It's snowing so I suppose it's Winter

The "Winter Light" weather, as I like to call it, in the Kansai region threw me for a loop yesterday afternoon when I looked out of my living room window and actually saw snow falling. That's right, snow! Now I realize that many regions of Japan have been battered with high snow falls and snow storms already in the past few weeks, but Kobe sees none of that. The average daytime temperatures here hover around 10C and I honestly scoffed at the idea of seeing snow this Winter. Mind you, my wife tells me that this is an unusual Winter in Kansai and normally it is colder. She also tells me that near the end of this month and February will be fairly chilly.

So, to see snow falling yesterday was actually, kind of cool. The ground is far to warm so none of it accumulated, but I could see that it was building up in the trees on the top of Mt. Rokko.

Again, this afternoon as I took the train to Sannomiya, the gray snow filled clouds rolled over Mt. Rokko and started dumping a small amount of the white stuff on Kobe. It again melted quickly. We're certainly not getting bitch-slapped by Mother Nature like the good folks up in Hokkaido are, but some slight signs of Winter have finally appeared.