My girlfriend and I are moving to Hokkaido soon as ALTs, which will be both of our first times living abroad. A mutual friend of ours who did teaching for 2 years in Oita Prefecture gave us feedback that we should have chosen somewhere in Honshu or Kyushu for a more "Japanese experience" since Hokkaido was only recently settled. She also said that the weather would make us miserable.
I disagreed with her, but I wanted to know what you guys think, especially from the perspective of people who have never lived where it snows before. We chose Hokkaido because we've visited all the regions of Japan and we thought Tokyo was too overstimulating and the summers in Kyushu were too brutal. Admittedly, however, we've only experienced Hokkaido in the summer and haven't seen its climate at its worst.
I'm from a part of California that's temperate year-round, but the coldest I've ever experienced was Mongolia in early Spring. That was a week at most though, so I want to hear people's experiences of how depressing it is living in the cold for months at a time.
by YouLostMeThere