5 comments

  1. Wow, where is this? Had I known there was skiing in Shiga, my skis wouldn’t have been banished to the crawl space all those years.

    Daisen is another place where you can ski toward water, the Nihonkai just below your feet…

  2. As the name hints at, Biwako Valley is just next to Biwako, not 15 minutes away by bus from Shiga station (itself a 40 minute ride from central Kyoto).
    It’s rather small: about a dozen courses, none of them incredibly long. Tahoe resorts certainly have nothing to worry about… But for such a close place, it is a totally enjoyable skiing daytrip option!
    I also learnt of it very recently, just when I was giving up hope on skiing here (without shelling out half a kidney on bus/train ride alone)…

    Then again: why do you even care: don’t you just have to skip off the windows to be on the slopes nowadays?

  3. @Scott: not completely unlike Tahoe. Much more urban though (down below). Also, much lower altitudes: the station starts around 1000m. But it’s a nice spot, and less than an hour from home, door-to-door… Hard to beat 🙂

  4. My windows do indeed open onto slopes now, but I envision a return to Dai Nippon once I rassle this grad school thing to the ground. Nice to know I can ski in Kansai, without selling my own kidneys for a trip to Nagano or Hokkaido (though gaijin kidneys fetch a fair penny in China these days).

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