For at least six centuries, residents along a lake in the mountains of central Japan have marked the depth of winter by celebrating the return of a natural phenomenon once revered as the trail of a wandering god. It would only appear after days of frigid temperatures had frozen Lake Suwa into a sheet of solid white. First, people were awakened at night by a loud rumbling. Dawn broke to reveal its source: a long, narrow ridge of jagged ice that had mysteriously arisen across the lake’s surface, meandering like the spiked back of a twisting dragon.
This was the Miwatari, meaning the sacred crossing, which local belief held was left by a passing god of Japan’s native Shinto belief. Its appearance evoked feelings of awe but also reassurance among the residents, who ventured onto the ice to perform a ceremony honoring what they saw as a visitation from the supernatural. In the rare winters when the ice ridge did not appear, the god’s absence was viewed as a warning that the natural world was out of balance.
So important was the Miwatari that residents recorded whether it appeared, the condition of the lake and what historical events accompanied it. They have loyally written these descriptions every winter since 1443, creating a remarkable archive that attests to centuries of monotonously cold winters.
But recently, the chronicles of Suwa have told a different, more alarming story. For the past seven winters, the Miwatari has failed to appear because the lake didn’t freeze. While there have been occasional years without ice, an absence of this length has happened only once before in the archive, and that was a half millennium ago.
In fact, Lake Suwa has not fully frozen over — what locals call “an open sea” — for 18 of the past 25 years. Kiyoshi Miyasaka, the chief priest of Yatsurugi Shrine, who for the past three and a half centuries has borne the duty of maintaining the records, says ice has failed to appear with regularity since the 1980s. He and other locals blame the disappearance of the ancient rhythms on global climate change.
“In old times, an open sea was regarded as a bad omen,” said Mr. Miyasaka, 74, whose shrine’s traditional stone gate and tile-roofed wooden buildings stand about a mile from the lakeshore. “We hear about melting of ice caps and Himalayan glaciers, but our own lake is also trying to alert us.”
Every dawn through most of January and early February, Mr. Miyasaka and dozens of his parishioners gather at a parking lot on the lake’s edge to check if the god had passed by during the night. For years now, they have found only disappointment.
Only parishioners in their 60s or older remember when the Miwatari was still big enough to make a sound that could wake them at night. The last time an ice ridge formed, in 2018, it was barely six inches tall.
“Carrying on a tradition for 580 years binds our community together,” said the mayor, Yukari Kaneko, 66. “I fear what’s happening now is a warning to rethink how we’re living.”
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