Why I Did a Ski Season in Japan

Update January 2020: This is an article about why I travelled to Japan to go snowboarding. People have been asking me about skiing in Japan so I’ve started putting together a practical guide and info. section which you can find here. I’ll be adding to it more in the near future. If you’ve any thoughts, recommendations or questions then let me know!

I came to Japan to explore two lifelong obsessions: one nurtured as a child, spending countless hours playing ‘the Nintendo’, I developed a fascination with the land that had produced Super Mario and Street Fighter, Donkey Kong and Pokemon. Since then, this early programming has revealed itself in a wonder in all the facets of the traditional culture that had inspired them and their worlds. The other I developed as an adult, as I fell in love with snowboarding on a serendipitous post-college adventure to Canada.

A friend called me a “swine” in response to me telling him I was going to Japan “for a long ski holiday”.

A more common response from people was that they “didn’t know you could ski in Japan”, or even “I didn’t know it even snowed in Japan”, or “you’d have to be fucking different, wouldn’t you?”

You can ski in Japan and it does snow. It snows a lot. And going on a snow holiday to Japan is hardly that different these days.

Along with my own cultural curiosity, Japan holds its own mythological place in ski and snowboard circles for the amount of snow that God sends its way each winter. Siberian weather fronts spit precipitation measurable by the metre all over the north of the country, which has the most ski resorts per capita of anywhere in the world. The snow is known for its dryness. You can pick it up and blow it out of your hand like a handful of dust. You get covered in it in seconds on the way to the shop but you don’t get wet. It’s powder. Powder is good. Although skiing is a more efficient and ergonomic means of travelling down a snowy mountain, snowboarding came about for reasons of pure pleasure, as a means to recreate surfing on land. Riding through dry powdery snow gives this sensation of surfing waves in the mountains. It’s like floating on air, it’s like flying, and to fly is to escape the everyday. It is magical. Japanese Powder – ‘Japow’ as it’s known in the scene – is now renowned worldwide, having been ‘discovered’ by Westerners in the 90’s and 2000’s, and this along with the Land of the Rising Sun’s exotic allure has put Japan on every serious ski and snowboarder’s bucket list. So despite my travel motives being personal, they’re hardly original.

The village I’m working and staying in, Echoland, sits halfway between Hakuba 47 and Happo-one ski resorts, two of the 10 or so resorts in the Hakuba Valley area. It’s popular with huge numbers of Australian ski tourists and season workers, and smaller numbers of other international tourists who come for the same reasons as me. “Echoland was built for foreigners,” my boss Sky, a Taiwanese property investor, informs me with a laugh after collecting me from the bus station. “They didn’t even bother to give it a Japanese name.” Such is its popularity with overseas tourists and season workers that at times the village feels like an Australian ski resort, with some Japanese restaurants and occasional visits from Japanese holiday-makers. Hundreds of season workers make a living here in workplaces that can maintain a roaring trade from international tourists, with English being their primary language of communication. The guesthouse I’m working at, exchanging household chores for a basic living with front-row access to the ski hills of the valley, caters mostly to Australian and Taiwanese guests.

It’s snowing when I arrive in Hakuba on a mid-January afternoon and the next day it’s still snowing. It mightn’t have snowed the following day, but it definitely snowed the day after that, and then it kept snowing until the day after that. And here when it rains it pours, as they say. Even in the flats of the village, the stuff piles up rapidly. Several feet in a matter of hours, and by the following morning the car is buried. Shovelling snow is a never-ending routine that must be done more than once a day, and then the day after that. Early mornings are spent digging out submerged cars, part of the endless routine of winter. Weekends stick out as busier days of the week, but other than that days follow a predictable and psychologically endless cycle. Wake up, shovel snow, go snowboarding, repeat.

The next couple of weeks continue like this. Amazing days riding  inspire a resurgence of deep-rooted joy and euphoria of a kind that has lain dormant within me for years. There have been other joys but not quite like this. A week-long trip to Hokkaido a couple of years ago had been my only snow trip since I’d spent my last full winter season in the French Alps six years ago. A new-found love of trail running offers a similar release in me, and thrilling downhill bursts in that sport brought me joy as they mimicked the same feeling of hurtling along on a plank of wood in the snow that I recalled from my mid-twenties. But here I’m reminded that the speed, the aerodynamic flow, the underfoot sensations of running downhill can’t compare to this. This is why I’m back. My first adventurous love, its effects still felt deep down having left its mark on me at an impressionable age, like any young love.

It’s been a while, and ploughing through this stuff burns your thighs and core like leg day at the gym. It might be light but it’s not air. This is a sport. This is hard. A 5 minute run through trees, full of technical turns, tight squeezes, near misses and bursts of adrenaline, not to mention the altitude inherent to this sport, will have you gasping for air by the time you line up for the next chairlift. But like being winded on the ground after you run the length of the pitch to get on the end of an inch-perfect cross and nudge the winner into the net, this exhaustion carries an elation that negates the discomfort, turns it into something to feed off. The bigger the gasps for oxygen at the end, the bigger the smiles. The bigger the high-fives.

