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For locals, moreover, the rash of new developments comes at a cost. Until recently, Nagano had a modest train station specially designed to look like a Buddhist temple-to usher pilgrims to Zenkoji down the street; now it boasts a splashy, escalator-filled arcade with a McDonald's at the south exit and a McDonald's at the north exit. Much of the downtown skyline is dominated by a Holiday Inn Express, and a new 242 km/h bullet train puts Tokyo only 79 minutes away. The center of local concern has been the future of the long-pristine environment. The venue for the biathlon event was actually designed in order to protect goshawks, and organizers have taken pains to plant azaleas along the ski-jump tracks and to respect the mating habits of butterflies. For five years the Nagano Olympic Organizing Committee refused to raise the start of the downhill event so as not to encroach on a national park, and when a compromise agreement was finally reached, it still prevented skiing in the protected area.
Nonetheless, something has been lost. "I don't like the Olympics," a local university professor says outright. "The revenues are limited, so that means a deficit. That means we have to pay more taxes. I, as a citizen of the city and the prefecture, have to pay $30,000. And for what? Sure, the infrastructure has got better-the bullet train, the new expressway. But now we have four ice arenas. Maybe we need one, but four? And we have a $100 million bobsled and luge course. Do you know how many people in Japan participate in bobsled and luge? Fewer than 200. They've changed Nagano, and they can't change it back."
At heart, some locals fear that their town has been laid waste to make greedy developers in Tokyo even richer. "The city bid for the Olympics during the bubble-era boom," the professor says. "Now the bubble is gone; the Olympics are a burden." In Hakuba young students hand out flyers protesting the Games and describing how promises have been broken, trees cut down and personal savings looted.
Though practical plans have been drawn up, it's nonetheless hard to see how the city will make the best use of its architecturally dazzling new Aqua Wing, M-Wave and White Ring facilities (designed to resemble a fresh breeze, a range of mountains and a drop of water, respectively) after the 16 days of competition are over. Recently, on a rainy Sunday morning, the 8,000 seats of the Big Hat arena were filled with maybe 60 cheering parents watching two pint-size ice hockey teams-the Frippers and Tigle-face off in perfect blue and yellow uniforms under a banner that said, guts! ice fighter buffalos.
Yet for the outsider Nagano does offer an echo of an older, purer world, and a journey there still suggests a trip in time as much as space, back to a place where children skip rope in front of small straw huts and country stations offer old-fashioned heaters for passengers awaiting three-carriage trains. On a "Bird Line" rural bus, the driver chats to his lone passenger throughout the duration of an hour-long drive (unheard of these days in Japan), and even in downtown Nagano taxi drivers open their doors at red lights to shout out greetings to one another.
In his classic novel Snow Country, the Nobel prizewinning writer Yasunari Kawabata depicted the mountains of Japan's far north as the place where jaded urbanites could come to bathe in a forgotten innocence-symbolized by the cool Tokyo dilettante who takes up with a local geisha. By the book's haunting end, the man is returning to his wife in Tokyo, suitably refreshed, and the country girl, heartbroken, is left with only memories. Therein lies the promise, and the danger, of the coming Winter Games.
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Nagano
