Almost a century after the Japanese government hired famed Austrian skimeister Hannes Schneider to introduce Alpine skiing to the country’s masses, skiing and snowboarding are currently having a “bit of a moment.”
You can see it at Vancouver International Airport, as skiers and riders from Toronto, Vancouver, and Seattle cart oversized ski and board bags bound for either Haneda or Narita, Tokyo’s two international air hubs. If you stop at the airport to pick up the Sunday New York Times for reading entertainment during your 10-hour Zip Air flight, you might read feature stories with headlines like: A First Timer’s Guide to Skiing in Japan and Japan’s Ski Slopes Have Too Much of a Good Thing: SNOW.
But it’s social media, in particular Instagram Reels, where the true buzz around “Japow,” as it’s called, has taken place.
From mid-December to mid-March, social media was blowing up daily with pros and bros (and women, of course) getting utterly buried in deep-snow bliss.
The advent of the “invisible pole” Insta 360 camera has resulted in a slew of videos where the rider or skier pushes off to gather speed and makes one or two turns before tunnelling under a white blanket, followed by an expletive-filled narration: “The deepest effing… whoo-hoo, effing amazing, mate, eff-mate, let’s get back to the lift again.” Meteorologists like @imlukesnow (107,000 followers) have peppered Instagram throughout the season, leading to perhaps the most serious FOMO of all time for B.C. locals stuck (until recently) amid an eight-week snow drought.
A darker side has emerged recently, seen in clips of epic lineups (or should we say Epic lineups, given that Vail Resorts’ Epic Pass provides transferable days of skiing at several Japanese resorts). There are plenty of statistics to back up just how popular skiing in Japan has become; the country hosted 43 per cent more visitors in 2024 than it did the year before.
How did we get here, and what might the future hold? Skiers and riders from around the world understand the lure of deep snow thanks to ever-user-friendly fat skis, hybrid bindings, and avalanche safety gear. Yet the lure of Japan goes well beyond blower pow. Buried deep beneath the six metres of settled depth at many resorts is the story of an insular country coming to grips with some hard economic and demographic truths, as well as snow enthusiasts’ boundless quest to find skiing’s Holy Grail; one that can be defined as “heli-skiing for the price of a lift ticket.”
Past: Japan’s Great Postwar Economic Miracle
From 1972 to 1990, no country punched above its weight on the international stage quite like Japan. The Arab oil embargo—where the price of gas tripled in the space of six months in the United States—led to the costly collapse of “Detroit Iron”; smoke-belching, gas-guzzling land yachts and muscle cars. With inflation spinning out of control, economical, dependable, functional cars by Toyota, Datsun (later Nissan), Honda and Mazda began filling up parking lots. Indeed, it scarcely mattered which consumer category you were in, from cars, cameras, stereos and microwave ovens to photocopying machines and guitars; American manufacturing was being routed by the likes of Honda, Nikon, Nakamichi, Toshiba, Ricoh and Yamaha. “Made in Japan” meant premium quality, long-lasting durability, and exceptional value.
In 1982, the Banff Mountain Film Festival premiered an unflattering documentary about how overtourism affected the world’s mountain landscapes. A brief detour was made to the slopes of Japan, where the world’s largest hotel complex—complete with its very own enclosed amusement park—was under construction in Hokkaido. Futuristic Shinkansen “bullet trains” jammed with thousands of members of Japan’s rising middle class departed on Friday afternoon from downtown Tokyo and teleported millions of skiers to brand-new resorts in Yuzawa, Myoko, and Nagano. By the mid-’90s, Japan had more than 700 ski resorts, and its winter economy was greater than that of the United States.
British ex-pat Andrew Lea saw those heady bubble days, but when he was assigned to teach English in Yuzawa Town in 1992, he had never skied. Inadvertently, he bore witness to what recreational life was like at the height of Japan’s economic bubble. “These trains would come up from Tokyo on the weekends, and there would be so many people on the slopes that it would be hard not to run into somebody,” he says.
One of those powder seekers is Whistler’s very own Jill Dunnigan, co-founder (with Peter Smart) of Extremely Canadian, the mountain adventure company that has challenged thousands of skiers to face their fears and test the limits. “It’s been 20 years since we teamed up with former Japanese pro racer Rick Lewon to go over and try Niseko,” she says. “Rick knew how to speak Japanese, which was a huge asset to us.”
Indeed, Lewon himself was a trailblazer when he first arrived in Japan to race professionally in 1983. He recalls: “I’d been racing on the PWA pro circuit here in Canada and went to Japan because the purses were about four times higher than they were here.” As was the case in North America at the time, pro racing featured two racers battling side by side on parallel slalom and GS courses.
