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Five hundred miles from the glitz of Tokyo floats Hokkaido, Japan's nothernmost island, for years inhabited only by fierce tribes, myths, and shadows. Martha Sherrill travels into the fabled snow country to find a unspoiled place where the seafood is bountiful, the bathing is restorative, the skiing is epic, and the soul of old Japan still lives on

As I fly over Hokkaido, the island looks slumbering and still. Our plane descends into whiteness. All of life—the city streets and train tracks, the dairy farms, the silent volcanoes and boiling hot springs—lies beneath layers of snow. It is a frozen winter world, a mysterious land of submerged identity.

Snow falls almost every day in the winter on the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago, making its largest city, Sapporo, one of the snowiest in the world, snowier than Helsinki or Oslo or Anchorage. The peak comes in February, around the time of the Yuki Matsuri, or Snow Festival, when two million people, mostly Japanese tourists, show up to party— if the planes are landing and the roads are clear.

Continue reading A Japanese Winter's Tale

• Submitted by
  
  Emma123
• 06/29/09
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