....to the man Behind the Slope Arai’s Kazuo Fukuyama-Sensei’s beneficial yet behind the scenes influence on the sport of skiing and snowboarding in Japan.

Three people I would like to meet....

After stomping down a truly invigorating run, I have taken off my board, looked back up at the course and wondered what it would be like to meet the person who was responsible for creating it.

Many times I have surveyed a well-designed resort from the lift lines and wished that I had a chance to hear about who built the thing up from nothing.

Looking down from a peak on an expanse of lifts that all lay at the command of my all-mountain pass has caused me to want to shake hands with the person who united the mountain simply to enhance the spirit of the sport.

The above are three people who I have always wanted to meet which is why I am so excited to tell you about my brief interview with Arai’s Kazuo Fukuyama-sensei who I recently discovered is all three of these men wrapped into one!

I was on a snow-finding mission at Niigata’s newest resort, Arai, where I had asked the resident Canadian Blair Anderson to introduce me to a member of the ski patrol or the grooming staff for an interview to appear in this column. Blair met me after the lifts closed with what appeared to be a senior member of the Arai staff and introduced him to me simply as Fukuyama-sensei, no title, and no card.

You have probably never heard of Kazuo Fukuyama; he is not a famous boarder, cameraman, or designer. He even admitted to me that he prefers to stay behind the scenes - like a Tanaka Kakuei of the snow-sports universe - so you probably won’t see him in any brochures or stat sheets at any of the resorts. After years of working in the ski resort industry in Japan, he has risen above the culture of title and placement and has simply become known as "Sensei".

Fukuyama-sensei started off on the right track to becoming a heavy-hitting government bureaucrat. He graduated from Tokyo University Law Department in 1962 and followed in the footsteps of many a Prime Minister by continuing on at the university’s Political Science program. But in 1966, he abandoned the quest for the throne and chose instead to follow the fall line of his heart to a life devoted to the sport of skiing – snowboarding had not yet been invented so, at the time, this was a truly noble cause.

He left his political studies unfinished and departed for the homeland of his favorite sport, the Alps. After a few "brush-up" language courses at prestigious French and German Universities, he settled in to study Ski Instruction at Bundessportheim St.Christoph in Tirol, Austria and later at The Ecole National de Ski et Alpinisme, in Chamonix, France.

Fukuyama-sensei returned to Japan with a deep knowledge of skiing that was superseded only by his deep love of the European ski culture. He chose what is now known as Yamagata Zao Onsen – but at the time was nothing more than a virtual civil war of minor lift companies all operating on one mountain – as the home to his newly founded ski school and the sport of skiing in Japan would never be the same.

"I told those guys (at Zao) that they should sell a joint-lift ticket like they do in Europe," Fukuyama-sensei said casually over a cup of hot chocolate. It was at this point that I began to grasp just exactly who was sitting in front of me. Some stubborn lift operators in Japan are still clinging to their territory but most have slowly given into the modern idea of cooperation for the sake of the consumer. We probably wouldn’t even bother strapping in at some of our favorite resorts like Niseko, Shiga Kogen, or Happo One if their minor sub-parts hadn’t tossed in the shovel and united the mountains. Can you imagine having to buy 22 different lift tickets to get from one side of Shiga Kogen to the other? Forget it! Japanese resorts have evolved over the past two decades and the first resort to step forward and overlook its differences was Yamagata Zao Onsen under the persistent nudging of Fukuyama-sensei. He planted a seed that is still growing today.

After uniting the lifts, the only monsters left to tame at
Yamagata Zao Onsen are of the snow variety

  
"Uniting Zao Onsen must have been a difficult task!" I imagined the frustration of trying to gather a bunch of Yamagata farmers-turned-lift owners into one room to resolve their differences and shivered.