Read on for the epilogue in this miniseries within the Setting Journals - if you have not read the introduction & previous articles to this series, please do so via accessing the links at the bottom of this page - thanks.

Enough parking for 4,000 cars and the resort is closed for six weeks of maintenance. How do you earn a little bit of revenue on the side? Rent out some of the parking lots for car races and the like. The wide-open paved areas have proven attractive to groups normally shunned in urban areas, to the point now that the resort doesn’t advertise this service but instead just receives referrals via “word-of-mouth”.

Car enthusiasts love to gather in the lower lots just before they buy new tires to “burn rubber” racing against each other. The racket is something else however, so these events are normally scheduled only during times that the resort is closed for maintenance. In addition to car races some weekends, the middle weekend in July finds the skies full of remote controlled fighter planes doing battle. Who said resort life was normal?

The rainy season in Japan has finally started (late this year), giving the rice fields a badly needed soak, and the rest of us wet shoes! To date the volume of rain has been lighter than in previous years, meaning water shortages in parts of this archipelago. While it is still too soon for water restrictions in this area, I understand that Kyushu has been particularly dry. Lack of water there not only affects the rice fields, but daily routines such as bathing, washing, and flushing! Although in other parts of the world (such as Africa & the Middle East) I’ve experienced drought like conditions, an abundance of water that can be drunk directly from the tap continues to be one of the attractions that draw me to this part of Japan.

Have you had the pleasure of receiving an annual health check if you work for a Japanese company? (Feel free to skip the next paragraph if such a subject makes you feel queasy).

The process starts with an envelope containing a questionnaire and test tubes being placed on your desk perhaps one week before the actual check-up. You take the envelope home and collect “samples” of your bowel movements on the day before as well as the morning of the check-up. In addition to not eating/drinking anything from the night before, you bring your samples and completed questionnaire into the office on the day to rendezvous with local health authorities (who have driven up to the resort in two medically customized buses). There is a reception where you hand your “samples” to the attendant, and he/she gives you a cup with a number. The cup is taken to the nearest toilet, filled (only half way!) with urine and then placed on a tray along with other numbered cups. Then, it is back to the reception area to have your blood, blood pressure and the like tested followed by a trip out to the customized buses. Removing shoes before boarding is followed by removal of outer clothes on board, and once you are in your underwear covered by a gown that is too small the fun really starts. The nurse gives you a generous portion of liquid barium, which is to be downed without burping, before being led into the main part of the first bus that acts as a radiology lab. Once you are strapped down to a table, the radiologist then moves it all over the place via remote control, snapping x-rays all the way while telling you to move in the opposite direction. This fun usually lasts about five minutes for me (given my size and limited Japanese ability), & then it is a return trip to the back of the bus to retrieve my clothes and a couple of nasty looking tablets (used to facilitate quick removal of barium from your internal organs) compliments of the nurse. Off the first bus, put the shoes on, take three steps, remove the shoes again and board the second bus. Here, I take off my shirt again for a chest X-ray, only the machine is too low for me so I have to more or less wrap myself around it, and then to the middle of the bus to have weight and height checked. Following a trip into an acoustically sound booth for a hearing test, then it is to the back of the bus where they lay you down and attach multiple monitors to your chest. Then it is off the bus, shoes back on and back to the office for some food and drink. A few weeks later the results arrive and if there is anything out of the normal you’re instructed to visit your local GP for further testing. What a person has to go through to get some powder, eh?

Reservations for the kids summer camps continue to flow in and I’m very pleased to report that several kids from expatriate/mixed families will also be joining the camp sessions this year. (More info on those camps can be found here here).

Another annual occurrence at the resort in June is the company-wide holiday. This year the vacation spanned two weeks, and employees on the front-end services in particular use this time to travel overseas and the like. Not everyone takes a holiday however, as support functions including accounts need to continue. For me, the time is used to catch up on tasks (both on and off the job) put off during the scrum that is the white season. The support that comes with the white season also disappears however, meaning an occasional lack of toilet paper and the like.

This is not my first encounter with these creatures. In 1995 I was in South Africa for the Rugby World Cup. One weekend during my stay was spent on a pension-style farm, where in-between televised rugby matches the host talked about beetle collectors traveling to that particular area from Japan to procure the local breed. Within this archipelago, one only has to talk with elementary school-aged kids in the summer to get an idea of how big beetle fan clubs are here.

If stag beetles don’t do it for you then like me perhaps you prefer aquatic pursuits at this time of the year? The Garden Pool at the resort is insect free, and the sound of running water works its magic every time. Although I’m not a personal fan of the adjoining Japanese baths in the summer, the Garden Pool is a great place for kids to enjoy themselves, and it is also possible to swim lengths indoors when not too busy.

