"There is Takada under here." The famous words that conveyed Takada's heavy snowfall are from the Edo period (17th - 19th century).
The words seems to have originated from the fact that a courier who came to make a delivery couldn't find a town because the town was buried under the snow. When looking around, he found a billboard which wrote that "There is Takada under here." This kind of life continued until the 1970s, when snow removers became popular. An elderly person spoke that streets were buried under the snow in his childhood, so he had to dig a tunnel to go to the house on the opposite side across the street.
Among cities with a population of 100,000 to 200,000 people, Takada gets the most snow in the world. It is also called the "snow capital." In Naoetsu district in the same city that is located on the seaside, the wind blows away the snow, and the snow doesn't accumulate much. It is surprise that such a big difference in the amount of snow between both districts exists due to the influence of the mountain landscape, even though Takada was only 4km inland from Naoetsu.
It was on January 26, 1986, that I experienced the wonders of the snow in Takada. The day before, an announcement in the limited express train from Tokyo said that they could not predict about when the train would arrive at Takada due to heavy snowfall. When I finally arrived at Takada and woke up the next morning, the snow that had covered the windows on the first floor in the previous night had reached halfway up the second floor. 90 centimeters of snow that accumulated overnight was the largest amount in a single day since the end of World War II. In the entire area of Takada, the snow paralyzed urban infrastructure. People removed the snow accumulated on the roof of buildings and arcades onto the road. The most surprising scene was the simultaneous snow clearing on the main street. The arcade with second-floor height was buried under the removed snow. Trucks one after another carried the snow off the streets where all the buses and cars had stopped.
The amazing snow, snow removal, and the spectacle of carrying it was almost divine to those who did not know the snow country. The snow in Takada was a disaster, but at the same time it had an information dissemination abilities as a sight unlike any other in the world. However, the difficulty of finding a balance between disasters and tourism, the large annual range of snowfall, and the fact that heavy snowfall is difficult to predict until just before are a bottleneck.
Simultaneous snow clearing on January 26, 1986
Snow scenery of Takada
Takada Park as one of Japan's top three night cherry blossom viewing places
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