Japan Surf Pioneers Northern island dissidents
Surfing in Japan has never been for the meek. Those who came to it early faced new obstacles every day, from sub-zero temperatures to over-zealous police. But on the northern island of Hokkaido, one group of pioneers found a way through the wall.
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The police officer pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and surveys the two figures standing in front of him. Noboru Tagawa jumps up and down on the spot to keep warm as the chill begins to seep through his damp wetsuit; Kasagi Hajime glances repeatedly over the cop’s dark epaulette as the next set peaks and peels along the sandbar. The officer shakes his head and continues scribbling on his flip pad. ‘How many times are we going to have to drag these two out of the water?’ he wonders. “Ok, sign this,” he says, handing over the ballpoint to the shivering surfer. Noboru scribbles his name and passes the now damp paperwork back. The officer snaps his pad closed and turns on his heel, kicking sand off his immaculate leather shoes as he heads back towards his car. “I’m coming back again tomorrow,” shouts one of the neoprene-clad figures as the officer climbs into the driver’s seat of the Nissan Cedric patrol car and starts the engine. It’s 1978 and a quiet revolution has begun on this northern isle.
“Every time I went into the water back then the police would come and kick me back onto the beach,” says Noboru, taking a sip of his black coffee. “They would write me a ticket for responsibility, because there was no one else there. It’s like a statement to say I won’t do it again. But after writing it I would always tell them, ‘I will be coming back tomorrow!’” This game of cat and mouse would go on for the next three or four years. In Hawaii Shaun Tomson was redefining the art of barrel riding at Off-The-Wall and Rabbit was attempting to Bust Down The Door at Sunset and Pipe. On Hokkaido, Noboru was just trying to avoid being busted by the law for the simple act of surfing.
Japan was born from the waves as molten rock violently extruded from the Pacific ‘ring of fire’, creating an offshore archipelago that, in part, buffers the huge Asian land mass from the great ocean. There are 6,852 islands within Japan, Hokkaido being the northernmost and largest prefecture. It is the second biggest island with a population of over five and a half million spread out over an area just smaller than Ireland. The majority of Hokkaidō sits at latitudes to the north of the Russian city of Vladivostok, enduring winters that can test the hardiest constitution as deathly winds slice in from the Siberian plains with the clinical sharpness of a Samurai’s cold Katana blade. The provincial capital Sapporo is a bustling metropolis of nearly two million; the country’s fifth largest urban conurbation. It provides a dazzling sensory collage that satisfies every preconception of urban Japan. Traffic, shopping, crowds, street dancing and the intense work ethic of a 24/7 society are set against a background noise of Pachinko halls and rafts of neon billboards that sing out competing advertising slogans. Yet within thirty minutes of its centre you can be transported to wide valleys where shrines wait in shady woodlands and herons stalk shimmering paddy fields.
Japanese society has a structure based on traditions that reach back through the millennia; it’s an establishment built on the ethics of hard work and adherence to a strict moral code. For some traditionalists, the concept of leisure time is still something of an anathema. Naminori, or waveriding, is thought to have arrived during the cultural shockwaves that followed the Second World War, brought in by American servicemen stationed outside Tokyo. By the early ’60s a handful of locals were surfing the beaches of Shonan and Chiba, by the late ’70s Japan was in the grip of a full-blown surf boom, fuelled by world tour contests bringing star-packed line-ups to its shores. On Hokkaido the beaches remained unoccupied – a blank canvas…
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Japan Surf Pioneers (text) by Chris Nelson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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