Japan's Snow Country & Winter Landscapes

About this book

Written and produced in Japan by a Japanese author and a Japanese publisher — a Japan-brand guide to the country the snow makes. Beyond the snow festivals and the ski slopes lies the other Japan: the yukiguni, the snow country, where the snow stands above the ground floor for a third of the year and a whole civilisation has been built inside it. Japan's Snow Country & Winter Landscapes covers 200 entries in a single uniform format — The Place, History & Culture, Visiting & Access, and Winter Safety & Notes — and every entry runs to more than 200 words of substance.

Four parts walk the country: Hokkaido's caldera lakes, capes and great farming plains; Tohoku's deep-snow basins, sacred stairs and folktale valleys; the yukiguni heartland — Echigo's buried cities, the Tonami plain's scattered farmsteads, Kanazawa's roped pines, Eiheiji in its white valley; and the long tail west and south, from Kyoto's thatched hamlets and snow-dusted dunes to Yakushima's snow-capped granite above a subtropical sea. The fifth part turns from places to the systems that explain them: Takada's covered arcades, snow cellars and under-snow vegetables, roads melted by groundwater, railways defended by plough trains, the cooperative village, and the words for snow themselves.

Every entry closes with the same honest sentence — conditions change, so confirm the latest local information before you go — because in the snow country, that is not a disclaimer. It is the first rule of the place.

Companion, kept separate: Japan in Winter covers the season's festivals, illuminations and experiences. This book covers the land itself — its landscapes, its settlements, and the ways of winter life. No photographs; the descriptions are written to be read on the ground, in the season, in the snow.