A meizanologist's diary (118)

22 January: the hotel’s hyperborean temperatures help me go for an asa-ichi alpine start. Out on the street, the wind knifes through several layers of fibrepile. This is no day to be up a mountain; it will be challenge enough to work out how to get home from Shikoku.

Flakes of snow swirl through the predawn air as I walk past the deserted factory of the Sadamitsu Foodstuffs Company to catch the 7.09 am westwards. 

At Awa-Takeda, the efficient station clerk says that the Sensei’s hometown is cut off by heavy snow – no trains are running from either Kyoto or Maibara. However, he suggests, you could always take the long way round, via Tokyo and Nagano. The first step, though, is to get back to the mainland.

It’s not often that the Shinkansen becomes an instrument of enquiry. Yet, starting with the pink Sakura from Okayama (but no Hello Kitty this time), we’re about to make a transverse section through a classic Japanese winter weather pattern – the continental high/Pacific low snow-making machine.

As far as Osaka, the sky stays bright and windy, although the scattered clouds are “streeting” just as they do on their snow-spawning march over the Japan Sea. 

The first sign of trouble starts at Kyoto. Mt Atago is lightly dusted, and you can see the snow squalls sweeping over the Kitayama hills. Even so, it’s hard to believe the regular announcements that heavy snowfall is causing delays on the Tokaido Shinkansen…

Then the sunlight fades and, running past Biwa, the Hikari noses into the first snow showers. Soon the train slows to half its normal speed in a near-whiteout. This is heavier weather than on yesterday’s mountain.

Mt Ibuki, famed for its snow accumulations, goes by invisibly in the murk, but soon afterwards we run out into the sun again. At Gifu-Hachiman, there’s no more snow on the ground and only the streeting clouds testify to the strong winds aloft.

The Hikari streaks through Shizuoka with such despatch that there’s hardly time to appreciate Fuji trailing its classic winter banner cloud. And by Tokyo, even without the help of Hello Kitty, we’ve made up all but five minutes of the delay.

Within half an hour, I’m on a Hayataka heading north. We pass a lightly dusted Mt Asama under clear skies, running into the first snow showers well north of Nagano. 

At Nao-etsu the clouds break up enough to show their tops catching the last rays of sunset. The train arrives at the Sensei’s hometown only a few minutes late.

Snow flurries down again as I shiver in the bus queue. Even our local tyrannosaurus seems a bit under the weather this evening…