mrjamie

Originally Posted By: hipsterandjane i got some unimpressed looks for that! cheers for coming out and saying it though!

Originally Posted By: DumbStick Are you angry new jam? no way! I'm just a forum member that's all.

'Foreigners' overrun with misconceptions of the orient invade Niseko looking for a past that was never there -- meanwhile Nozawa tourists ignore the hypermaterialistic present of Japanese cultural arbiters, young people modeling the latest snowboard gear and snow wear, and see instead the fictitious reality half of their own making half a marketing campaign directed towards urbanized youth fed off of soda-pop dreams of nostalgia. Next time I visit Australia I'll be sure to post some nasty comment asking why it is that a country with aboriginal culture whored itself out to the internationa

Originally Posted By: torihada can see where they're coming from. A close Japanese friend works as a guide in another industry and works only for Japanese companies in the UK. The Japanese guides get treated pretty poorly and their pay (among other things)is way below the comparative UK guides working for UK companies. So I think guide's associations are pretty good if it gives them some clout when negotiating with companies, otherwise they'll be expected to work for free, with no holiday, for 40 years, for the good of the company. Oh I wish, that would be really nice for them. Unfortunat

mm, I figured Rag-Doll was just raggin' on me. That's ok though, the observant readers will have noticed my entire post was just one big plug anyways!

Originally Posted By: MikePow Do any of the members of the Niseko Winter Guide Association have formal guiding certification e.g. Canadian Mountain and Ski Guide (CMSG); International Federation of Mountain Guide Associations (IMFGA)? They have something much more important: a virtual stranglehold over the customer base because everyone does prepackaged stuff now. Soon enough it'll be a cartel with initiation writes, such as taking annoying customers for 'long lessons' off of 'short lifts'.

wow i ought to brush all the powder snow off, it's been a while since i posted, i almost got buried beneath the new forum posts. meanwhile super baka rose to among the top-viewed videos.yay so you all know how i feel about niseko I worked at NAC last year and one of my friends/coworkers was a skier from Colorado (also in the video, the lone skier). Whenever we would talk about development and Niseko he laughed and said 'Well this might be getting developed, but it's still nothing compared with Aspen.' We can moan and complain and compare and contrast and maybe even analyze, but we can't

I didn't buy a new board this year because there was nothing wrong with my board from last year. ;p we need a nice environment for plenty of cold weather and snow, support green boards or repairs & refurbished/used models. imagine if Burton stopped making new boards seasonally and instead retooled used boards for a third price every other season....mmm. edit: boards from last year. and i had to buy a replacement board last year but that's not related! at all! really!

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger... ... seems to be the general logic surrounding the most frequent response to global warming. People, it is said, will not change, so we need to make cuts and edits between the lines, to leave things as they are but with a friendlier, more sustainable motor coughing at full capacity under the hood. To power the motor we must discover a new fuel or mobile power supply at least. A softer, more expansive power supply that will radiate energy, just like the nuclear reactors have irradiated kilometers of soil, mega-liters of water. I apologize for si

i'll pass it on to kei-san, who took the picture. We'll try to get more when we go to yotei or the rumored 60 degree slope near the sea of japan/korea/china.

I ride switch with 30/30 binding angles, and the other day I saw a hard-booter with extreme angles carving tight turns in switch. That was probably the most impressive thing I've seen all season. Higher binding angles makes carving toe-side really easy switch. So easy I do it all the time. i.e., by accident. whoops. Oyuki gave great advice: keep your weight on your front foot! And get used to sliding turns again: think of it like you're re-learning how to snowboard, with a different foot. good luck!

The malolo is an awesome ride, but if anything it's a little too easy to ride in powder. On piste it can hold an edge no problem -- I had hard plates on it last season, in powder and on piste -- though it does chatter, the trade for a super-light board with 'extra slash'. I had one of the longer malolos, a 16x, but sold it to my flatmate this season after buying a 187 rad-air. Comparing two boards that differ more than 20cm in length is probably neither beneficial nor fair; no matter, the rad-air takes a little more technique to ride proficiently (and this is with soft boots), but I feel

The top picture is looking off of Chise-nupuri to Nitonupuri, Iwaonupuri and Annupuri; Yotei is deep in clouded thought in the far background. The second shot is coming down the trees in Iwao -- There wasn't that much speed, so I put my energy into a tight toeside carve... into a flat laying down stop ;p good thing for rapid fire cameras!

The warm sun shone on champagne snow, after a sparkling ascent we played for a few hours here and there. have a fun day in the snow.

Why not choose a board around your riding style? I'm 5'8" and 70kg, my shortest board is 16x -- the Rad Air Tanker I picked up this season is 187cm. It seems like Japan is famous for powder and tree-runs; that might dictate the length of your board if you're not sure about style. How long have you been riding for?

Yea, thursday, you're exactly right, but you don't think that the many foreigners, especially Brazillians, Chinese and Koreans, who are residents of Japan deserve the same privacy rights as native Japanese citizens? What about foreigners who have married Japanese? Are citizens or residents of a 'sovereign country' supposed to forfeit every right to the whim of the country? Is Pakistan within its rights suspending the constitution because it is in the interest of preserving the rule of a specific president in a 'sovereign country'? How the Japanese government can justify this for visitors

When did citizens of nations become sheep who need a wolf to protect the flock? How can governments talk about oblique ideas of safety when policies of market expansion and liberalization have stripped from millions of farmers, workers, and business owners across the world any semblance of social and financial security? What kind of safety can the government possibly offer by holding onto my fingerprints and biometrics that it can't offer through the information it has already? Identifying my corpse if I die in an avalanche? Is that for my safety, or so my family/friends can pay for

early december in niseko when I move up there to work come visit! let's ride shiribetsu yama:p

Just going through some camera-films and pictures of last season ... and then listening to the new Wax Tailor album I had an urge to put the two together. Here's looking forward to an entire season in niseko...

cheers. I grew up playing video games online; deathly allergic to sarcasm, humour, and any other semantics when used in online forums; I risk bringing out the 13 year old in me again. and so, as cliche as they are, smiles are much appreciated. winter or summer.

Most of the 'hardcore' riders in niseko would spend more time on Yotei or go out to the nupuri ranges, or to shiribetsu...

I love moguls for the technical practice they give snowboarders. Icy, steep moguls. Great riding after in the powder

Whoops, I'm working on a collage of summer photos for my girlfriend, so I accidentally slipped up. I meant to write 'last winter.'

by the way, last summer Iwate in general had a horrible year for snow... so did Niseko, but in Iwate you could see the foliage on the sides of the roads... Off piste was untraveled and pretty good when I went in February, but the piste had dirt showing in places...

Nishimori is great, but they don't open it up unless there is a ton of snow: bring snowshoes and have it all to yourself like I did great under the gondola runs too ...