Hokkaido in Winter: A Meditation on Ichigo Ichie

I have lived in Sapporo long enough to have stopped counting winters, and I still cannot tell you what the snow will do. Some mornings it comes down in flakes the size of coins, so slowly that you can watch a single one for the whole distance from the streetlight to the ground. Some nights it comes sideways off the Sea of Japan in a wind that turns the street into a white tunnel. There is a snow that squeaks underfoot at minus fifteen and a snow that packs into ice by noon and a snow so dry it will not make a snowball, and none of these is next year's snow, or even tomorrow's.

This is the plainest place I know to understand ichigo ichie — one time, one meeting — because here the idea is not a philosophy. It is the forecast.

The northern island

Hokkaido is Japan's second-largest island and its emptiest. It holds about four percent of the population on more than a fifth of the land. It was settled by ethnic Japanese in numbers only after 1869, when the new Meiji government renamed it from Ezo and sent colonists north; before that, and for a very long time, it was the home of the Ainu, whose place names — Sapporo among them — are still on the maps. The cities are gridded and wide and were laid out by planners with American advisers, which is why Sapporo looks, from above, more like a Midwestern town than a Japanese one.

What the island has in place of old temples is weather. Winter begins in earnest in late November and does not really let go until April. Sapporo, a city of nearly two million, receives around six metres of snowfall in a season, which makes it the snowiest large city on earth. The eastern side, on the Sea of Okhotsk, watches drift ice arrive from Siberia in February. The mountains inland record some of the driest, lightest powder anywhere — a fact that has drawn skiers from every continent and turned the resort town of Niseko into a strange multilingual outpost on the west coast.

The snow is not one thing. That is the first lesson.

What the tea masters meant

In the sixteenth century the tea master Sen no Rikyū taught that a tea gathering should be approached as though host and guest would never meet again. Three centuries later Ii Naosuke gave the idea its four characters, ichigo ichie, and added the refinement that matters: even if the same people gather many times, each gathering is still unrepeatable, because the day is different and so are they.

A winter here is a slow demonstration of that refinement. The path I walk to the station is the same path every day. The snow on it is not. One morning it is untouched and takes the print of a single crow. The next it has been pushed into grey banks by the night plows. The next a thaw has laid a skin of ice over everything and the whole city walks like penguins. The route does not change. Every walk along it is once.

The festival and the shrine

Sapporo's Snow Festival, in early February, is the winter's great set piece: enormous snow sculptures in Odori Park, built over weeks by teams from the Self-Defense Forces and from cities around the world, lit up at night and photographed by two million people. It is spectacular and I do not want to be dismissive of it.

But ichigo ichie is not really in the sculptures. It is in what happens to them. Within a week of the festival's end the sculptures are demolished — bulldozed, for safety, before they can soften and fall on someone — and the park is a field of dirty white lumps. The two-storey castle that took a month to carve is gone in an afternoon. Nobody mourns this. It is understood, and the understanding is the point: you saw it on the night you saw it, and that night is over.

The other place I go is Hokkaido Jingū, the shrine in Maruyama Park, on a snowy weekday when almost no one is there. The approach is lined with cedars and in heavy snow the sound stops — not quiets, stops — and there is only the crunch of your own feet and the occasional soft thump of a branch shedding its load. You clap twice at the hall and the sound goes nowhere. The snow takes it. It is the most complete silence I know in a city, and it exists only for as long as the snow is falling.

What the cold does to attention

There is a practical reason winter sharpens ichigo ichie, and it is not mystical. Cold makes you present.

At minus ten you cannot drift. The body will not let you. Your face stings, your breath is visible, the cold finds the gap between glove and sleeve. The environment is asserting itself constantly, and the mind, which in warm weather wanders off into plans and worries, is pulled back into the moment by the simple fact of the temperature. Every winter person knows this — the odd clarity of a very cold day, the way colours look sharper and sounds carry.

The tea masters built their rooms small and dim to force attention onto the few things in them. Winter does the same job with the whole world. It strips out the unnecessary and leaves you with a white field, a black line of trees, one crow, your own breath. You are here. You cannot be anywhere else.

A short practical list

For anyone thinking of coming north in winter, a few notes from a resident.

Come in late January or February, when the snow is deepest and most reliable and the light, on clear days, is astonishing. December is grey and the snow is still settling in.

Walk. The temptation in a cold city is to move from heated building to heated building, and you will miss everything. Buy proper boots with grip, or pull-on ice cleats from any convenience store, and walk the parks and side streets after dark, when the snow glows under the streetlights and the city is very quiet.

Go somewhere small. Otaru, forty minutes by train, is an old port with a canal and stone warehouses that lights snow lanterns along the water for ten days in February. Further out, the Sōunkyō gorge in the Daisetsuzan mountains freezes its waterfalls solid. The fishing villages on the Okhotsk coast, when the drift ice is in, are as far from the world as Japan gets.

Eat what is in season. Winter is when the seafood is best — the crab, the sea urchin, the ikura — and when a bowl of miso ramen in a tiny counter shop, steam fogging the window, is not a meal but a rescue.

And do not plan too tightly. The snow will cancel a train, close a road, bury the thing you came to see. Let it. The day you actually have is the only one you are going to get, and it is usually better than the one you planned.

The last snow

Every spring there is a last snowfall, and you never know it is the last one until, a week later, you realise the ground has stayed bare. I have started paying attention to the late storms for this reason — going out in them, standing in them — in case one of them is it.

It is a small practice and a slightly foolish one. But it is ichigo ichie in the plainest form I know: this snow, this once, and then a long green season in which to remember it.