Word: hakuba
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That's in synch, of course, with young Japanese, who crowd into head shops in Hakuba and talk of winter sports as kakkoi, or cool, without referring to temperature. "Snowboarding's awesome, man," Shoji Koike, a student of Tsukuba University, volunteered, unsolicited, last week. "Once you've tried it, you don't go back to skiing...
...Nagano is the unpretentious town you learn to like, Hakuba, an hour away by bus (and site of many of the snowy events) is the practiced charmer that grabs you instantly. This is in part, no doubt, because Nagano is a city with 360,000 people--more populous than Iceland--while Hakuba is a village of just 9,400 residents, a picture-perfect poster site for the Japan Alps with its Chalet Heidihof pensions and white birch forests encircled by snowcaps reflected in the Princess River...
Like many Japanese resorts, Hakuba is essentially a world of foreign fantasy and at times has the air of stage sets from 15 different movies all collected in the same small block. Roughly 800 rococo hotels, inns and pensions crowd the village (one for every 12 residents), and at night the timbered buildings are full of trendy young couples sipping wine over gourmet French food after a long day of snowboarding wearing the latest gurobu and goguru. "This is Youngtown," marvels a Kyoto woman as she surveys a corner of the Echoland area where the Shop Jah Jah shares space...
Besides her physical conditioning, Street is preparing her mind for her big day at Hakuba, where she learned the downhill course last winter by riding down the mountain on a coach's back. (She'll race in the super-G as well.) Picabo isn't letting public expectations rattle her. "I always put more pressure on myself than anyone could ever put on me. I create that pressure, so therefore I own that pressure," says Street, a believer in meditation and Zen-like attitudes. Hers is a far cry from the old days of the downhill, when some...
Located in Hakuba, 30 miles from Nagano, the ski-jumping venue expects crowds of 36,000 to cheer for a home team that has serious hopes of gold. A curtain hung on the poles at left will protect jumpers from tricky winds...
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