Inquiring "gaijin" want to know the best ski and snowboard spots in Japan. If you're a snowboarder, you're lucky because starting in March, Shigakogen in Nagano Prefecture, Japan's largest "sooki snow-bo" area, opens all its runs to snowboarders as well as skiers.
You'd think such a large ski area would be easy to find, but the fact is that Shigakogen gets so much snow, it even buries the ski area regularly and the staff has to dig out the lifts in the morning. Since Shigakogen is actually 22 small ski areas connected by 53 lifts, that's a lot of snow shoveling. And a lot of tired staffers.
When making the trail map for Shigakogen, the members of the "Enjoy Sooki snow-bo Trailmap Association" decided to follow Japanese city planners and not name the trails. Instead, the trail map is based on what else but -- mathematics! So unless you're Einstein-san, you can easily get lost because the trail map is based on the theory of trail map relativity.