'll refer to a smaller portion from memory. I don't remember if I have talked about this before, please forgive me if I have.
I was studying at EF Tokyo and commuted every day from the dorm in Yokohama to Shibuya in the heart of Tokyo. It was Monday morning and I had classes from 9:00. Around the second lesson, so around 11:00 I guess, a different teacher knocked on the door to our classroom and informed us that all classes from 15:00 were canceled, as all trains in Tokyo would stop running due to the snowfall. To make it fair, the classes from 15:00 would also be canceled on Tuesday. I had classes on Monday until 15:00, so when they were done, I hurried down to the train at Shibuya station. Thankfullly, I didn't need to change trains to get back to the dorm.
Usually at 15:00, Shibuya station is not quite as crowded as it can be during rush hour, but the crowd on that day was several times worse. The train was so insanely crowded it was hard to navigate, and very scary. Thankfully, I met a Japanese girl who had lived in Michigan (the US state, either she didn't mention the city or I never wrote it down) for a few years, and she was very willing to help me. She got me a seat and made sure I got off at the right stop. She later told me that she should actually have gotten off at the previous stop, but as her home was right between the two stops, it didn't really matter to her. I'm still so grateful to her. I told the girl I'd be fine navigating home on my own, mostly because I didn't want to inconvenience her further, and also because I could sense that she too wanted to go home. Besides, I later learned that I probably lived in the exact opposite direction of where she was going.
Well, getting from the station and to my dorm was hard. There was lots of wind and lots of snow, and my normally poor sight was made so poor I might as well have had none at all. I only had a vague idea of where I was going. In a way, it reminded me a bit of how blizzards are discribed in The Little House on the Prerry series I read when I was in my early teens. I managed to find my way to Family Mart, which was on the way to the dorm, and buy some food to live off of. Then it was just straight ahead until I found the dorm. Based on what I wrote in my journal, it was very cold and I needed time to warm up after getting inside my room.
On the following day, the whole world was covered in snow, and there were many icy places and lots of drifts. I planned on going to the supermarket, since my classes that day were canceled, and I needed to get help from a kind mother and her little daughter. At least she enjoyed the snow.
Apparently, it's fairly common for Japanese people to cancel all trains in case of a heavy snowfall. However, I heard from someone who had been on exchange on Hokkaido that up there, the trains run even if it snows. Considering that Hokkaido is that much further up north and they experience more snow up there than in the rest of Japan, it makes sense. If they were to cancel all trains in case of snow up there, the trains would probably never run during winter.
The picture I took from my dorm room after getting back there safely.
