Snow Country: Niigata and the Long Winter of Gaman

The train goes into the mountain on the Gunma side in grey drizzle and comes out, eleven minutes later, into a white world. Everyone who has read the book looks up at the same moment. The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country — it is the most famous opening line in modern Japanese literature, and Yasunari Kawabata wrote it about this tunnel, this line, and this place: the Niigata side of the mountains, where the clouds off the Sea of Japan hit the ridge and drop everything they carry.

The Echigo region, as Niigata was called, has always been yukiguni — snow country. The villages in its mountain valleys receive three, four, in some years six metres of snow, and lived, until very recently, for a third of every year under it. What that did to the people who stayed is the subject of a book that predates Kawabata's by a century, and of a word that predates the book by longer. The word is gaman (我慢): endurance.

The snow book

In 1837 a merchant from the Uonuma valley named Suzuki Bokushi published Hokuetsu Seppu — Snow Country Tales — a description of life in the snow for readers in Edo who had never seen more than a dusting. It was a sensation. Bokushi described, with a naturalist's precision and a resident's weariness, what it meant to live where the snow began in November and the ground did not appear again until April.

He described houses buried to the eaves, entered by tunnels dug through the drifts. Roofs that had to be cleared every few days by men with wooden shovels, because a roof under two metres of wet snow would collapse and kill everyone under it. Paths between houses that became trenches. Children born who had never seen the ground. Avalanches that took whole hamlets. The work, above all the work — the endless, exhausting, unpaid labour of simply keeping the snow from crushing the village — that consumed every winter day.

And he described, without sentimentality, what the people were like. Patient. Uncomplaining. Tough in a way that Edo could not imagine. When the townspeople praised the beauty of snow, Bokushi wrote, with something between pride and bitterness, they were praising an enemy that the snow country fought for its life every year.

What the word means here

Gaman is usually explained through disasters — the orderly queues after an earthquake, the silent endurance of hardship. But a disaster is an event. The snow country's gaman was a season, every year, forever. It was not the endurance of a catastrophe. It was the endurance of a climate.

That changes the word. In the snow country, gaman was not heroic, because there was no alternative to it and no audience for it. It was the ordinary condition of staying alive. The roof had to be cleared or the house fell; the path had to be dug or nobody ate. Complaint was pointless because the snow did not listen. What developed, over centuries, was a temperament — quiet, dogged, unshowy, with a dry sense of humour and very little patience for people who made a fuss — that Niigata people still recognise in themselves and that the rest of Japan recognises in them.

Kawabata's novel is set in this world, in a hot-spring town in the mountains, and its heroine, the geisha Komako, is gaman embodied: she endures a life that is going nowhere, and a love that will not be returned, with a fierce, wasted intensity that the visiting Tokyo aesthete who narrates the book can only watch. He finds her beautiful. He does not have to stay for the winter.

The snow country now

The tunnels are bigger and the roads are ploughed and the roofs are steel and heated, and the villages of Uonuma no longer live under the snow the way Bokushi's did. But they still live with it, and the winter is still the fact around which everything else is arranged.

Yuzawa, the hot-spring town where Kawabata stayed — and where the inn he wrote in still stands, with his room preserved — is now a ski resort an hour and a quarter from Tokyo by bullet train, which turned it, briefly in the 1980s, into a forest of apartment towers that stand mostly empty. Go past it. The Uonuma valley proper, up the river, is quieter: Shiozawa, with a museum of Bokushi's world; Tōkamachi, where the snow festival in February builds a stage out of snow and holds a fashion show on it; and the hamlets up the side valleys where the old houses still show the marks of the drifts on their walls.

The snow made things. It made the rice — Uonuma koshihikari is the most expensive rice in Japan, and the reason is the meltwater and the cold. It made the sake, because rice and cold water and long winters with nothing to do are exactly what brewing needs; Niigata has more breweries than any other prefecture, and its clean, dry style is the snow in a glass. It made the textiles — Echigo jōfu, ramie cloth woven in winter and bleached by laying it on the snow in spring, a craft so refined that it is now a UNESCO heritage. Every one of these is gaman turned into something. The winter was the raw material.

Fighting the snow

The most Niigata thing I know is the yukigassen — not the snowball fight but the fight against snow, the annual civic labour of clearing it. In a heavy winter every able-bodied person in a village is on the roofs and in the streets, and the municipal websites post the snow depth daily the way other places post the pollen count. Old people die in the clearing every year, falling from roofs, and every year the villages hold meetings about how to protect them, and every year the old people go up on the roofs anyway, because it is their roof and this is what one does.

That is the double edge of gaman that the snow country shows more clearly than anywhere. The endurance is admirable. It is also the reason a seventy-eight-year-old is on a roof in a blizzard. The virtue and the risk are the same trait.

Going

Go in February, in a heavy year. Take the Jōetsu line, not the shinkansen, so that you go through the long tunnel slowly and come out into the snow the way the book does. Stay in Yuzawa long enough to see Kawabata's room and then move up the valley.

Walk in the villages. The trenches between houses, the drifts to the eaves, the sound a place makes when everything is muffled — this is what Bokushi was describing and it has not changed. Drink the sake in the place it comes from; the breweries along the valley open their doors. Eat the rice and understand, for the first time, why anyone would pay that much for it.

And watch the people clearing roofs. Do not help — you will be more danger than use — but watch, and understand that what you are looking at is not a chore. It is a civilisation's answer to a question the snow has been asking for a thousand years.

The tunnel

I took the train back through the tunnel in the evening, into the grey on the Gunma side, and watched the white go out of the windows all at once. Behind me were villages that would be under the snow for two more months, and people on roofs, and a word for what they were doing.

Kawabata's narrator leaves too. That is the point of the book, and its unease: the snow country is beautiful to the one who goes home. To the one who stays, it is simply the winter — to be endured, and turned, by the spring, into rice and sake and cloth and a temperament that the rest of the country calls patient and the snow country calls Tuesday.