SEPTEMBER 05: Japan - Rebirth on the northern island
Shunsuke rejoined the mainstream after college, he says. He moved to Tokyo, worked as a computer programmer, leased an apartment. He made new friends, enjoyed his independence. During his first winter in the city he realized that for the first time he was living among people who didn’t relate snow to skiing. It was also the first winter he didn’t log a single day on the hill.
But he was earning money, and his parents were proud. He stuck it out that year. He survived another. He grew roots. He got married. The years passed. Then something gave. His job wasn’t fulfilling. The concrete byways of Tokyo weren’t home. He missed the mountains, the snow, the trees. After six years in the city, he needed a change.
***
Ian’s old boss, Kaya, knows about the trees. The houses he builds are made of them. There’s piles of sawdust and three motorcycles in his yard. We sit in his office in seats he shaped with a chainsaw. His wife serves green tea on a solid pine table. She helped him peel logs the first winter they spent in Niseko. They built a small studio first, then lived in it while they built the main house. They spent half of each day clearing the snow off the logs.
A dozen fishing rods hang in the rafters. Thirty-one reels sit behind glass in a cupboard by the window. Along the windowsill are two dozen hammers, each head made for a different strength nail. The tips are capped with the same steel they use to forge Samurai swords.
Kaya knows about tradition. He wears the special jacket. He learned his trade by carving Ainu dolls, then studying Japanese log temples. He built 20 houses in the valley using traditional Japanese tools. He does it for a living, but also to keep Niseko a Japanese town instead of a generic ski town.
But even Kaya has a story. He was in trouble in Kobe, he says. He sweeps a long, black strand of hair from his eyes, smiles. Something with the law. He never went to jail, he says, but it was close. It was a bad time. When he came to Niseko, he didn’t know how to build. He didn’t know about living in the mountains or skiing or fishing or living in the snow. He says 30 years ago, there was nothing here. Just the mountains, the river, the woods and a few skiers. It took courage to move here, he says. To leave a life behind and start again.
***
The masses have clued in to Niseko’s healing snows. A television crew came into the bar last night. Ian didn’t want to talk to them. They were Japan’s version of ESPN, he said. They heard Niseko was chic and were looking for a scoop. They looked like they’d never left the city in their lives. The reporters sat at a long table and pretended to sip beer. Then they drank from a shot-ski. They had the bartender pour tea into the glasses instead of whiskey. They left not knowing what this place was about. They left assuming we were thinking about them. We weren’t. They were thinking of us and we were living.
They’re coming more and more, Ian says. Real estate is spiking. Japan is in a recession, but it won’t last forever. People will come in droves, he says. He thinks five years, maybe. He says he’ll find another place then. Get away from it, start again.
***
The Japanese move quietly around the tourists. They serve food, drinks, take money. They talk with customers they recognize. The men are courteous. The women are striking. Occasionally owners share a cup of sake with a guest. In the streets, they walk with their heads down. On the hill they ski with their hands up. You can see their gloves gliding through the powder from the gondola. It looks like they’re trying to climb out of the snow.
***
It was to Niigata, near Nagano, that Shunsuke escaped that last winter in the city. He went to learn to ski bumps. He got a job as a caddy at a golf course in the summer. He joined a bump team at Hakaba, then Fukushima. In 1999 he left the team to ski on his own. It wasn’t long before he found himself in the same woods he learned to ski as a boy.
He marvels at the course his life has taken. An abandoned career. A stand against tradition. Even a divorce. In any other country, this wouldn’t be abnormal. But you don’t do things like this in Japan, Ian says. You just don’t.
Before we leave, Shunsuke hunts for a Japanese magazine. He flips to a spread of him and his friends Tachimoto and Yamaki in India. They’re sitting on bulbous Royal Enfield motorcycles with skis strapped to their backs. The pictures are of a trip he took last spring. The trio motorcycled 300 miles through the Himalayas looking for turns, Shunsuke explains.
He shows us to the door and I ask if it was hard to drive the bikes with 75 pounds of gear on their backs. He smiles, leans on the doorframe, curls his fingers.
“Yes,” he says. “Very hard.”
***
I stopped today mid-run. It’d been snowing for two days. We were poised on the edge of Waterfall, an 800 vertical foot drop through the trees. The sun came out from behind a cloud. Silver birch cast shadows on the snow. There was a ridgeline to the right. It dropped steadily toward the river and then straight down. The water made a black streak through the snow. Snowflakes hovered in the air. They were so light they hardly fell. Ian pushed off toward the stream. In a minute, I followed, staying just right of his tracks.
***
Before we leave, Kaya lays out his tools on the table. They are crafted from steel and wood. They are well-used.
The nomi, he explains, is a Japanese chisel that shapes the mortise and tenon joints. An ads-like chouna notches logs. Each instrument is individually named by the machinist who made it. There is only one in the world like it. The maker’s name is engraved on the handle. Kaya places his kana—a hand planer you pull instead of push—on the coffee table. It is solid and square with a thick, razor sharp blade jutting from the bottom. Etched in the steel is the mark of the man who created it, Chiyozuru. The tool’s name, Kaya said, is Moondrop.
***
We didn’t know what was happening that first night. We didn’t even know if it was real. The slot through the trees. The draw, the cat track. The green light radiating from the ridge.
But we couldn’t stop skiing. We lapped the face. We picked new lines. We discovered the further you skied the ridge, the longer the run to the draw. We skied straight and fast back to the lift, then sat on the quad and floated up through the dark.
There’s a certain magic on the northern island, Kaya and Shunsuke will tell you. A magnetic pull that lifts you up and out of your life. It’s a world so different, it can’t exist within the reality you know—so it creates a new one. One you dream about on fall nights, where it snows every day. Where carpenters build houses with samurai steel, and trees grow silver bark.
It’s a place where old men sit at a breakfast table and contemplate two shaded lines running down a hillside. Green tea steaming in a mug. A napkin balled on a bamboo mat. Footsteps in the kitchen. Boot tracks parallel to the line. Bamboo skis leaning against the doorframe. A rare break in the clouds. The sun lifting so slowly over the mountains, you hardly notice it lighting the slope.