Left: YOKOMIZO TAICHI (bluntslide)
Age: 21
Skating: 10 years
Home: Omori, Tokyo
Spot: Akihabara, Tamachi
Japan good: Compared to a few years ago, pros and regular
skater kids here are cool with each other.
Japan bad: Really good skaters here should be nicer to kids
who aren't that great. Then everybody would get better at
skating, and it'd just be more fun overall.
準法によ
* 10% 67
福田
Below: TAKAYOSHI SAITO (blindside flip from bank to bump)
Age: 24
Skating: 11 years
Home: Chiba
Spot: Makuhari
Japan good: One of the good things about it is, compared to America, no one
really gets pissed off at you and you don't get arrested or anything for skating.
Japan bad: Japanese skaters don't have much individuality.
As far as my own life...I'll try to have fun and go with my dreams as long as I
can. Being pro (in Japan), I feel pressured to do stuff for ads, but when I was
an am, I was having so much fun just skating super hard all the time.
Sometimes when I get bummed on skating now, I look back to when I was just
starting and how I felt back then, and it makes me want to go skate again.
Skateboarding for me has become a big part of my life. I'll still be skating.
aesthetics
<伍称
POPEYE43
Left: Gen Ogawa drops a
kamikaze method on Osaka.
Below: Forty-five floors above
Keith Hufnagel's ollie you can
enjoy a melon soda while taking
in the Tokyo skyline.
BASS & SALTWATER
2
SPOTS
Spots in Tokyo are good; some of them
amazing just look at the photos. Even at
spots where security would come out, they
would almost always be polite and ask you
nicely to please leave. Even while skating a rail
in front of a building that has been hit now for
ten-odd years, the security guard came out and
gave us three extra tries until finally telling us
we had to go.
Outside of the city of Tokyo proper are "new"
areas of massive shopping, office, food, and
convention complexes built on reclaimed land
in Tokyo Bay or out in the farms and suburbs
near the airport. The result, that we visited, has
been lots of shiny marble and fun angled
shapes to play on and jump off, in planned pat-
terns that actually include large amounts of
open space, a rare commodity once you return
to the middle of the city. Still, there's something
to be said for skating a set of stairs buried in the
basement of one of Tokyo's huge train stations,
taking runs between commuting high school
kids and people coming in and out of the adja-
cent underground shopping mall.
REAL
t'd be easy to say that Japanese skateboard-
ing is just like in the US since, after all, the
tricks, clothes, boards, and styles are all pret-
ty much the same. But all skateboarders every-
where are looking at the same center on the
same map the same videos, magazines, and
pros. Tokyo is there right next to the big cities of
skateboarding, just harder to see without big
names and big photos. What makes it different,
what makes skating there more than just another
LA or New York, is the other stuff, the stuff that makes you step
back while you're skating around at 10 PM in the middle of
Akihabara and just check it out for a minute-the trains running
in and out of the station around you on two sides, neon from
the electronics stores lighting up the spot brighter than the dim
lights installed overhead, signs in two-foot-tall Japanese charac-
ters around the sides of the park, the music from the station
platform-and realize this is what everyday skating in Tokyo is
like. It's fun.
Thanks to everyone who helped us out while we were in
Japan: Fujiwara-san and everybody at California Street, Alex,
Ishiko, Shin Okada, Daisuke Hayakawa, Yuiichi, Akachi-kun,
Mit, Masaki (grow your own), Simon Lockett, Takayoshi and
Yamamoto at Ueno Murasaki, Taiichi, Carl, Hisashi, Tamachi
locals, Akihabara locals, Chiba guys, Setagaya kids, Daisuke and
other guys from Osaka/Kobe, Huf and Agah, people in
Yokosuka/Yokohama, Jun at Upstate, the Boys of Summer:
Katoh, Tazawa and Kei, Nakagawa and Envy, kuzu-Jin and Shin
Yoshida, and anybody else we skated with, talked to, shot pho-
tos of, or who helped us out in any way:
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