Verttii

I'm not sure which are allowed in Japan and which not, but Dealextreme has quite big selection of all kind of walkie talkies

While skiing in Europe we have always used these small radio phones(PMR), which are very handy on this kind of situations also. These small PMR phones come in handy quite often in various situations when need to communicate with friends over some distance, ie. when skiing in dense forest/other side of ridge/knoll/etc. when distance is too big for shouting. I'd say that using these easily improves safety of you and your friends... Before our trip to Niseko I found that at least the Australian PMR phones(477MHz frequency) are banned in Japan, because they are overlapping with TV frequencies.

I've followed this thread on background, as the topic is interesting and discussion around it seems quite "vivid", also I was still skiing on the same region last week so it would be interesting to know what and where actually happened... Regarding the original question that was presented in the first post, I heard some rumours on Finnish outdoor forum: Group of Finnish skiers(not involved in the accident) were skiing on that day in the Hanazono area, and they had spotted some ski-patrol activity "on the steeper part under the cat track, above the long traverse to Hanazono lift starts". Ac