1/10/2006

Above is a fun Japanese tool seen on the news every year at this time now: the “snow dump” [スノーダンプ ]. It’s a Japanese news story as predictable as Groundhog Day and nearly as enlightening.

Snowfall Blamed for 71 Deaths in Japan
Associated Press:…In Akita, a 51-year-old man died of head injury after falling from the roof that collapsed while he was shoveling snow, prefectural police spokesman Shoji Hashimoto said. Three other people were injured while trying to remove snow in the area, he added.
In Niigata, about 160 miles northwest of Tokyo, an 89-year-old man was found dead in his snow-covered backyard with a shovel near his body, apparently after falling from a roof while shoveling snow, said Niigata police spokesman Daijiro Tamaki….

This is the same story EVERY fuckquing year. It snows a lot in northern and western Japan. It’s called “snow country” [雪国], and this year is the coldest and most snow-laden on the record books.

And like EVERY fuckquing year, Japanese in “snow country” die while shoveling snow off their incorrectly designed roofs. Do you think they would learn to increase the pitch* of their roofs. Nope. They’re Japanese—Every year they shovel their roofs. Sheesh.

One strategy is to increase the pitch in the tradtional style of a “gassho-zukuri” farmhouse which refers to the hands raised in prayer because the roof pitch is very steep. My friend in Toyama has lived in a gassho-zukuri that takes 3-to-5 meter snowstorms without any shoveling for 20 years. In Europe in areas with powder snow, roofs are designed to retain snow in sort of the fighting-fire-with-fire approach. The snow is retained to the point that when too much snow falls on the the roof the snow sheds off the excess naturally. Other methods include, specially-coated slick metal panel roofs as well as active systems for roof ice melting.

Right now my cabin in Colorado has less than one meter of snow on its 13.5-pitch roof but there’s already three meters of snow on the ground. Needless to say I never shoveled my cabin’s slick-coated metal roof for the past 20 years I’ve been in Japan.