It does snow sometimes in winter in Hiroshima city, but the snow seldom lays and quickly melts away when the sun comes out. When it does lay, it seldom gets more than an inch deep, so today was really something special! I've never seen it snow so hard for so long or lay so fast and so deep in all the years - no, decades - I have lived in Hiroshima.
What is even stranger is that Hiroshima seems to have got most of the snowfall in this region. Usually it is the prefectures to the north of Hiroshima, on the Japan Sea side of Honshu that get the snow, but this time, it was Hiroshima that got the bulk of it.
On a Mission for Frozen Ramen
I was home alone for most of today and had no plans to go out, but the Mrs messaged me that she'd like to have ramen when she got back home. The only ramen in the house was el-cheapo instant ramen, so I decided to pop out to the supermarket to get some much better quality frozen ramen: the noodles and soup are frozen into a convenient round block that you can drop into a saucepan and heat up to get a much tastier ramen than the instant stuff gives you.
As you can see from the photos, hardly anybody else was out and about, although there were a few hardy souls in the supermarket when I got there. The snow was three or four inches deep, and crisp and even. It was freshly laid and not a soul had trodden across it before me. It's been a long time since I've had the experience of walking across crisp virgin snow which gives way before each footstep with a satisfying muffled crunch. By the time I returned from my ramen-shopping mission, fresh snow had covered up my outbound footsteps and so I walked over virgin snow all over again.
Hiroshima's Snowbound Election
A few weeks ago Japan's "first female Prime Minister" took advantage of her popularity to call a snap general election. Today was election day, but since Hiroshima was snowbound the turnout plummeted to just 25%!
Note: "Snowbound" is a relative term. For the aged Hiroshimite today's largest snowfall in living memory would have been a huge deterrent to venturing out to vote. The favourite word of every Japanese person I've ever met is "abunai" - "dangerous" - and that word would certainly have been on the lips of the electorate today; not with regard to the various candidates, but to the risk of slipping arse over head on their way to or from the polling station.
Hiroshima is Not "Snow Country"
However... three inches of snow would be considered a piffling amount in the northern regions of Japan, the old "Yuki Guni" (Snow Country), after which the famous Japanese novel, "Yuki Guni" by Yasunari Kawabata is named. That novel has one of the most famous opening lines in all of Japanese literature:
The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.
What most English translations don't mention is the very first word of Kawabata's original Japanese:
国境の長いトンネルを抜けると雪国であった。
Kokkyō no nagai tonneru o nukeru to yukiguni de atta.
Kokkyō [国境] means "border" but it is an imaginary "border" between the the Kantō region of Tokyo and the snowy countryside of the old Echigo (Niigata Prefecture) which would have seemed like a remote and utterly different world to a sophisticated Tokyoite.
For me, today, merely opening my front door transported me into a completely different and enchanted world. Whether the new world will be so enchanting for the Japanese when they wake up to the election results, I cannot say.
Cheers!