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Skateboarding => Appreciation! => Topic started by: Sundaynuggets on May 11, 2020, 08:45:15 AM
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Came up in the Leo Valls thread as another super interesting skater that does super fun looking slidey things, but everything else he does is slick too.
Oldiebutfrenchie posted this part over there
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LujB02iwyE
https://www.instagram.com/p/B96bv8Glpfd/?igshid=nyxhxtjeq9h0
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytxbe0IRUTA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWs7XRitwF8
https://www.freeskatemag.com/2017/12/25/shinpei-ueno-in-the-evisen-video/
You May Also Like: Lui Araki (used to be the Japanese Zoo York rider super early on)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUPRltB-xb4
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Shinpei is a badass
I always appreciated the Japanese skateboarding mindset where it’s less what tricks you’re doing but more how you’re doing them and also what spot you’re doing them at
But he has the tricks plus that sensibility and strong style
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No one has made me want to skate the streets of Japan more than him. Glad to see him get recognition on SLAP.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytxbe0IRUTA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWs7XRitwF8
https://www.freeskatemag.com/2017/12/25/shinpei-ueno-in-the-evisen-video/
You May Also Like: Lui Araki (used to be the Japanese Zoo York rider super early on)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUPRltB-xb4
Niiiice! I can’t remember where i heard Araki’s name but I’m glad you shared that part. I love those fast shove its and the powerslide/nose slide type stuff. Awesome
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No one has made me want to skate the streets of Japan more than him. Glad to see him get recognition on SLAP.
For sure, so many of those spots looks super fun. It’s like an architect had a toy box full of random obstacles and just decided to stack them in crazy ways. “Let’s put this ledge perpendicular to a mini quarter pipe with a flat bar in the middle of it”
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Niiiice! I can’t remember where i heard Araki’s name but I’m glad you shared that part. I love those fast shove its and the powerslide/nose slide type stuff. Awesome
Lui is amazing. Maybe you remember his name from a guest board he had on Magenta a few years back. His part in the first Strush Wheels video "Collective Improvisation" is also incredible ("Cityscape" is the brand's more recent full-length, so it traveled around the globe a bit better but that older DVD is definitely worth finding). Also a skilled photographer and runs the brand Live In Fab Earth: https://www.instagram.com/liveinfabearth/
https://www.instagram.com/p/B8-mjPJhYGb/
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Niiiice! I can’t remember where i heard Araki’s name but I’m glad you shared that part. I love those fast shove its and the powerslide/nose slide type stuff. Awesome
Lui is amazing. Maybe you remember his name from a guest board he had on Magenta a few years back. His part in the first Strush Wheels video "Collective Improvisation" is also incredible ("Cityscape" is the brand's more recent full-length, so it traveled around the globe a bit better but that older DVD is definitely worth finding). Also a skilled photographer and runs the brand Live In Fab Earth: https://www.instagram.com/liveinfabearth/
https://www.instagram.com/p/B8-mjPJhYGb/
Dang, I need to find that video! Looking through his stuff on YouTube, I think I came across him when I was binge watching loose truck skaters and came across Koichiro Uehara, which led me down a rabbit hole where I think I saw Araki.
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I wasn't really sold when I saw Gou Miyagi's stuff for the first time....but now I'm really hyped on Lui Araki and Shipei Ueno! so I'm off into a youtube japanese rabbit hole I guess ;D
btw Japanese society seems so strict and rigid and japanese cities seem so dense, I wonder how street skaters are perceived over there? total outcasts?
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A bit. It’s still kinda like skating in the 80’s, bad boy image, smaller population, local scenes, kinda clique-y. But a decent girl’s scene, population-wise.
And it used to be VERY fashion-orientated, almost laughably so. Thankfully that’s mellowed our a bit.
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I’ll add that back in the day, dudes were almost like carbon copies of American pros, you can still find straight up clones (I guess they exist in every country) these days, but I think most skaters here have recognized they have their own scene/ style and they should be proud of that.
Chopper needs more credit in helping birth this style, he was doing similar shit 20+ years ago when the rest of the world was in “hammer” mode And dudes here were doing their best Smolik impersonations.
I think this is my fav showcase of the “Japanese style” of skating, never gets old for me:
http://youtu.be/GlDo2i_tXIg
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http://youtu.be/6ZPclz-rAjI
Kento Yoshioka is also going to take this style to the next level in the coming years!