An early powder-day trip to Cortina resort on the northern edge of the Hakuba valley provides some of the deepest snow conditions I’ve ever ridden in. Cutting sharp turns unleashes waves of snow overhead, like getting overtaken by a truck in torrential rains. I’m momentarily blinded and I need to stop lest I hit a tree. On our first run my friend Michi takes a tumble and is buried up to his neck. You do need to be careful in such conditions, sometimes the snow is so thick that it slows you down to a halt, or the terrain flattens out, or your legs just aren’t strong enough, you’re just not skilled enough to stay upright, and you have to burrow like a dog through the snow to find your board at your feet, unstrap and swim to safety (another advantage to skis – your legs aren’t tied together so it’s easier to get out of trouble). But we’re both experienced enough at this, Michi having spent several winters in Niseko on the northern island of Hokkaido, the home of powder skiing in Japan.

So enough of the caution, days like this are for letting go, letting rip. The deep and dry snow offers all and no resistance. ‘Normal’ snowboarding on pistes is a reference point, as is surfing a wave; but it’s not the same thing. There’s a cushion beneath you that gives way but pushes back, supports you. You can’t feel the bottom when your board is flat, but you’re able to create your own waves when you turn. It’s like floating through air but flying on a magic carpet at the same time. The moments where you reach a state of flow and are completely present in the moment in these conditions is divine; in control and finding the perfect line through a technical zone, or just having at it and opening up through a field of powder, momentarily at one with the lay of the snow and the flow of the terrain. Although physically testing and frustrating at first, once you’ve ridden powder you wonder if there’s any point in going back to pistes or parks.

This, to me, is what snowboarding is. Maybe it’s a programming thing and a case of ‘whatever you were raised on’, but park riding doesn’t appeal to me as much as free-riding through rugged natural terrain and pure untracked snow. It’s a different sport in my mind, a series of gimmicky diversions for skateboarders (I also freely admit that land on a cushion of soft snow when I mess up than willingly slam down onto a hard-packed landing or an ice-cold rail). While I respect the bravado and sacrificial endurance of pain in pursuit of landing tricks, of achieving goals, to me the process is the goal, the meaningful part. No objective other than pure experience and enjoyment. There’s artificiality to park riding, of mechanically manipulating the snow and contaminating it with mundane metal and foreign objects which looks cool but shifts the goalposts to turn a way of life into a sport; the logical progression is to judge skill and award scores based on perceived quality (again, I’ll be the first to admit I possess none of the skills, quality or dexterity required to excel in the park).

What do I like? Riding through natural forests and off-piste powder zones I’m reminded of the first times I was dragged into the Revelstoke side-country to experience real powder-boarding. Giddy joy so effervescent that childish laughter was the only reaction my body could muster, a feeling that I’d previously mostly experienced at music festivals. There’s an artistry to finding your own line on the mountain, at once restrained by the contours of the mountain but limited only by your imagination, your skill and your mastery of fear. Skiing may have been around for millennia as a means of functional transportation; more than mere pleasure, surfers knew when they took their boards to frozen mountains that this was a path to transcendence.

And like a surfer knows that most of their life is spent bobbing in the ocean, waiting, waiting, waiting, and often failing, there’s more to it than just the photo reel, the action shot. The environment plays a huge part. The mountains form their own majestic ocean, surrounding as far as you can see, isolating the small mountain villages and towns from the dry land of the outside world, the more southern reaches which remain untouched by snow and breathe freely throughout the winter. Being immersed in the heart-aching beauty and vastness of endless mountain ranges is part of the life, the place you must venture to in order to partake. It’s important to often pause and take it in, for the beauty of your land is as important for the soul as the rush and exhilaration of travelling through it at high speeds as its master. And the fresh air is not to be taken for granted.

Back down in the valley, I settle into the slower moving and always shivery routines of ski-town winter. There is a culture here that we only understand in Ireland from Christmas cards, that we think we know due to our own experiences with shite weather and the odd ‘big freeze’ but in reality we know nothing of its kind; a range of sights and experiences that come with living on the frontier of civilisation. There is a partial feeling that every day is Christmas, particularly when it’s snowing and you can’t wait to get an early night to jump up early the next morning and unwrap your presents on the hill. There’s a slower and more methodical pace of life, where people get on with their journeys, head down into the flurry of snowflakes blowing at them in the wind; slowly digging themselves out of hibernation every morning, grinning and bearing it through extreme cold and lack of sunlight. On sunny days the mix of icy air and dazzling snowblindness from the sun’s reflection on the brilliant ground electrifies the senses, wakes you up like an ice bath. A steaming hot onsen under a dump of snow is a magical thing. Echoland, for all its rather non-Japanese atmosphere, exudes a charm reminiscent of the planned frontier-town street grids of Revelstoke, where I fell in love with ski life, a youthful fling. There’s a camaraderie amongst the people here that comes with journeying to extremes to do something you love, or getting on with where you’re from. Something active, something thrilling, something that requires care and skill and a sense of adventure.

The secret is out at Hakuba Cortina, and we wait impatiently for over an hour in snaking lines to get on one of the inadequate 2-person chairs to get halfway up the mountain, then another. We strap in, newbies to the resort, meandering a little aimlessly down a cat-track flanked woods through dispersing crowds. Half unsure of the lay of the land, half scared of disappointment, unsure yet if it’ll be worth the wait. I’ve been waiting to drop in here for a while.

And it’s amazing. This is more than just pleasure. It is deep.

It’s one thing to rationally remind yourself of all these things, to look at the pictures, to make the decision to come here based on what you think or remember to be true, to know that something is good. It’s another to experience it all again and feel it deep down within you. This is something that you need to feel first hand. I’ve traveled somewhere new, again, somewhere different, but all the same, it’s good to be back.