Explore everyday life in Japan
After shoveling your driveway and the walkway up to your front door, or maybe after shoveling your car out of its parking space, have you ever climbed up onto the roof of your house and shoveled the snow off it? I never have, but every winter, I see stories on the news in Japan about people, usually old men in their mid-seventies it seems, who do.
The mountainous areas of northern Japan have fable-like winters where one to two meters of snow sometimes falls in a single storm. As the snow accumulates over weeks and months, it’s not uncommon for many areas to have over three meters of snow. In some places, like that of Zao in Yamagata Prefecture, all of this snow encapsulates the pine trees and creates mysterious looking creatures known in Japan as snow monsters. In other areas, like that of Tateyama in Toyama Prefecture, you can take bus tours along mountain roads banked with over ten meters of snow.
As you might guess, the weight of all this snow poses a danger to buildings and awnings. If it is not removed, houses face a risk of collapsing. This means that taking out a ladder, climbing onto the roof with a large scoop-like snow shovel, and pushing the snow off of the roof is a necessity. In many rural towns in Japan, as the populations have declined, it has become a trend for the young people to leave and migrate to cities where they can find work and education more easily. One of the results of this is that all of this heavy snow labor is often left to a team of scrappy old-timers who, I am guessing, have probably been doing this work every winter for most of their lives.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.