Yuzawa, part 1: Snowballs in May

~Hello again, loyal readers! Before I post the first part of my travels in the lovely mountain town of Yuzawa, I'd like to share a concern of mine. As some of you know, I'm a bit of a media junkie (I hit BBC.com around ten times a day), and all indicators that I see point towards the U.S. launching an invasion of Iran in the near future. From over here on the other side of the planet, it all seems so remote...and it's all too easy to just ignore the bad news.

If you're shaking your head right now, consider the fact that many Americans, myself included, were really surprised when we invaded Iraq (for the second time). In the months leading up to the invasion, I mostly ignored the political whining that was spewing out of Washington; after all, we were already occupying Afghanistan, right? This was just the usual election-year BS, right? When we actually DID invade Iraq, I was shocked...and disturbed. I suppose someone has to stop Iran from developing those pesky WMDs! Sounds familiar, dosen't it...



Before you get worried, I don't plan on turning David Does Japan into my own news and political forum (to be honest, politics bores me to tears). This blog has and always will be primarily about Japan. Now if only we could borrow some of their ninjas and "remove" the right people, we could avoid another messy war...okay, enough with that, on to Yuzawa!




~My final trip during the vacation was to Yuzawa, a small resort town in the mountains south of Nagaoka. The trip was only an hour away by train, but if you're short on time or high on cash, the shinkansen can get you there in less than half an hour:

Now that the ski season is over, the town was almost empty, the huge hotels vacant and the stores silent. Which suited me just fine. My first stop was a "ropeway", a cable car lift that took me on a ten-minute trip to the top of a nearby mountain. This gave me an excellent view of the valley and mountains all around:

^ For scale, most of the surrounding mountains are around 6,000 feet high. The long, rectangular building in the lower center is the Yuzawa train station, where I arrived. While hanging out on top of the mountain, my friends and I had a discussion about what this place must have been like a thousand years ago (hint: cold). We imagined what it must have been like to be the daimyo of this valley, being the absolute overlord of literally everything you can see from on top of this mountain.

We concluded that it might be pretty to look at, but the area must have been awfully poor back then; there's not much room to grow rice, which is how wealth was measured in the Feudal Age of Japan. Without trains and the tunnels they pass through, this area must have been quite isolated, as winter snows would completely seal the mountain passes (that's what happens to Tom Cruise in a certain overblown movie).

Still, for all its downsides, I think that if I had been standing in this exact spot a thousand years ago, surveying my domain, I would have felt literally on top of the world.

^ On top of the mountain, clinging to the slope, was a single cherry tree. [INSERT POETIC METAPHOR OR HAIKU OF YOUR CHOICE HERE]

^ Note how this picture has the taller, snow-covered mountains in the background, with a smaller, snowless mountain in the foreground. And of course, a single tree in the front...seriously folks, I'm not in the mood to be poetic today.

^ My friends and I dubbed this area a "cloud factory". The remaining snow was melting quickly, and where the sunlight was shining directly, the snow was sublimating into vapor right in front of us. The snow was also great for making snowballs (damn you, Scott!). Can you see the ski lift on the mountainside leading up into the clouds?

^ The melting snow has raised the water level of all the rivers and streams in the valley. These rapids look like they'd be fun for some white-water kayaking...for all of five seconds, before you slam into a rock.

^A mountain soaring above a cloud bank. Can you see the straight horozontal line on the right side of the picture? That's a snow-covered mountain road, that would probably be a lot of fun to drive on in a sports car...that is, after the snow melts.

^ Don't you just want to explore? Seeing landscapes like this, I'm seized with the sudden urge to just abandon the rest of my life and set out to the mountains, to climb to the top and see what lands lie beyond. That's why I love taking pictures like this, but I can't look at them for too long; I feel this weird combination of excitement and depression. I hope you enjoy it, though.


^A panoramic image I created by stitching multiple high-altitude photographs together. I'm very happy with the result, but unfortunately, the blasted Blogspot website reduces the image resolution of every image that I post (the real picture takes up 3 megabytes and is 12032 x 1476 pixels), so you can't see it here in its real size. Please click on the image above to see it in a slightly larger size,.

~And now, a dose of Japanglish!
^ Curiously, snowjunk.com seems to be down. Seems that business is not that good--I can't imagine why. I get this image of of the Snowjunk owner in the middle of the winter, watching all the skiiers go by, and wondering why his shop seems to be so unpopular with the gaijin tourists.

Next up: The Exciting Conclusion to my Yuzawa trip, with many strange things I spotted around the town.