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I learned to snowboard at the huge resorts in the snow country of Nagano Prefecture, site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. You can spend all day at some of these resorts and not go down the same trail twice. The trail map looks like a plate of spaghetti, and there are endless fields of powder in between the trails. But when I moved to Ehime Prefecture, the options were sharply reduced. The winter climate of Ehime is not particularly snowy. While the mountaintops are typically white for a few months in the winter, the snow isn’t deep, and doesn’t extend much into the valleys. Nevertheless, Ehime produces Olympic-class snowboarders, and the secret lies in a giant refrigerator known as A-X (Across), an indoor snowboard and ski slope which sits gleaming on a hillside in Shigenobu.
There are three or four winter sports fields in Ehime, depending on which ones are closed at any given time, but Across is always open. Although Ehime Prefectural Government has a policy of promoting the region through professional sports, it doesn’t have any involvement in Across. Nevertheless, Across has been successful in creating professional snowboarders (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms...)
I went to Across Shigenobu once in the autumn. It’s about a 30-minute drive from central Matsuyama. Both the single slope and the half-pipe are 90 meters long. For a ski slope, 90 meters is laughably short. You can get in about three turns, four if you’re quick, but making three turns in a giant refrigerator isn’t much fun. Another drawback is that people who can’t really snowboard like to go and give it a crack after a few drinks at an izakaya as an alternative to karaoke. You have to time your turns so as not to hit the beery-smelling people lying slumped on the ground in their rented kit.
But the slope isn’t what Across is really about anyway. It’s about jibbing and jumping. If the slope isn’t up to much, the funnables are pretty awesome for indoors. The half-pipe is a major piece of engineering, and with all the lights and roof-beams around it, it’s intimidating. Besides the half-pipe, there’s also a selection of jumps that are changed around according to need. As an environment for jumping, Across is intense.
There’s no scenery to gaze at or other distractions, and so the boarders or skiers huck their meat through some spins, get on the moving carpet up to the top, and do it again. And again. Meanwhile, they get very good at it. And they can do it all year if they want.
As I left, I saw a Japanese dude arrive on a longboard. He told me he lived just up the hill. When the winter comes, he doesn’t fool around with Ehime snow fields. He and his friends get in a station wagon and head up to the cold North with all their gear. Boarding is their way of life, and it’s a path that can lead to the Olympics for some, even from Ehime.