One final tidbit that may be of interest is the arrival this summer of “Lisa & Gaspard”, French Cartoon Characters that will grace the resort for the summer.  In the past the resort offered Dick Bruna’s “Miffy”, but this is an anniversary year for Miffy supposedly so enter the substitute - Vive La France!

Snow Japan, who put the final touches to all volumes of the Setting Journals, will no doubt be pleased that for this epilogue neither the weather reports nor the clocks need to be included as they were for the main part of the mini-series.

When the introduction to this series was made, we produced the following organizational chart for the resort:

Although the above chart was valid for the day in the life series (22nd of February, 2004), by the time it was made the organization had changed dramatically. In spring of 2004, a restructuring of the parent company that included the resort was carried out, and this followed in the fall of the same year by a complete change in the resorts upper management. Thus, while starting a project such as this mini-series in the midst of all this was rather bold, to be honest I wanted to tell the story while I still had the chance.

I remember asking the president during the summer of 2004 if I could put the organizational chart above online to include it within what has become this mini-series. After some talk he gave permission to proceed based on the reasoning that even if we put the image online, it would be difficult for competitors to follow in our footsteps. I walked out of his office and began the mini-series, having decided to “freeze” the organizational chart to February of 2004 in order to get the story out.

The image above appeared in Volume 16 of the Setting Journals, which also served as the introduction to this mini-series. To come clean, introduction in this case meant the equivalent of not knowing how to proceed. That is, I had not initially intended to devote an entire volume of this mini-series to the introduction, but wound up doing so in order to get a better feel for the task at hand. By describing the organizational chart in detail and getting that information online, some feedback generated included comparisons to the TV series 24. While I have yet to see this show, I soon found out that the series is divided into segments representing 3 hours each (with one segment covered on TV over one hour in real time). With this guidance, it was not long before I had made an excel template containing divisions of the resort heading the columns, while 3 hours of 15-minute periods graced the left-side of the page. It was then just a matter of balancing out the divisions for each of the 8x3-hour periods, and including an introduction, update and summary for each one. Sounds relatively straightforward, right?

Towards white season opening in December of 2004, it was difficult to find the time to work on subsequent volumes given jittery guests enquiring about both the Chuetsu Earthquake & a lack of snow! Snow or no snow though, the pattern of producing volumes for the mini-series had now been tried and tested. It was now only a matter of using the related template to produce new volumes, or so I thought.

This is a term that I remember being used in the restaurant industry to describe everything happening at once - that is, you get slammed. ARAI got slammed in the last part of December 2004 with guests, seasonal workers and fresh powder! Although I too got slammed in the process to a far greater extent than in previous seasons, the annual slamming refreshed memories of the subject matter for the mini-series. In hindsight however, not all memories came back because I mistakenly promised a new volume during the peak February season and subsequently missed deadline by about 3 weeks. Good things come to those that wait/are delayed however, and in this case it was that a new English Course Map could be included in the volume.

The latter part of the 2004-’05 White Season permitted more uninterrupted time to write, as my main business of reservations slowed (as it does yearly). It was actually quite therapeutic to work uninterrupted then, a luxury that could not be afforded in the peak of the season. I even managed to squeeze in a quick trip back to Canada - giving me added perspective to finish the mini-series. There, I met an old friend I used to ski with as a teenager, and he let me know that he had been reading the Setting Journals (he and another guy got me into skiing during weekend school trips away as a teenager).

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share with you a day in the life of Arai Mountain & Spa, if you have yet to visit I encourage you to do so!

The end of this mini-series marks the 25th volume of the Setting Journals going online. Life is different now for me compared to when the first volume went online back in December of 2001.

As I have changed, so has the significance of this column. It now serves as a growing reference that I will be able to continue to use to explain snow resort life in Japan.

To have had the privilege of producing this journal I must thank both the people at Snow Japan, who have consistently tried to make my ramblings coherent and the readership whom has shed light on areas that needed it via the threads for these volumes.

Come with me next time in the Setting Journals (most likely in early September) as I mark the second anniversary of the resorts English website going online. Enough time has passed now for the story to be told in its entirety. I’ll also update you on the summer operations at the resort and shed some light on the upcoming white season - if you are like me you will be biting your nails right now in anticipation of getting out there!

Until then, it would be great to hear from you via the thread linked to this volume.

Have a great summer and make sure that it is a safe one, eh?

This volume of the Setting Journals is dedicated to Mr. Shigeo Hayashi, who has completed five years of great work at the resort and now returns with his family to Kansai. We will all miss you here at the resort “Hayai Hayashi”, and look forward to listening once again to your Osaka dialect when you visit in the future.