Confession: I have yet to visit Hokkaido. But as a former Upstate New York boy (Rochester, precisely), I know what it means to live in a winter wonderland. So I’m not surprised by this new thought experiment from a Hokkaido research institute that calculated how much effort Hokkaido residents spend shoveling the white stuff during the winter. Their conclusion: A hell of a lot.
With events like the Sapporo Snow Festival and beautiful scenes in towns like Biei, Hokkaido winters draws in travelers worldwide. However, the volume of snow – while pretty – makes life hard for people who actually live and work there.
How hard? According to Yomiuri Shimbun, a new study from the Dogin Regional Research Institute sought to calculate how much snow residents shovel by calculating how much they’d make if clearing powder were a paying gig.
The Institute estimated that some 2,125,000 residences have to clear snow during the winter, and each residence spends an average of 15 hours a year on snow removal. Estimating an hourly wage of 1,675.1 yen ($11.18, a pretty damn good hourly wage for Japan), they calculated that residents would earn a total of 53.4 billion yen, or USD $356M.
Mind you, at 15 hours per household, that’s only 24,000 yen ($160) a pop. Still, in the aggregate, it represents a stunning amount of effort that cuts into everyone’s productivity and leisure time.
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The good (?) news is that climate may be reducing that burden a little. According to weather data, snowfalls have dropped gradually over the past 30 years and continue to decline.
That’s bad news for tourists, obviously. But perhaps a blessing for residents who are fed up with all the unpaid labor.
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