Working at a Ski Resort Hotel: Life in Snow Country, Sugadaira Kogen, Nagano

The year-long working holiday finally brought my first, and only, real job!

I wanted to spend a winter where there's snow

"Spend a winter somewhere with snow, and go somewhere I can learn to ski" was the only wish I had for the working holiday. My Japanese was limited (by job standards, honestly it was "can't speak Japanese"). I'd thought about Hokkaido for a while, but while an agent was contacting places for me, I found waiting for interviews and replies too stressful and too much hassle, so I just took whatever came (?).

The hotel in Sugadaira Kogen

The hotel is in Sugadaira Kogen in Nagano, at about 1,300 meters above sea level, an hour by bus from Ueda Station. Most visitors are Japanese. It's a ski destination in winter and a holy land for sports training camps in summer, with lots of sports grounds (all buried under snow in winter).

The hotel can hold over three hundred people, and its main guests are school groups, so when it's busy, it's truly insane. There were nearly 20 winter-only workers like me, mostly Thai, then Indonesian, and Taiwanese people were the fewest, just the three of us. Apart from the odd little drama, everyone was pretty respectful, tolerant and friendly, and we even had a New Year's Eve dinner together.

The Japan I saw from inside the hotel

At work you can observe how different schools manage things and how they interact with students. One school's morning call came with a woman teacher's singing, and I saw a male teacher yelling and scolding a student until they cried, which was so interesting! There was also a boys' school group: buzz-cut, tough-looking high schoolers who didn't make a fuss while queuing in the crowded buffet line, and who very gentlemanly let the girl behind them go first when picking up their food. I was lucky to catch a small corner of Japanese culture from an angle I'd never had before.

Shifts and daily rhythm

It was shift work, roughly split into three slots: breakfast, room cleaning (plus lunch) and dinner. I started around 5 to 6 in the morning and finished around 8 to 9 at night, and sometimes napped in the afternoon after getting up so early. Even though I only worked 6 to 8 hours a day, I felt kind of foggy the whole time, and the rest of each day seemed to disappear if I so much as lazed around... I guess it had been so long since I'd done a regular nine-to-five that I forgot this feeling XD

Restaurant vs. room cleaning

I liked working in the restaurant better. It felt like playing a management game: restocking dishes, wiping down the buffet counter, clearing plates and so on. I liked room cleaning less, mainly because the cleaning standard was sooo far from my bare minimum. Doing this job also made me lose faith in humanity (hotel cleaning), and I keep complaining "wiping it makes it dirtier than not wiping" and "trust no one."

Overall, like any job, fun and misery always come together, and you only know the flavor once you've tried it.

Winter in snow country: how my body reacted

Winter temperatures here ran from about −10 to 0 degrees, and it wasn't as cold as I'd imagined. At least if I put on all my clothes, I was mostly fine, and I hardly wore a beanie. Even though it didn't feel that cold, for the first month and a half my nose was always bloody, my scalp seemed to get dandruff from the dryness, the knuckles on the backs of my hands bled two or three times from dryness, my heels cracked for the first time in my life, and I caught a cold in my second week there. Other than that everything was fine, and I never even slipped on the snow! (That's worth being a bit proud of, right!!)

The daily life snow brings

Snow brought a completely different daily life. A 7-minute walk to work could turn into 15. The driveway in front of the dorm, with over 20 meters of piled-up snow, took several of us 30 minutes to shovel. The windowsill of my dorm room was a ready-made fridge; in cold weather the window frame iced over and the window wouldn't open, and in warmer weather I had to clean up a little lake of meltwater on the sill. I needed the heater on in the room to survive, but the electric heater has a safety feature that turns it off after 8 hours, and several times I forgot to turn it back on before bed and woke up shivering. And before I could ski, heavy snow was annoying, but once I could ski, I thought "please, more snow!"

The many faces of snow, and icicles

Snow comes in many forms. Fresh snow is soft and fluffy like cotton candy ice. After a day or two of good weather, the surface starts to melt and sparkle in the sun, and it sticks together easily, which is perfect for snowballs and snowmen. Melt a bit more and it becomes big, clear crystals like traditional shaved ice, and after that a smooth sheet of ice, which was my least favorite moment. I'd hop left and right, dodge left and right, looking for somewhere safer to step, and the walk to work took even longer.

On days of steady melting, lots of icicles form under the eaves. Looking for a safe, low spot to harvest (?) big long icicles and sticking them outside my room window (?) was my daily fun. I once saw a guest harvest a huge icicle (and they even pointed out where they'd harvested it), which shows harvesting icicles isn't weird! I'm not alone! XD

My fellow Taiwanese in the dorm: Pin

Deep in the mountains, far away from everything, it feels inevitable that workers from different countries in the dorm would mix with locals, and get really close. Pin was my roommate, and this was the first stop of her working holiday. Like Doraemon, she'd brought lots of daily supplies and Taiwanese snacks and kept up the quality of life, and she saved me, who hadn't brought a hair dryer or a single hanger. Our personalities are very different but we clicked right away. We're both from Taiwan, we both like cooking, and living in the same room, working together, venting to each other and picking up trash to reuse (?) helped us get along.

Ryu, who showed up a few weeks later

The other Taiwanese person, Ryu, showed up a few weeks later. He's a guy who hasn't been poisoned by society yet and is making the most of his youth on a working holiday. Maybe because he has an older sister and a younger sister at home, he's very comfortable to be around, though now and then he acts like a boy (brat) and makes you want to roll your eyes. (He also became a professional icicle harvester later on XD)

What made us close was, I think, chatting during a break and finding out he had a rice cooker, then finding out he could ski, so on days off we ate together, skied and went on trips. On boring days, Pin and I would barge into Ryu's big single room to find something fun to do. (Not only was the room bigger, the lights were even brighter!)

Precious and lovely time

It was a precious and lovely time. Three and a half months is not short, and the three of us Taiwanese, who had no choice but to make friends with whoever was in front of us, got along really well. We worked hard and earned money, and played hard too. Life was simple and ordinary and happiness came easily, which felt a little naive. I'm grateful that I still get to be so naive.

Further reading: 〈A Working Holiday Year in Japan: Preparation, Costs, and a Life That Isn't Mostly Working〉 (2026-08-31)