This and your other post kick ass. Love gaining insight into non-US skate cultures. Regionalism is one of the best things about skating in general I feel (though the internet is slowly blurring the lines)
I feel like the internet is only making regionalism more prevalent actually. Now everybody who skates (and has access to a phone) even in the middle of buttfuck nowhere earns the potential to be seen, and if they do interesting stuff they will stand out on their own due scale. You no longer have to order local full-lengths with doubt triggering cover art in order to get a (curated) taste of what's happening overseas in terms of raw skateboarding. Even those days of ordering local DVD's owe everything to the internet as it is the platform that served to establish basic communication in between scenes that bypassed the filter of print media. Hell, pretty much every smaller city skateboarder who's currently sponsored probably owes a lot more to the internet than we think. I think the lines are getting blurred in a good way, people will always be individuals so long as there will be fucked up bullshit to try and skate, if anything what we're getting out of this is that one no longer needs to fit in a mold and know the right people to publicly exist.
^ Thanks for that Silhouette. I guess the Overgound Broadcasting-type skating has an easier time getting featured on mainstream media like Thrasher, making it 100 times more likely to hit my eyeballs.
Did you live over there?
Never lived in Japan, but I've been there to skate, following the scene for over a decade and friends with dozens of Japanese skaters for a decade. Overground Broadcasting is packed with "conventional" street skating when you make the effort of looking past the production and presentation with the filming / editing, just super sick on difficult and good-looking spots and made look a certain way. It features tons of pros from the whole world over as well. But like you're saying, all most westerners like to remember is how exotic Gou Miyagi's part is, because a lot of people would rather laugh at cultural diversity like it's impenetrable as opposed to make the effort to learn.