Good afternoon, and a belated Happy New Year.
Despite all that is going on in the world, I hope the new year brings us all some level of personal peace and things to look forward to.
This is the first Letter from Japan of the year, delivered to you from windy Tokyo, which feels much colder than usual this winter. This raises my hopes for some snowfall this year, not the usual slashy, but the real kind. If that relatively rare event happens, I will make sure to cover it in one of the future newsletters. But before that, this month, I bring you snow, lots of it, complete with icy waterfalls, from somewhere else: the northern country, otherwise known as the Savage Island or more descriptively as Hokkaido.
What took me to −10 °C Hokkaido this time, right after a grueling 13-hour flight back to Tokyo from Istanbul, was, among several other tangible and intangible reasons (all outlined below), the need to escape the depressive mood that hangs over Tokyo in the first few days of the new year, a city I otherwise find surprisingly soothing, despite its size.
Most people leave town or stay home with their families; all the museums and shops, including grocery stores, close; and streets outside the temple areas1 become ghostly empty, testing the limits of even the most introverted among us, including me. To make things worse, there is also always deceptively inviting sunshine and blue skies, which creates a Pluribus-like anxiety, with all the possibilities outside, yet something deeply missing. While this all on paper sounds like a good excuse to relax at home and indulge in endless streaming, reading, or itinerary planning before getting back to work, I had never managed to make good use of that time in the past.
So instead of kicking off the new year in an uninspired mood in Tokyo, I now spend those first few days in a tiny town called Biei, located in central Hokkaido.
The town offers the perfect antidote to the depressive mood of Tokyo: a cozy hotel, a few restaurants that gracefully remain open even on the first few days of the new year, a web of easily walkable country roads surrounding the town and cutting through endless snow fields, and, more importantly, perfectly calibrated street lighting that Edward Hopper would approve of - adding a great deal of charm to the town`s often empty streets. There is still a sense of solitude, but an impressively deep and pleasurable one, and one that comes with one of the most distinctive winter landscapes one can find.
Biei, home to fewer than 10,000 residents, and not modestly but rightfully named as “beautiful crystal” in Japanese (美瑛町), remains reliably covered in snow for almost half of the year, starting in November.
The area, as rural as Japan gets, is surprisingly rich in landmarks, the number of which could easily rival those of midsize cities like Kanazawa. But there is a twist: the majority of Biei`s landmarks are trees, which the tourism office promotes with a helpful map and affectionate names like “Puffy” or “Parent and Child”. There is also, of course, the famous Christmas Tree, the Mona Lisa of the Biei area - a lone spruce which, I believe, attracts hundreds of visitors every day in the winter season, leading to strict traffic control in the area.
