Jifubuki is not snow falling. It is snow that has already fallen, lifted off the ground by wind until the air turns white in every direction and the horizon simply stops existing. On the Tsugaru plain in January this is not an event. It is Tuesday.

In 1988 a man in Kanagi asked whether the thing everyone here endured might be the thing that brought people in. Winter had always been the season when nobody came. He began taking visitors out into the open fields dressed in kakumaki, monpe and kanjiki: a heavy cotton shawl, work trousers, snowshoes. The shawl was once part of a Tsugaru bride's trousseau. Nobody manufactures them any more, so the ones handed out were collected secondhand for the tours.

Kanagi is not an accidental setting. Dazai Osamu was born here, in a house now open to visitors, and the Tsugaru Railway still runs a coal-stove train through the snow, on which attendants grill dried squid over the stove. One of the carriages is named for his story Run, Melos.

Across nearly four decades, thousands of people have signed up to walk into a blizzard on purpose, in a season that was supposed to be empty.