Winter in Japan

By Thatthep Sae-Lim, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Since I was doing my exchange in Singapore, it’s given me the opportunity to frequently travel with my mom, who live in Thailand. Since I’ve always been obsessed with Japan and I was really longing to spend some times in a cold climate after living in Singapore for awhile, we decided to go to Japan for two weeks in January.

I decided to pick out the few best moments from this trip to share as the blog would be too long if I were to share all of them.

This was my fifth time in Japan and I was able to cross off so many places in my bucket list. We drove over a thousand miles in this trip.

Shirakawa-Go village

This one of the UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites. The building style of the village is known as gasshō-zukuri.

Shinhotaka Ropeway

This double-decker ropeway stops at the viewpoint, which is at 2,200 metres above sea level, offering 360 degrees panoramic view of the Japan Alps. I normally do fine in ropeways, but my fear of height definitely acted up when I was in this ropeway.

Jigokudani Monkey Park

I’m actually quite traumatised by monkey and would normally try my best to stay away from them. However, this place has been so hyped up recently that I was so FOMO and felt the need to visit. Surprisingly, the monkeys here are rather nice and friendly, considering they are wild monkeys. Most of the time they just minded their own businesses and enjoyed the hot spring (onsen).

PS. (Not so) fun fact about this park is that its very secluded. Its a 3 miles walk from the carpark to the monkeys and back to the carpark and FYI, I was not made aware of this in prior and was definitely not in any shape or form prepared for such walks in the snow (YES, I DID SLIP AND FELL ON MY BACK).

Kusatsu Onsen

First off, let me start by saying I am the biggest onsen fan. For me, Japan trip is not complete without at least one onsen. In this particular trip, I made sure to booked accommodations with onsen every single night.

Kusatsu onsen is one of the onsen towns that I’ve always wanted to visit for years. Unfortunately, it was snowing very badly on the day I was there. This caused the road to be blocked and we needed to proceed to the other way that took 3.5hrs longer, causing us to arrive very late in the evening. Thinking back about it makes me laugh at how unlucky we were.

Spoiler alert: this is just the beginning of our unluckiness.

Ginzan Onsen

This is the other onsen town I visited in this trip. It is known to be the most beautiful onsen town in Japan and I think it lives up to its name. As it locates quite higher up north, the snow was extremely heavy. By the end of the day, my whole face was covered with snow. My car was also stuck in snow and it took me forever to get it out 🙁

Zao Ropeway (Snow Monsters)

Toward the end of this trip, we took another ropeway called the Zao Ropeway. The highlight of this place is something called the “snow monsters”. They basically are trees that covered in snow that resembles a monster.

However, the snow got even stronger which caused the second ropeway to close. The second ropeway is actually the one that would bring us to the majority of the snow monsters. We ended up seeing trees that are not quite a snow monsters, but I guess we needed to make the best out of the situation. We were slightly disappointed to know that the ropeway was running normally the day before and after our visit.

Mt. Fuji

We visited Mt. Fuji on our last day. Mt. Fuji is the highest mountain in Japan and is highly associated to Japan. It is known to be very shy, such that some people might be able to see the whole mountain or might not be able to see the mountain at all (not even the tip!). This depends on the day, time, and location at which one views Mt. Fuji from.

Of course, we are still rather unlucky even on the last day. It was raining very heavily on that day, causing the fog to most part of Mt. Fuji. We were only able to see the tip at first, but we were lucky enough to see more of the shy Mt. Fuji by the end of the day. Viewing Mt. Fuji by the seaside was definitely a good closure to our trip.

I find the unluckiness that ran throughout the trip quite entertaining and I was very much sick of snow and colder climate by the time I was back in Singapore. So, I think this trip was overall a great idea :))