“It was quite a spectacle,” Lewon says. “Thousands of fans would line the course. Range Rover and Toshiba were the major sponsors. It snowed a lot, but I only had stiff racing skis, and there wasn’t much time for freeskiing anyway. There was a ton of money going around; many of the resorts were brand new.”
The Japanese, however, were never much interested in powder skiing anyway. Glades, climbing out of bounds, and skiing underneath chairlift lines were all strictly forbidden at the time. For many years, Japanese skiers held the superstition that evil spirits lurked in the dark, mysterious, snow-laden forest.
“We knew the world would beat a path to Japan,” Dunnigan says. It wasn’t an overnight sensation, though. “In 2007, we filmed a segment for the Pontiac World of Skiing TV show and hit perfect conditions. But it was a hard sell until we had a DVD to send out to our clients or to play on the ski-show circuit.
“By the time we got to Niseko, the Australians had planted the flag,” she says, and seems a bit depressed at how busy it has become. “We saw a booking for one of our trips go from $400 per night pre-season to over $1,000 for a decent, though hardly luxurious, hotel room.” While lift tickets are a comparative bargain at $105 per day compared to Whistler’s walk-up ticket window pricing, shopping, dining out and alternate winter activities can be just as expensive as here in Canada.
Rachael Oakes-Ash is an Australian journalist covering the Japan beat since the early 2000s. In a feature story for her website snowsbest.com, she admits those rowdy days of discovery led to Niseko earning a reputation as a “Bali on Snow” party spot, with ex-pat powder seekers and locals alike frequently appalled by the newcomers’ often rude and obnoxious behaviour. Two decades later, Niseko has become synonymous with American-style luxury (“though it will never be Aspen,” Oakes-Ash says). The flags of several opulent hotel chains fly below Mount Yotei’s famous volcanic cone, including Ritz-Carlton and the over-the-top Park Hyatt Niseko, which featured its own Louis Vuitton Mongolian-style yurt “pop-up shop” on the premises for 2025. Indeed, the $5-million luxury townhomes (in a country where almost 20 per cent of rural property has been abandoned by its rapidly declining population) are just as likely to be owned by Chinese, Korean, Malaysian or Taiwanese high-rollers as they are by Australians.
Perhaps Niseko never truly was a Japanese skiing experience. There’s no language barrier and the place gets hammered with 17 metres of bottomless fluff annually. Dunnigan and Smart’s Extremely Canadian offers both scheduled and bespoke trips to Japan, but Dunnigan says “if skiers are expecting a big dump overnight, you’re going to have to get up very early and be very strategic when it comes to planning your day. It’s just as challenging to find first tracks there as it is here at Whistler Blackcomb.”
Matt Appleford, an Australian guide who similarly leads adventure skiers on trips to Kashmir, Kazakhstan and Turkey, had the misfortune to hit a dry spell lull during this year’s cyclonic storm cycle. “Four, five days after the last storm, you really had to work hard to find first tracks in the Niseko backcountry,” he says.
With the exception of Hakuba, the resorts closer to Tokyo on the island of Honshu have been slower to realize the Kangaroo hop when it comes to real estate prices. According to a podcast from the Tokyo Times English-language newspaper, the domestic Japanese ski economy declined drastically from 1990—the year the Lost Decade began—from a high of 20 million skiers to the current level of roughly 6 million. Enormous sums of government money were poured into resort and train infrastructure to host the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, but that investment has been very slow to pay dividends. According to Hugh Smythe, former Intrawest CEO, “we were very interested in bringing our village-building expertise to Japan when the economy was still going strongly. However, the Japanese ski vacation culture is very different from that of North America. Amongst the Japanese, there’s very little après ski or dining out, their resorts often have two or three lift companies operating at one resort. It’s a complicated place to do business.”
Figuring out “where to go next” has become a bit of a holy grail for adventurous skiers and riders. “Our guests want to explore more of the countryside and have a more authentic experience,” Dunnigan says. To meet that demand, she and Smart along with another couple took to the road for three weeks in January hoping to uncover some hidden gems. “To take some of the pressure off places like Hakuba and Niseko next season, we will offer two ‘mystery trips’ to Japan where I won’t inform you of the destination until you pay in full and sign an agreement to not geo-tag your location on social media.” Forget Instagram, this will be old-fashioned “word-of-mouth” style buzz.
“Are Japan’s Lost Decades Finally Over?”
Japan’s domestic ski industry will never again reach the heady numbers it did in the early ’90s—the country’s incredibly low birth rate, high urban cost of living and generally stagnant economy will see to that.
