While having only lived in this city a calendar year (minus a month in Okinawa post-earthquake), this is the fourth winter I have experienced here…2009, I visited Tokyo the first time in February; in 2010 I spent a wintry fortnight watching Columbo on TV and ploughing through a battered copy of Crime and Punishment (to later learn that the rumpled TV detective was based off a character in the book); 2011, when we arrived, and now.

Last night we ventured out and were quickly covered with a layer of fat, wet flakes.  It was lovely to see the familiar sights again smoothed over with a fine white blanket; the lights of the Tokyo Tower were invisible in the mist.  The snow came as a huge surprise.  As much as a couple hours before we noticed it, I had been wondering if it would ever really feel like winter, and thought of my high-school bedroom where I remember the entire window was once blocked by four feet of snow piled on the roof.  I remember waddling and struggling up to my waist to get down to my bus-stop; I remember once when my mother came home from work, she found our driveway hadn’t been plowed, so she sort of rammed the car into the end of it to get it out of the road and trudged pluckily back up to the house in her wool overcoat.

This morning was a different story and illustrates the essential difference between cold places and warm places.  The snow was still there but had largely melted into a thick and treacherous layer of ice.  Assessing the new landscape, my old instincts to stick to the crunchy layer where few others had walked and to temper my steps by placing my feet precisely or even the old standby of fake-skating on the really icy spots kicked in.  I did not see an army of workers shoveling or de-icing the pavement, which is something you realize happens en masse in places used to the snow.

Just outside the gate, the gentleman who held the door for me was down on the pavement, ipod wires flying every which way.  I felt terrible for I knew he was really embarrassed, and since I could not pretend I had not seen him fall to save face I made a big show of how dangerous it was and how awful the weather had turned out to be.  Unfortunately, this part of the commute was downhill and the ice was really awful.  I edged along the side of a garbage truck and kept going, looking for side-streets that might be clear.  The one that taxis always roar up was mercifully de-iced so I picked my way down that, following a jaunty Japanese woman in extremely high heeled shoes.  I figured if she didn’t fall, I wouldn’t either.  She wisely chose a pedestrian underpass to cross the street, and I took that way too, realizing it would be free of ice.  The other side of the street had rough pebbled pavement so that was safe, and so on, like a sailor navigating familiar seas on a stormy day, I eventually made it to work in one piece.

Normally the morning commute is completely forgettable, but I had invested a remarkable amount of brain power into the normally simple task.  Maybe if you can keep from snapping a wrist or breaking a bone, inclement weather keeps you sharp.  It is so much harder to survive in a cold place.  I felt fondly towards the plaid flannels and sensible pick-up trucks of my homeland; the woodpiles and thin lines of smoke snaking out chimneys and dutiful grandfathers who wake up at 5 AM just to shovel sidewalks; overzealous janitors who carefully layer three inches of rock salt over every visible surface…I missed it all.