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I’ll add that back in the day, dudes were almost like carbon copies of American pros, you can still find straight up clones (I guess they exist in every country) these days, but I think most skaters here have recognized they have their own scene/ style and they should be proud of that.
Chopper needs more credit in helping birth this style, he was doing similar shit 20+ years ago when the rest of the world was in “hammer” mode And dudes here were doing their best Smolik impersonations.
I think this is my fav showcase of the “Japanese style” of skating, never gets old for me:
http://youtu.be/GlDo2i_tXIg
actually that's one of the reasons I'm so stoked on Leo Valls' skating. even the best French guys from my generation (like Daclin, JB or Larance for ex) were following the American pros' lead. To see some guy out of Bordeaux come up with something original and make Americans take notice is really inspirational and the same goes for Japanese skaters. Who's Chopper btw ?
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Who's Chopper btw ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hf91JNrkz8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSZ1hcM5nQU
Sounds like you badly need to rewatch the old Heroin vids!
Gou Miyagi is a great skateboarder, just old. Twenty plus years ago he was hitting wild spots and doing some very legit advanced handrail stuff, since then he's been through injuries and had kids, he's a lifelong genius of his own kind, but of course most Westerners with a standardized vision of skateboarding aren't even going to bother looking up his old stuff and just stop at 'huhu, look at this exotic guy' like I'm sorry to witness all the time. His name comes up in conversations a lot and I don't really get picking just one guy out of a whole country worth of skateboarders to exemplify a scene that's been rich and strong for decades, or when people talk about 'Japanese skateboarding' like it's something especially fancy because they've run into a section of Overground Broadcasting once and remember seeing a few more powerslides than they're used to in their necks of the woods.
Also this is important:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HdGvyFBd5Y
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Funny you mention Leo; I actually thought he was copying EE3 style and Japanese style skating a little too much there for a minute. Then it seemed like he found his own groove and created a style of his own which spawned something beautiful and unique. Looking back I think maybe Leo was just wearing his influences on his sleeve; sort of like how people on here were mentioning a young Andrew Reynolds copying Tom Penny’s style
Chopper is the Osaka Daggers guy that rides for Herion. Sure, these days you mightn’t think he’s *that* unique but in the year 2000 no one was doing shit like this, and if they were they certainly weren’t getting props for it:
http://youtu.be/JMKoL82po0g
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^ That's just how cultural transmission works, in Morita's filming style for instance you could already sense a lot of Dan Wolfe influences early on, in general humans start by studying how other people do something before coming up with their own (I find the Japanese in general to be really good at reinterpreting existing phenomenons to the point of making it their own), and during their formative years where they're still sucking up the influences they more often than not wear them on their sleeves yes, because it naturally takes some time for style in everything to mature and shine; one starts with just a few reference points in everything they tackle, then little by little they expand over to the whole picture and better understand what they're trying to do themselves. Later on Yoan literally exported Morita's filming style over to the West, too, starting in Europe but as the Internet was blowing up people as far as in the U.S. really caught up on it, all that shit really is just some transcontinental ping pong game the most passionate players build upon the rules of with every smash.
I guess this very process of progressive discovery also explains the common superficial perception of 'Japanese skateboarding' I was rambling about earlier, but even with a logical reason for the phenomenon I still find it frustrating sometimes seeing how geographical boundaries still affect the spreading of a global culture (but at the same time, it's very interesting to study).
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Great summary and as usual I agree with you on most all your points.
Japanese are able to taking existing subcultures and then completely make them their own, I see it in tattoos, chopper culture and hardcore/ noise music genres just to name a few (craft beer is experiencing a boom here at the moment so I think that will also get a Japanese twist in the near future.
And yes, the perception/ stereotype of Japanese skating is quite superficial because only a handful of skaters here actually skate like that. But I guess again that’s the same anywhere; when rail skating/ hammers was big in the media that’s all we saw, but that doesn’t mean chopper was doing 540 power slides at night with his homies in Osaka. Skating media, in general, just tends to focus on the flavor of the month but luckily it’s more diverse than ever at the moment.
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Dang, I need to find that video!
The brand just put it up on YouTube via VHS Mag after we brought it up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1lZuR6E6uY
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Dang, I need to find that video!
The brand just put it up on YouTube via VHS Mag after we brought it up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1lZuR6E6uY
Man, I’m only ten minutes in and this is so good. The spots are so cool and the trick selections are so fun, interesting and unexpected!
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The whole “fast feet” style of skating pleases me greatly, as does the gratuitous sliding that I frequently see accompanying it.
Backing it heavy.