Hakuba

They tend to be not huge vert, sort of compact.

If they do have a lot of vert, like the Hakuba Valley ski resorts that are on Vail, they tend to go kind of straight up and be side by side.

You don't have a lot of the mega resorts as you would have in North America or especially in Europe.

So it's good that the passes are all building density in Japan because – The ski areas are not, this is not a place that you would go to necessarily like Vail Mountain and spend a week or like Whistler.

At the time, Japan doesn't really strike me as the kind of place to go to.

It's not like the Niseko of today or the Hakuba of today where people like to come for skiing and snowboarding.

What kind of videos, like what did you see? which is also early 2000 before kind of social media really came to be.

Where did you find that interest in these Japanese snowboarding videos?

We're opening a coffee shop in Otaru and our plan is to find a local person to give ownership of the coffee shop too.

So that's like, I guess a little way that we're just trying to figure out to give back to Otaru.

But yeah, I think in places like Niseko, Hakuba, Tokyo, people have been getting priced out.

So it's a tough question to answer.

at all.

So I guess Hakuba started.

You guys did the first couple of years.

The space evolved.

They were

allowed to get to Europe, so they were like, oh.

We come to Hakuba, so it made it feel like we came home.

And because they were foreigners and it was just, like, you shouldn't travel, they just did.

So if you're going to buy a house near a ski resort at this point in history, you have to be rich if you want to ski and ski out place because those were the first to blow up.

Niseko, Hakuba, Miyoko, Furano.

If you're like us buying an affordable house with your boys, you're probably gonna buy in a central town that has a bunch of commuter resorts nearby a lot of times they're pretty densely packed together like we have seven we could drive to but they're anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes away so that is the main difference i would say i kind of

like that though personally like i'd rather have variety than like wake up every morning and ski the same resort that's just my opinion

We definitely aren't sponsored at all.

We could talk about Epic because they just recently got into the game of Japan.

They're all over Hakuba Valley, right? I think there's like nine or ten resorts.

Most of them are small resorts, but they kind of are all in that region around Nagano.

I stuck it out.

Hey, hey, was it Hakuba, H-uh, i-that you, you skied, was it?

Oh, where did you ski? Yeah.

Oh, down at, uh, uh, Sapporo.