
Yesterday was such a memorable day. The day it snowed in Tokyo and it was SO MUCH SNOW!
More than 20cm of snow and it’s been 4 years since it snowed last time. It usually doesn’t snow so much in Tokyo. Usually once or no snow within a year. but yesterday was exceptional.
Many things were going on. Let me show you one by one.
It was cloudy in the morning but it wasn’t snowing at that point. I headed to my office in Shibuya and there was no problem.
It was that there was a sign in the station saying “trains are expected to be affected by snow”.
It started snowing by noon and it only got heavier and havier. My colleagues started canceling meetings in the afternoon and that was a good call. It didn’t take too long to hear the company-wide announcement saying the trains might stop due to the snow and everyone in the office should go home by 3 pm. The announcement was thorough. It also said the entire office is going to shut down at 6pm. This is when I realized that this snow thing really is a big deal.
I left my office at 2:30 pm and the train was already a bit late. A few hours later, my housemate shared a photo of the Shibuya station.

Then I found photos on Twitter.
I have never ever seen anything like this…
People often describe Tokyo as a convenient city to travel. Thanks to the train lines (way too many of them), usually there are multiple routes to get to the same destination. But this isn’t the case when it snows too much. Tokyo simply isn’t built for this.
The same thing happened when there was a huge earthquake on March 11th, 2011. Millions of people couldn’t go home because the trains stopped.
This time, fortunately, it wasn’t as bad as it was before. The trains started moving (slowly) a few hours later and everyone did go home eventually, except for the ones who were scheduled to land at the airport though. One of my friends only went home on the day after.
In the meanwhile, I was at home finishing my work of the day. I’m glad that my job happened to be remote-friendly. I was happy to stay indoors but I took a walk to Inokashira park with a housemate anyway. After all, it was such a special and a beautiful day.

A snowy inokashira park (left), a bridge at the late (middle), the inokashira lake (right)

And also, these people were also having a good time.


If you see snow in Tokyo, you know what to do now.