Lea has been in the country for more than 40 years now and is 100-per-cent fluent in Japanese. He’s also a part-time resort archeologist; you might say, searching for the remains of some of the 200-plus ski areas that continue to vanish to this day. “Many of the mid-sized areas have not kept up regarding lift infrastructure,” he says. “I would have to say that the biggest challenge for the Japanese resort industry will be upgrading its lift systems to the standards that in-bound travellers from other countries expect to see.” You can get an idea of just how immense the Japanese ski industry was at its peak by perusing his snowjapanhistory.com website where “I’ve covered 300 of the 400 defunct resorts and am slowly getting to the rest.”
Alas, with modernized lift facilities comes a higher price tag for locals, with more occasional skiers—a complaint voiced everywhere these days. “Pre-COVID, a daily lift ticket at Rusutsu cost approximately Y5000 and now it’s Y14,500,” Lea says. But, consistent with the wonderful incongruities that Japan offers, “there are a few tiny hills nearby that let you ride a rope tow for free!”
Or, as one Australian lodge owner said, “a lot of skiers like to think that they want to stay in a tiny ryokan (traditional Japanese lodge with tatami mats, futon bedding, and paper room dividers) but then the lodge happens to be off the main bus route, or the breakfasts are fish roe, eel, and tofu and, of course, there’s a language barrier.” All of which sounds insufferably colonial, except for the fact that if you’re there to ski powder, you don’t want obstacles in your mission.
There’s one very delightful tradition that kind of hearkens to the ’40s-era Laurentian-style lodges that have largely disappeared. Slotted somewhere between youth hostels with communal beds and showers and the cookie-cutter Hyatts of the world lies the wonderful world of Japanese ryokans and Australian-owned ski lodges. Large family homes once owned by Japanese families can be owned for almost unbelievable prices. “Akaiya” properties as they are known are country homes usually owned by Japanese parents or grandparents whose children that have moved to the city. Japan’s population is aging so rapidly that it is estimated as many as 20 per cent of all homes in rural Japan are vacant. Most of these are tear-downs, yet some savvy skiers and boarders have been able to snap up fixer-uppers and turn them into homey ski lodges.
Like most Australian snowboarders who’ve been in-country for a while, Dan Solo’s Japanese journey started in Niseko but eventually led him to Madarao, one of the “diamond in the rough” resorts we all dream about. “It’s still off the beaten track enough that I can get out early after a 50-centimetre dump and not cross a single track all morning,” he says. “All of the backcountry runs end near a road that takes you right back into the area. There’s only been one fatality during all of the years that I’ve been riding here.”
Solo and his wife Louise started with their Australia x Japan style Snowball Lodge and have added a luxury family duplex next door, and several nearby apartments with strangely institutional architecture; indeed, it used to be a dorm for maintenance workers.
Madarao’s an interesting case; it shares its slopes with another resort, Tangram Ski Circus, which is almost exclusively patronized by Japanese families staying at the all-inclusive onsen resort farther down the valley. Solo says Madarao has gone through three ownership changes since he’s been there but its fortunes might soon change. Like several of the resorts in nearby Myoko, Madarao is now owned by Singapore-based Patience Capital, which is probably what the new owners will need to make money at this mid-sized mountain. Some locals fear that outside money will modernize the rather run-down charm some of these obscure areas ooze.
It’s worth noting that while these premium Australian-owned lodges do their best to integrate Japanese best practices in culture, cuisine, and décor—most lodge developers are huge Japanophiles of both the modern and traditional aesthetic—the truly unspoiled Japanese experience is still out there. While Oakes-Ash believes that Niseko and Hakuba are “pretty much over for core skiers looking for authentic Japan,” she suggests going farther afield or planning a trip outside the six-week Japow window from early January to mid-February.
SnowJapan’s Lea is optimistic; though he’s probably more skilled at navigating the country's travel since he’s fluent in Japanese. The English teacher turned webmaster spends his mornings updating his highly informative (and hype-free) snowjapan.com website and then hits the slopes for the first tracks around 10:30.
First tracks, at 10:30? Where the hell is that?
“There are three or four ski areas within a half hour that I can go to where you can hop on a chair and ski powder. I’ll go for two or three hours a couple of times a week and that’s it, I’m good,” he says. An avowed curmudgeon when it comes to social media (rather ironic for a website owner), Lea says, “I’ve seen these video clips going around of people lining up for an hour at Niseko or Hakuba and think, ‘Are you people crazy?’ My website lists over 400 ski resorts in Japan and at most of them, you can ski right onto a lift.”
Indeed, the Japanese Alps are full of surprises. Full-on multi-day backcountry tours are non-existent, and winter hut access is limited. Hit Hokkaido in mid-March and you’ll have the place to yourself, and there’s still a good chance of hitting the Japow.
While the sun might be setting on Japan’s aging population, there’s still enormous potential in the land of the rising sun.
