Mountains account for most of Japan's land area and provide what must have seemed like endless opportunities to enjoy this new sport. Businesses soon saw that potential and began developing mountainsides in Honshu and Hokkaido. Ski areas soon appeared all over Japan, including some of today's best-known ski areas.
Early momentum in the 1950s
The development of ski areas with lifts started gaining momentum in the 1950s. Many of the early ski areas were constructed in or close to already popular onsen hot spring towns. It was only later that development started to expand into more rural and undeveloped regions.
In the 1960s, Japan enjoyed rapid economic growth, and more people were taking trips in what is sometimes known as the first major 'ski boom' in Japan.
The oil shock in the first part of the 1970s put brakes on progress, but development accelerated again during the 1980s.
Over 1,500 ski lifts were built on Japanese mountains between 1980 and 1990. In the last few years of the 1980s, more than 200 new ski lifts appeared each season.
However, construction quickly slowed during the 1990s, with significantly fewer lifts being built by the middle of the decade. In the early 2000s, about 10-20 ski lifts were built each season in Japan.
Some significant new lifts have been installed over the last few years (examples include Nozawa Onsen, Niseko HANAZONO Resort, and Ishiuchi Maruyama), and several new or replacement lifts are planned at ski areas in Niseko, Myoko, and Hakuba. Nowadays, such new lifts and facilities are fairly big news.
The most recent entirely new ski area to open in Japan was Mineyama Kogen Resort White Peak in Hyogo Prefecture in 2017. Before then, it had been 14 years since the previous new ski area opened.
Since the first one opened in the early 1910s, Japan has had around 900 officially named ski areas. The most ski areas operating at any one time was more than 720, around the year 2000.
Some ski areas started to close around 1970, but that was often due to ageing facilities or competition from more ambitious and modern projects opening nearby. Only later did ski areas start closing due to broader economic reasons, declining visitor numbers, or lack of snowfall.
Of course, there have been exceptions, but many of the earlier ski areas to close usually had a few main characteristics. They were often small-scale, with only one or two simple lifts and ageing facilities, and were operated by villages, towns, and cities rather than private companies.
There were many cases where the merging of villages and towns doomed a ski area.
A few different Japanese terms are used to describe the status of a ski area that still exists but is not currently open or operating.
休止 or 休業
These terms basically mean closed or 'operations paused', implying a temporary status.
廃止 or 廃業
These terms have more of a feeling of finality and are often translated as 'abolished'.
Some ski areas in Japan have been described using the former phrase for literally decades, even after facilities have been completely removed. Others have reopened after taking some time off for one reason or another, usually after a management change. But a temporary closure has often led to the ski area closing for good.
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This vague period between being temporarily closed and abolished may explain why some abandoned ski area facilities remain in place, surrounded by ever-growing forests.
It also explains why it is notoriously difficult to give an exact number of ski areas in Japan in any one year.
Visitors to ski areas in the 2020s often notice ski lifts that remain in place but are no longer used. There are two main reasons for that. First, fewer skiers and snowboarders are on the slopes, so the lifts are simply beyond requirements. Second, in other cases, the lifts are ageing and in need of maintenance. Taking them down would be expensive, so they are simply left to stand.
Snowboarding and the inbound market have revived interest in the winter sports scene since the 1990s. Even so, the number of skiers and snowboarders decreased from around 18 million in 1998 to about 5 million in 2020.
Winter sports are not a cheap pastime, of course, and with the explosion of alternative entertainment, the scene has been struggling to keep people coming back as much as they used to. Most people in the industry would probably admit (off the record) that there are still simply too many ski areas out there.
Given the budgetary restrictions and challenging circumstances, some ski areas have been looking for other ways to get people back on the slopes rather than simply skiing and snowboarding. As a result, additional activities and facilities for families and children, such as snow parks, backcountry tours, snowmobiling, sledging, and snow tubing, are now widespread. We can probably expect that trend to continue in the coming years.
