When Matt Georges visited Tadashi Fuse in his homeland of Hokkaido, Japan, he discovered an ethereal scene of impossibly deep snow, hidden roadside pillow lines, and a side of Japanese snowboard culture only known to those who call it home. Visions of Tadashi, JP Solberg, and Romain de Marchi in Tadashi’s Hokkaido paradise.

Tadashi was born a little more than 27 years ago in the Yamagata Prefecture on the principal Japanese Island of Honshu. He learned to snowboard in the surrounding mountains and then traveled the various islands of Japan before finally migrating to Whistler, where he now lives with his wife and their two little girls. Tadashi was the driving force behind the trip—he wanted to introduce us to the well-hidden secrets of Hokkaido. Famous for its resorts, live volcanoes, innumerable forests and aforementioned snow, Hokkaido is one of the northernmost Japanese islands and privy to Siberian-born snowstorms carried across the Pacific by prevailing northeast winds. It is a mecca of sorts—the icing on the cake, the saddle on the horse, the yellow of the egg, or, as Tadashi might put it, the sashimi on the rice when it comes to riding in Japan…

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