Notes on Winter Shoes ― 2026/02/04
My current equipment
Shoes play a big role in life in Sapporo. A pair of well-waterproofed shoes with non-slip soles can hugely improve your quality of life and even your chances of survival here. I say this based on my bitter experience of falling and damaging my hip joint.
Because of that incident, I always wore spikes over my snow boots. But it gradually became annoying to put them on and take them off every time I entered a store, a station, or walked on a dry surface. I also started to feel a bit embarrassed using them, like riding a bicycle with training wheels. In fact, even five-year-olds don’t wear spikes in this town.
So I decided to look for a good pair of shoes that doesn’t need spikes. I visited several local shoe stores and gathered some information. Here are my notes for next season (it’s probably too late to find a good pair for this season).
(Sources: shop assistants at a local ABC MART and the Madras section of a local department store)
If you want a pair that lasts for two seasons or more, look for shoes priced around 20,000 yen or higher with Vibram Arctic Grip soles. But it’s totally fine to choose a cheaper pair if you don’t mind changing shoes every season.
Because soles designed for snowy surfaces are made of very soft materials, you should switch shoes as soon as you walk on bare roads. Otherwise, the soles will wear out quickly on hard surfaces.
People in Sapporo usually own at least two pairs of snow shoes, and replace one pair with new ones when they see the first heavy snowfall of the year.
No shoe works perfectly on every surface and terrain. A perfect pair for someone else might be shoes from hell for you.
Upper materials can be roughly divided into rubber, GORE-TEX (or similar membranes), synthetic leather, and real leather. In any case, you should apply waterproof spray about once every three wears to prevent water from getting in. In the case of real leather, you also need to polish them every week.
Soles can be replaced. So it is possible to equip your sneakers with snow-adapted soles. However, whether the upper part can withstand sub-zero temperatures and wet snow is another question.
I guess (or hope, or wish, to be precise) that some of this information might be exaggerated because of their profession, but at the moment I still can’t tell which parts are sales talk and which are sincere advice.
Welcome to Snow Hell ― 2026/01/25
In our first week in Sapporo, we were met with extremely heavy snowfall. Even locals were struggling to drive, or even to walk. In this extreme situation, I realized that money really talks: residents of luxury condominiums with heated ground surfaces enjoy dry, snow-free walkways
—though they still face slippery, snow-choked roads where their cars easily get stuck once they leave their sanctuary.
A Moving Company and I ― 2026/01/18
Our move from Fukuoka to Sapporo cost a fortune. I never imagined how much it would cost to move some furniture, chipped tableware, old comics and old clothes.
As you can see in my previous post, we hired a major Japanese transport company, because their quote was the lowest among the three companies we asked for estimates: Art, Sakai, and one of the biggest players in the industry.
The result: you get what you paid for. There were so many troubles that I ended up cursing Japan’s most prestigious (-looking) transport company, the one that transports cultural properties from museums to museums. The following is my experience with them.
First of all, the packing boxes they provided were irritatingly small. I mean, it was irritating because the boxes were very slightly smaller than the size I needed for bigger plates and albums. Also, the cushioning materials quickly ran out. I had to run to a local DIY store to get some more. Meanwhile, there were too many packing tapes.
On the day of the actual move, the team of young workers quickly packed bigger items such as the TV set, air conditioners, and so on. So quickly that their work sometimes got rough. As a result, our shredder’s leg was broken (but it was quickly compensated, no questions asked).
In Sapporo, things got worse. The older moving workers came earlier, in the snow. They were all temporary staff (or so they said). They were apparently unprofessional. My layout plan, which I spent quite a long time making, was completely ignored, and they asked everything verbally.
The worst thing was that the documents to prove the number of boxes moved were lost. The leader of the Sapporo team finally started counting the boxes after they brought them all in at random, and the number he counted was one more than what the Fukuoka team had told us. He casually said, “Oh, I seem to have miscounted,” and started blaming the Fukuoka team for not passing the document to his team. That’s it. After the gentlemen left, we were left with cardboard boxes all over the place, and I had to rearrange them myself.
To cap it all, a guy from a sub-subcontractor of the moving company came the next day to our already chaotic flat to install the air conditioner and washing machine, which were supposed to be included in the quote.
But he suddenly insisted that installing the air conditioner would cost extra. He also said it would be better to install it later, in April.
So, at the end of the day, both the air conditioner and the outdoor unit were left untouched, and we were handed a new quote of 11,000 yen, which we don’t think we ought to pay.
Totally tired of dealing with this company, we are half-decided to just leave it for now. Maybe we will contact them (or complain) after we get settled and recover some energy.
Would I recommend them to a friend (if I had some)? I definitely wouldn’t . I regret having chosen this particular company only for the lowest quote, not having chosen Sakai with the lovely salesgirl.
(Helped by Chat GPT)
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