The town of Hamatonbetsu

	A shot down the main street on the way to Lake Kutcharo
	The baseball field
	A farm and some wind turbines just south of town
	A shot of the mountains from south of town
	These arrows are over every major road here. Why? Why, so you can tell where the road is during a blizzard of course. And yes, they're necessary. Snow frequently piles up taller than me out here, or so I've heard.
	Here's a lovely little shrine next to a nearly-abandoned shed on the way to Tonbetsu (the fishing village connected to Hamaton)
	A nice river running out to sea south of town
	A shot of the Sea of Okhotsk from Tonbetsu
	Here's another river running through Tonbetsu very close to it's outlet
	Here's a mapof the town on a large billboard along the main road. Hamatonbetsu proper is between the rivers, and Tonbetsu is along the red road on the sea
	Here's a shot from my office right when I got off work at 4:30 in late October. Not having daylight savings time sucks.
	Erika and Yui came up to Hamaton for some forrestry workshop. The person who ran it was pretty cool, but it was basically "Here's some cool things you can do with wood." And not the really cool things either.
	This is the type of bin used throughout town to store garbage on the various weekdays. Garbage collection is pretty complicated here what with having to sort your garbage and buy special bags for each catagory at the store. They do recycle a lot though which is good. The basic catagories are burnable, nonburnable, dangerous nonburnable (light bulbs, batteries, etc.) food, paper recycling, plastic recycling, metal recycling, glass recycling, and oversize (which requires a special fee, notifying the garbage service, etc. Apparently they're pretty loose about the whole thing here, as opposed to the Hiroshima area where you have to write your name, address, and phone number on each bag of garbage, and you get fined if you mess up.
	Here's a fun shot out my front door from early winter. That"s a bit over a foot of snow piled up across the street way from my building, and almost none on my side. This from what was fairly evenly diistributed snow that morning. You can tell from the picture just how hard the wind was blowing. This was not a typhoon, just a windy day.
	Here are a few shots to show what early winter was like. This is the alley where my garage is located.
	And here"s one from down on level with the snow.
	And here's where I park my car at work. I used to think this was a lot of snow.
	And here's the parking lot's other snow pile.
	And here's one of the building's entrances. One of the pictures on here is this during the summer. Kinda interesting now, what with the bule things to protect the trees. Those are all over town nowadays.
	Here's an interesting indicator of snow depth piled along the side of the road. Up to the eaves of this one-story building.
	Here's a section of town I don't photograph very often. There's lot of these bunk houses (at least 55 judging by the numbers). Most are boarded up, but some are still open. My guess is that they were built during the gold rush days and are now used as low-income housing if their in any condition to be so. A lot of the iki-iki kids live in this area.
	Here's what the baseball field looks like now. Quite full with snow.
	Finally got a shot of that huge snow pile from the other side where it's height is more evident. That's my office building in the background. For reference, the dome is on top of a 3-story building, and the first story has a really high ceiling. I really want to sled down that thing.
	Another shot.
	Here's the road out to Shimotonbetsu and Nakatonbetsu. Inland, basically. You can catch a glimpse of the mountains that are out that way.
	A long, cold, wet winter makes for cool icicles in many places.
	Here's the snow ramp I've made next to my garage. That's all been shovelled this winter.
	From the top, here's a look back down.
	...and down the street a bit. (From the top of the ramp.)
	And straight across the street.
	And this is where the snow eventually got dumped late in the winter.
	Off to the right, you can kinda see the footpath the neighbors carved through to their garage.
	Here's the back end of my garage. It's hard to see, but thanks to the melting/freezing, the nearest gutter has a long gutter-shaped stick of ice protruding from it.
	From my front door you can see that the area around the other garage for the apartment complex is a bit better tended (it's on a larger street).
	Here's the view out my window in mid spring
	Here's an alley by my apartment. Kinda cool to watch all the snow slide off the rooves at once.
	Here's the baseball field as spring approaches
	There are a lot of these birds around this time of year
	I think they're snow eagles, but I'm not sure
	Here's an example of the two types of forests you have around here: evergreen and birch
	These are the remains of the snow sculptures the iki-iki carved
	And the view from my window at night around Easter
	Here's the view from my window in early May
	A nice tulip garden on my way to work.
	These plants are everywhere. The stalks are pretty tasty when cooked.
	These crows are everywhere, and huge. They sound eerily human too.