Snow!

Last week was a pretty a quiet day on Valentine's Day, just me and one Japanese staff (every Friday I'm the only native teacher at work), and a handful of adult students taking one-on-one lessons.  My last student left at 6:50pm.  I looked out the window and it had just started to snow.  "Take care driving home!" I told her.  Shelly, my co-worker said that schools in Tokyo were cancelling due to the snow.  "And it's coming our direction!"  Sure, whatever.  It can't be all that bad.  I'm from Minnesota - I've seen snow.

I was wrong.  I woke up Saturday morning to a winter wonderland outside my window, and the snow had just started!  I trudged to work and all three of us English teachers taught our first class, but the snow kept coming, and our Japanese co-workers were frantically using all the office phone lines (and their personal cell phones) to call students and tell them to stay home.  We were closing the school for the day (Saturday is our busiest day, with 27 classes and over 150 students).

A view from our apartment window on Sat. morning
(the height of the snow would eventually come up to that car's window)

I went home and shoveled out the stairs leading up to our second floor apartment (for the second time that morning).  Haidee and Cindy spent over four hours on Saturday shoveling the church parking lot twice, and helping to push cars out of the road. Snow in Japan is very unlike snow in Minnesota.  Occasionally we'll have good packing snow in Minnesota, but usually it's just powder.  Either way, a good snow-blower can handle it no problem.  The snow here in Fukushima is wet and heavy.  So when I say it snowed almost 60 centimeters (just shy of 2 feet) over the course of Friday night to Sunday morning, I'm talking about HEAVY snow.

Sunday morning work was cancelled again.  We arrived at church in time to help shovel out a few more cars that had gotten stuck in the road.  Our friends Natsuko and Jaquup were walking up and down the street, shovels in hand, digging out cars that (for some crazy reason) had decided to try to drive that day.  All told I think they pushed out over 20 cars that day.  Only the major streets in Fukushima get plowed.  The vast majority of side streets don't get any help.  The residents are on their own when it comes to digging out their streets.

After church Haidee, Joel, and I, shovels in hand, walked to an elderly church member's house to dig out his car.  It was trapped under the car-port which had collapsed due to the weight of the snow on top of it.  Along the way we passed several groups of people walking up and down the streets, pushing out cars, digging paths to their homes, and scooping heavy snow off the roofs of their houses.  Even on Monday (the snow had stopped falling for 24 hours) cars were getting stuck.  The snow was still deep, but it was a wet, slushy mix.  Cars would just sink down until the the snow was up to their bellies.  Their tires would spin, but the snow held on tight to the underbelly of the car.

Yamanashi (circled in red) is about 360 km (or 220 miles) SW of Fukushima (circled in blue)

The worst place hit was Yamanashi Prefecture, just to the west of Tokyo.  It didn't show up in any major newspapers, but people reported stories and posted pictures via Twitter.  They received between 110 to 140 cm of snow (that's four feet of wet, heavy snow)!!  People were snowed in, literally!  They couldn't open their front doors.  Cars were stuck on the roads and eventually buried completely under the snow.  Roofs over parking spaces collapsed.  Power lines were damaged and people went without electricity for over a day.  I'm not sure how many people were injured, but there were some casualties reported.  The following pictures are all from Yamanashi, posted via Twitter:

These people won't be driving anywhere anytime soon.

Covered parking was a little hazardous. 

This is a road.  The bumps at the top are cars that are buried!

someone's kitchen . . .

After some searching, I did find Yamanashi mentioned in this newspaper article by The Japan News, dated February 18th: (link)

All of this comes after a very mild, and unusually snow-free winter here in Fukushima.  I made this post just one week too early . . .

As an aside note, we also got a bunch of snow a week ago (on Saturday, February 8th).  I was going to post something about it, but then it was totally overshadowed by the snow we got a week later on Valentine's Day weekend.  Anyway, the Monday after our first snowfall, Haidee and I called up Pamela and Joel and invited them to come out to play with Nathan.  We built a little homemade sled out of a box, some plastic, and a scarf.  It turned out to be a little too small for Nathan, and he wasn't so impressed in the end.  It made for a cute picture, though!

Our homemade sled hitched up to the stuffed animals

Nathan had a stand up to fit inside our sled, which was too small.