Kakinoki James

12/13/05: I'm from a place where it doesn't snow much. Being right on the water, the ocean keeps the temperature fairly moderate. It will often snow everywhere BUT my hometown. My hometown sometimes will almost completely shut down if it snows more than a couple of inches.

Kakinoki isn't on the water. While the temperature usually is about the same as my hometown, they don't have the ocean there to keep the temperature from dropping that last degree or two needed to snow. Last Monday it snowed 3 or 4 inches. For most of last week it would snow during the night & then have most of the new snow melt during the day. Sunday most of the snow disappeared. Thinking like I was at home I somehow thought that was it for the snow for a while. Yesterday it started snowing as I drove to work. By the time I left work I had 6 to 8 inches of snow on my car. It then snowed another 6 to 8 inches during the night & is still snowing a fair amount all day today.

It's all very pretty, but I don't have the proper shoes or clothes for snow. Also, as is normal in Japan, my apartment has no insulation. It's too bad I'm not a skier or snowboarder. There are several places near where I live to go skiing or snowboarding. I'd like to try snowboarding, but my feet are too big for any of the rental equipment in Japan. How can an entire race have such small feet???

12/15 update
It has continued to snow every day. I'm sure there is a certain amount of compression going on and some melting, but overall the accumulation is getting deeper. This morning, one of the schools I work at measured the depth in the field at 53 cm, which is almost 2 feet. Just in front of my apartment door it's about 3 feet deep, but that's mostly from the snow that slides off my roof.

12/22 update
We had 2 or 3 days with not much snow, but then late yesterday it started to snow heavily. Between 8PM & 10PM around 4 inches of snow accumulated on my car. It slacked off during the night, only dropping another 2 or 3 inches of snow. I`m told that this is the most snow they`ve had here in 20 years, the 1st snowfall being a month earlier than it was last year. During the weekend I was awakened at midnight by a loud sound and my apartment was shaking. I thought it was a decent sized earthquake, but it was just much of the snow on the backside roof of the apartment sliding off. Must have been pretty heavy stuff because it demolished a big metal frame I had back there to dry my clothes on.