Storm

In early March of 1999 I was in my car heading reluctantly home to Shibetsu after a weekend spent amidst the bright lights of big city Obihiro. I was trying to outrun a fast approaching storm and even as I left the city for the four hour drive back, the wind was picking up and the snow had started to fall. I should have left earlier, much earlier, but hubris and a hangover had kept me from going. So I pushed it, my trusty Cynos driving dangerously fast on route 38 and I arrived in Kushiro shortly after six. By now the snow was falling heavily and being blown hard by the ever strengthening wind. Usually I stopped in Kushiro for dinner, but I kept on, hoping my luck would hold all the way home.
It didn't.
About half an hour out of Kushiro on the rapidly disappearing road to Nakashibetsu I was stopped by a police car. Just beyond them a large barrier had been swung across the road. They had closed the road and I was diverted west, towards Shibecha. A little further on another barrier loomed into view and I had to make another turn left. The wind was howling now, flinging the snow in great white sheets across the road. I had to dim my headlights as full beam was reflecting off the snow and effectively blinding me. I crawled along at less than 20 kph, trying to steer through the drifts that were increasingly blocking my progress.
That part of east Hokkaido is flat open countryside, one of the few arable plains in all of Japan. The farms are big and open; the fields are not bordered by ditches or trees the way they are back home. Instead there are huge swathes of open land to make it easier to use farm machinery and allow crops to catch as much sunlight as possible during the short summers out there. In winter though, this untrammeled space means that the wind can blow unimpeded, picking up the dry, powdery snow off the fields and piling it metres high across roads and against the windward side of houses.
The storm got stronger, the wind driven snow obscuring everything; I could no longer discern where the road was and slowed to a stop. Immediately the snow began to drift around the car. I tried to drive on but my wheels spun uselessly. I was well and truly stuck. And I had no idea where I was stuck. Somewhere northwest of Kushiro, but closer to Shibecha than Nakashibetsu.
I spent along, anxious, sleepless night in my car. I had enough sense to turn off the engine and was lucky to have had a sleeping bag with me, so I crawled into that and waited out the storm, praying that one of the big transport trucks so common to that part of the world wouldn't crash into me. I didn't leave my hazard lights on as I didn't want to run down the battery.
My dawn the next morning, the wind had abated somewhat but I knew little else beyond that. The snow had drifted up and over the top of my car and both doors were frozen shut. Just after eight a road crew finally got to me and dug me out of the snow. They were quite taken aback when a gaijin got out to thank them in bad Japanese for rescuing him. Turns out that over 60 cars had to be dug out from the roads in the region that morning. I finally got back to Shibestu at midday, following a slow moving slow plough for much of the way.

Last weekend a similar, albeit considerably more severe, storm hit the same region. Nine people died in it, the worst death toll from a single winter storm in Hokkaido in over 40 years. A woman and her four children were caught in a snow drift just outside of Nakashibetsu. The mother called a number of times for help, but such was the ferocity of the wind and the amount of snow that had drifted onto the road that it took the rescue services 2 hours to travel the four kilometers to where the car was stuck. By that time the car was buried under a 2 metre high snow drift. When they finally got the car door open they found that the family had died from carbon monoxide poisoning; the mother had kept the engine running to keep the car warm, but the drifting snow had blocked the exhaust pipe so the fumes had been forced under and then into the car.
Elsewhere, people were found frozen to death in fields and by the side of the road after they had abandoned their snow trapped cars and attempted to walk to safety, in some cases only a few hundred metres from their homes. The saddest tragedy was of a 53 year old, recently widowed father and his 9 year old daughter. They had gone to the local town to buy a cake for Hina Matsuri or Doll's Festival, which is traditionally a day of celebration for girls. On their way back home their car got stuck in the snow. Again, the father made repeated calls for help but the rescue services were already busy answering similar emergency calls all across the area and couldn't respond. Anxious that he was running low on petrol and wouldn't be able to keep the car warm, he decided to walk to a friends house some 700 metres up the road. The following morning the police found father and daughter covered in snow, huddled in front of a barn, halfway between the car and the house. The father had frozen to death, but in dying he had saved the life of his daughter as he had covered her with his body, clasping her close to him thus saving her from the worst of the wind and the cold. She survived the night with only some minor frostbite.

There is a similar storm forecast for tomorrow but the hope is that people will have learnt from the terrible events of last week and stay at home and wait for it to blow past.