Beautiful Downtown Nagano Wasn’t Until Snow Fell

Talk of Winter Olympics usually conjures pictures of quaint little towns nestling up against the mountains, smoke rising from the chimneys, quilts of snow covering the roofs of gingerbread cottages.

Lillehammer fit the picture, perhaps better than any other recent Winter Games site. Albertville and environs didn’t disappoint and even Lake Placid, for all of its problems, certainly was a scenic town.

Then there’s Nagano.

It is not quaint. It is not cute.

It is a big, sprawling industrial city of more than 300,000, a little old, a little tired, a little frayed around the edges. The smoke rising here comes from big stacks, not cottage chimneys.

Still, as Grandpa used to say, nothing is so bad that a coat of paint can’t help it.

So the other day, Nagano got a coat of paint. In fact, it got an overcoat. And a jacket. And a vest.

It snowed. Then it snowed some more. Then it snowed again. Think of El Nino in solid form.

One of the quirky things about the Winter Games is that if there isn’t a lack of snow, there’s probably too much. Seldom, it seems, do you get two weeks of happy medium.

In Sarajevo in 1984, for instance, folks arriving before the Games were greeted by springtime. The streets were bare and the sun was shining. Many wondered how there could be Winter Games there without any snow.

Then, it began. It snowed. And it snowed some more. It snowed so heavily that traffic was snarled for a couple of days and even walking was a mighty chore. Many wondered how there could be Winter Games with so much snow.

Sarajevo in those days was still in communist Yugoslavia, and militiamen with Sten guns on their backs were a common sight. When the snow hit, they were seen dragooning citizens off the streets, handing them makeshift broomstick-plywood shovels and ordering them to shovel.

Nothing so drastic as that here, of course, although conscientious homeowners and shopkeepers were out in force with their shovels, even while the snow was still falling. The streets went unplowed, but traffic seemed no worse for that, and the fresh snow did wonders for Nagano’s image. If you looked down the right street, you could see an old-style Japanese house with the upturned tile roof covered by a quilt of snow.

Quaint enough.