JANUARY IN JAPAN: After Five Dry Days, Niseko Delivers

JANUARY IN JAPAN: After Five Dry Days, Niseko Delivers
By Tess Weaver

If it were any other place, we’d be happy with the conditions. We’d be satisfied with the boot deep snow, appreciative of the visibility, grateful for the lack of crowds and content exploring a new place. But it’s not just any place. It’s Japan. Land of legendary dumps and storied storms. I wanted to drown in effortless white. So why the blue sky?

“It’s never like this,” says one local, squinting in the sunlight. “We never get more than one or two sunny days in January and February.”

It’s been four days since we arrived in Niseko, a large ski resort on Hokkaido, Japan’s northern most island. We choose this week in January to visit the second snowiest resort in the world based on years of snowfall data. It was meant to be one of the deepest weeks of the winter.

“You should consider yourself lucky,” says the jaded local. “Most people come here for years before ever seeing Mount Yotei.”

We gaze out to Japan’s second highest volcano, an aesthetic pimple on the earth’s surface that fans out to some of Japan’s most fertile farming land. The views from Niseko are almost worth the high pressure. From the area’s backside you can see the Sea of Japan. It’s breathtaking. But I want my breath to be taken by a mouthful of blower powder.

And then, just as the fourth day comes to end and I feel justified in bitching about the lack of snow, something happens. The ceiling lowers and the grapple begins to fall. A sign of change. By nightfall it’s coming down hard. We can’t wait until morning. It’s 8:30pm and the lifts don’t close for another half hour (Niseko is the largest night skiing area in the world). We go to bed early to the sounds of snow sliding down the metal roof.

The next morning we awake to a whole new Niseko…and a buried car. We’re at the gondola early, but there are less than a dozen people in line. Eric Pollard and Pep Fujas are among them. The forecast called for 20cm, but as soon as we take our first run through the silver birch trees, we discover quadruple that.

This is it—what we came across an ocean for. We choke, we laugh, we disappear in our own private white. It’s the deepest run I’ve had in years and it’s only just begun. We lap the gondola from 9-4, never crossing anyone’s tracks but our own, which vanish each run. It’s eerily empty. The birth tree forests were made for skiing powder. They are just as supernatural as they seem in the photos. Rolling, rhythmic hills link steep sections, which envelop, consume, devour. I’m cold, wet, hungry, happy and foolish for ever doubting Japan’s ability to produce the planet’s best powder days.

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