NY = cold and only cold

I know New York is colder than LA, but I never considered it a "Cold Place", until I came here and found out everyone thinks of it that way. Sure it's cold, but I wouldn't put it up there with Moscow or Rekjavik, but most Japanese seem too. I'm not sure why, my guess is because so many Christmas movies take place in New York, and sometimes there is a big blizzard that makes the news.

So if someone I know from London or Paris introduces himself, Japanese people say "Oh, wow, nice place." But if I say I'm from New York, people shiver and hug themselves. Seriously.

In the north of Japan is a beautiful island called Hokkaido. It has good skiing, lots of cows and therefore cheese and ice cream, apples, nice flowers in the summer. In the Japanese psyche, it's a vast, undeveloped wild place that even seems like a foreign country because it's more recently settled and has wide open spaces. It also happens to be the same size as New York state and on about the same latitude.

The other day I told a woman that the first time I went there I was surprised because it really reminded me of New York (state). The gears in her brain just sort of froze up. It would be like saying a sumo wrestler reminded you of a gay hamster- how coulkd the two possible be related?

Then she had an idea. "Oh I see, because it's cold."
"No, I mean the scenery. It really looks like the New York countryside, up where the ski areas are."
"Because it's cold?"
"No, what I mean is Kochi is squeezed between the mountains and the see. Hokkaido and New York have similar tees, and mountains. And houses aren't walled in like in Kochi. It's wide open. Yeah, when my plane landed there for the first time, it felt funny, like I got on the wrong plane and was landing in New York." (This was after I had shown her pictures of upstate New York the week before, which had blown everyone away.)
"I don't understand." she said. "Same because both cold?"

There is just no way the the most wild part of sceneic Japan could even remotely resemble the most crazy, dangerous, built up, noisiest part of the US. It would be like a Japanese person telling an American you that Alaska really reminded them of Tokyo.