Snow Japan (known as Ski Japan Guide until November 2002) is the premier and only source of detailed information in English covering the subject of winter sports in Japan and related topics. First launched in August of 1999, Snow Japan has continuously grown to now cover all aspects of skiing, snowboarding and other winter sports at the hundreds of resorts located all over Japan.  The current Snow Japan site offers a large number of exciting new dynamic interactive features.  (For a history of updates on the site, click here.)

Snow Japan is owned and developed by a design and marketing company - www.iponicsjapan.com.  Iponics Japan is part of the global Iponics group and was established in early 2001 by the original founder of SnowJapan, Andrew Lea, and the UK Iponics Group.  Andrew, now Managing Director of Iponics Japan, still oversees many aspects of SnowJapan.  As well as extensive experience working for Japanese snow industry related projects, Andrew is also an active member of the JNTO (Japan National Tourist Organization) Advisory Committee and often advises Japanese snow resorts on the foreign market as well as making presentations on the subject in Japan and overseas.

All site development (design, programming) is done in-house by Iponics Japan.  Each season up to 6 people are involved in the off-season updates to the site.

Our winter season content and writing is provided by a number of people based throughout Japan, Japanese ski resorts themselves (although they continue to have no editorial input into the site), the Japanese ski and snowboard industries and of course our readers and members who contribute reviews, journals, photos and stories.  The interactive features of the site - including Photos, Resort Reviews, Reader Journals, and the popular Forums - encourage active participation by our users.  A quick look through those sections shows how active the Snow Japan community has become - and increasingly so.

We provide in-depth information that cannot be found elsewhere either on the web or in print, making SnowJapan an essential guide to people interested in visiting Japanese slopes.  This, along with our total commitment to providing an independent and high quality service, has made SnowJapan a highly reputable website and one of the most popular English language "Japan" sites with the foreign community.  Furthermore, we also now attract an increasing number of English-reading Japanese.

Our readers are, by their very nature, active and outgoing.  They range from young (and older!) skiers and snowboarders who come to Japan for short periods of time, to very high-spending expatriate families, who wish to make the most of their winter based in Japan and need to know how to go about doing that.  We do not allow "just anyone" to advertise on the site, and want to keep it that way in the interests of our users and our partners.  We do welcome advertising enquiries from all companies who are keen to have the attention of the increasingly large active foreign market in Japan and those interested in and visiting the country.