Part 2
When there isn’t a festival going on, it’s always a good idea to throw one yourself! This year was the 3rd Annual Queens of the Drift Ice (here's what happened last year), a time to showcase Eastern Hokkaido’s famous 流氷 (ryuuhyou), or drift ice. It’s a good reason, and usually the best time of year, for those who live in other parts of the island make the long trek out and explore Abashiri for a weekend. Surprisingly, a record number of people made the half-day journey out to Abashiri in what was probably their first, and last, time to the far east. Unfortunately, due to a sudden Chinook just mere days before the weekend, all of the drift ice retreated back to Siberia and the drift ice cruise we had booked was cancelled. But there was still a lot of winter fun to be had, including snowmobiling on frozen Lake Abashiri, onsening, eating Nepalese food for lunch (nothing like keeping warm with curry!), and visiting Abashiri's Drift Ice museum (it's not quite the same..) or many other museums. That night saw a football-sized team of us, over 55 in total, taking over the Abashiri Beer Gardens for two hours of all-you-can-yakiniku. After eating our body weight's worth in meat, we headed to Tokoro to party the night away in Caroline’s ‘mansion’.

It’s been a busy past few months; Winter just flew by, it seems! The sun sets later, the snow is melting (in between random spurts of blizzards) and it’s undeniably, no matter how much I try to deny it, turning into Spring. With the imminent changing of the seasons, I’ve been trying to enjoy the remaining days of Winter before it evaporates, leaving the green buds of leaves, blooming flowers, and warmth in its wake. The next few posts are a recap of my Winter adventures over the past few weeks.

Part 1
Winter, as with all seasons, brings a bounty of festivals to Japan. The Japanese love to celebrate, whether the reason is big, small, or made-up, festivals are always great times to see the Japanese at their best. A few came to Hokkaido the past few months, including the biggest and best – Sapporo’s Yuki Matsuri. This year it happened to fall near my birthday (which is on another Japanese holiday, Setsubun). A few days of paid holiday turned a long-weekend into one of the best times I’ve ever had in Japan! I spent this week-long combination Birthday, Yuki Matsuri, and early Valentines weekend in Sapporo with Eliza. She surprised me with a night date up scenic Mt. Moiwa and a flambé-style steak dinner where our meal was cooked right in front of us. The next few days were spent looking at the always-impressive snow and ice sculptures of Yuki Matsuri, then heading to Niseko (where I spent most of my Christmas holidays) for good times with friends and an amazing powder day on the slopes. Upon returning to Sapporo the next day, we immediately went snowboarding again at Mt.Teine (site of the 1972 Winter Olympics) with some Japanese friends of ours. On Valentine’s Day, I took Eliza out for 5-course meal at a French restaurant in Otaru where we had the entire cozy restaurant to ourselves. We strolled along the famous Otaru canal afterwards, taking in all the glowing snow sculptures for the last day of the Otaru Lantern Festivals for a perfect evening to cap off an awesome weekend, and 24th birthday.

I've written before about the Japanese inventing sports and making them "softer" or more easier to play, but there's one sport they've changed and pushed it above and beyond, inventing rules, equipment, and expanding this one-time childhood activity into international winter 'sport'. I have to admit that it's pretty brilliant, and having participated in a tournament last weekend, I'm all for taking it to the Olympics.

I'm talking... snowball fights!

Snowball Fights - or Yukigassen as it's called in Japanese (Yuki=snow, kassen=battle) - has been around in Japan as an organized sport since the 1980's. It started right here in Hokkaido from it's humble beginnings as small town's yearly tourist attraction to a winter activity with an international committee and tournaments held all throughout Japan and countries like Finland, Norway, and Australia. The Yukigassen court is 40m x 10m with small, 1m-tall ice shelters placed strategically throughout the field and a Center-line that separates the two teams' areas.

The two ways to win are by hitting all of the opponent team members (a hit by a snowball anywhere on your body is an out, even if you drop it on yourself or from friendly-fire!) or by pulling the opponents team flag out of its base. Each team only has 90 snowballs for the entire 3-minute round and consists of 7 players, 1 coach, and 2 substitutes. The 7 players are divided into 4 forward players (wearing black-numbered vests) and 3 back players (wearing red-numbered vests). Forward players are not allowed to cross behind Back Line (where the snowballs are) so it's up to the back players to roll or pass the snowballs up to the forward players, who are probably bunkered down behind the shelters. Only 3 team members are allowed in the opponents area (i.e. are allowed to cross the Center line at one time) and having any more is an automatic forfeit. You can check out all the rules on the official Yukigassen website (in English): http://www.yukigassen.jp/english/index.html They've even developed equipment for official Yukigassen tournament play including protective hockey-like helmets, colored vests and a perfectly spherical and oh-so-grippable, 45-at-a-time snowball machine. I seriously want one, but the 73,500yen ($850) price tag per machine is a but of a bummer.

A lot of Yukigassen tournaments are held in Hokkaido around this time of year. Some are local, others are regional, with prize money for the winning team (30,000 yen at the tournament I played at) and a spot to compete at the all-national tournament in Yamanashi prefecture. Glen's town of Kiyosato (up near where I climbed Mt.Shari in the summer) had one of these tournaments and invited us to enter a team of gaijin. So we gathered a group of 8 ALT's and called ourselves the Storm Troopers. All except two of us had never played before but, fortunately, we would be able to watch a few matches before our first one. The matches were pretty.. tame.. to put it politely. They preferred defensive strategies which included a lot of snowball lobbing at the people behind the shelters then staying alive until the clock ran out. We'd worked out a strategy the night before which involved rushing at the opponents flag before they had time to get any snowballs, but we realized the impracticalities of it after seeing our first game (goes to show you shouldn't strategize before ever playing the sport). We decided to scrap our strategy and go free-for-all, balls-to-the-walls, and do our best.


It turned out being the best strategy because we had a blast! We played valiantly and (kind of) aggressively, which I think took the Japanese teams off guard. We had two sets of two matches that day - the first of which we tied then lost, the second of which we lost and lost. Two of those losses were desperate (but successful) dashes by our opponents for our team flag after after we'd shrunk their numbers quite a bit, and the other loss was from an epic one-on-one stand-off with Simon and the remaining member from the other team... ending up with a snowball to Simon's gut. Zannen.

Overall it was a ton of fun, even though we lost horribly (but not by much!). It was the same thrill of exhilaration and satisfaction you got as a kid when you threw a snowball 10 meters and smoked your opponent in the head. Ohh yeah.. Why no one thought of making this a sport before? I have no idea, but I'm bringing Yukigassen to Canada!