Road to Santosha

The Kevin and Craig Show

Hippie Trail Gold

At Play in the Fields of Allah

Career Move

Grand Prix Dream

Follow the Money

Big in Japan

Rabbit's Big Adventure

Shaun Tomson's Tunnel Vision

South Africa in Black and White

Mark Richards, Gentleman Killer

Two Fins, More Wins

The Divine Miss M

The Fortune Seekers

Japan hosted four out of 13 IPS tour events in 1979. Pro surfers looked at the schedule and wondered if there’d been a misprint. But no, it was true. Four events in a row, right in the middle of the season. None of the contests turned out to be particularly interesting—waves for the JSP International Pro at Shonan Beach were so tiny, one surf journalist reported, that competitors had room for “a single turn before fins could be heard scraping the sand.” But the events formed a coming out party of sorts for Japan, which revealed itself to the Western surfing world as a distinctive and fairly bizarre surf nation.

The sport had been growing in Japan ever since the mid-'60s, when California 

 boardmaker and entrepreneur Tak Kawahara began to make regular visits to the east coast of Honshu island, where he spread his Malibu-learned surf gospel and quietly positioned himself as broker and middleman for the Japanese surf boom to follow. Japan’s postwar “economic miracle” was in its peak years, and before the decade was over a small but fully-formed surf economy—including domestic surfboard and surfwear manufacturers, brisk import trade, a thriving surf club scene, and a local competition circuit—materialized in the greater Tokyo area.

Japan was the most trend-crazed country in the world, so perhaps it’s no surprise it went crazy for surfing. More interesting was how the sport was appropriated, immediately, by 

 trends. The first and best example was the Tokyo Summerland water park, which opened in 1967. The park’s main attraction was the “Surfatorium,” a five-story glass-and-steel dome containing a 200-foot-long pool, with an industrial-grade forced-hydraulic pump system at one end capable of producing 20 highly-chlorinated waist-high waves per minute. Each wave sighed to a close upon a plasticized “beach,” opposite an indoor tropical hillside made up of hundreds of potted palms. Go-go girls Fruged and Watusied on a nearby stage while a house band played Beach Boys hits. Every hour, hundreds of Summerland park-goers streamed out of the water and for 15 minutes and stood politely by as pool was turned over to a handful of game but inexperienced local surfers—none of whom had ever ridden a real ocean wave.

Japan’s surf boom didn’t really explode until the late 1970s, however, and this seemed to have as much to do with style as surfing. The IPS stars from Australia, Hawaii, and elsewhere were by then all riding brightly-colored boards layered with sponsors’ logos—just like most of the items bursting out of the popular department stores in Tokyo’s Ginza district. New Wave attitude came into play as well. Everybody on tour was listening to Blondie, Devo, and the B-52s, and preening along to the music, and this was hugely attractive to Japan’s young, free-spending, vogue-sensitive youth.

Some of the Japanese newcomers became dedicated surfers. They had surf—not an abundance, but enough. Pacific Ocean typhoons usually track to the east, away from the coast, which means an entire swell event can pass by in just a day or two. Mostly what arrives is smallish local windswell. However, the entire Japanese coast, west side included, is filled with bays, points, headlands and rivermouths, with lots of beaches in-between, and a few times a year, when conditions all line up, the waves change quickly from knee-high gurglers to overhead A-grade bottle-green tubes. Wave consistency in Japan, in fact, is similar to the American East Coast, but the set-ups are much better. When Japan turns on, the surf is on par with the world's best breaks.

The vast majority of Japan’s first- and second-generation surfers lived in the greater Tokyo region. Because of this, the sport developed mostly in the feeble and badly polluted sandbar waves of nearby Sagami Bay, and among the slightly better (and cleaner) reefs and beaches of Chiba, a semi-rural length of coast on the Pacific side of Chiba Prefecture, about 45 minutes by train southeast of Tokyo. Mobility and patience were the defining traits of the hardcore Japanese surfer. Individuality was not. “The nail that sticks up is hammered down,” the Japanese proverb states, and to a degree not found anywhere else in the world, Japanese surfers dressed, talked, and rode their waves very much alike. But the lineups were filled with talent, and a few stood out internationally during the late 1970s. Two of the best were Norihiko Okano and Hiromichi Soeda (both greatly influenced by Mikio Kawai, Japan's original pro surfer), from the Tokyo area. Okano was a fast, nimble regularfooter who performed well in the 1978 Stubbies event in Australia. Soeda charged the big stuff and was IPS-ranked at number 30 in 1979. He was also his country’s most cosmopolitan surfer, having traveled to Hawaii, Indonesia, California, and Australia.

But the Japanese pros, in the 1970s and after, made little or no impression outside of their country. Trade, industry, and commerce—this is what Japan soon meant to the surf world at large.

Japanese surf shops had long been importing boards from America, but demand skyrocketed around the time the IPS was formed. By 1982 individual stores were placing orders for as many as a thousand boards a year. Big-name overseas shapers were in high demand. Rather than ship in finished boards from people like Dick Brewer, Gerry Lopez, or 

 Robert August, the shapers instead arranged work furloughs in Japan. For most, it was a lonely, dull, labor-intensive gig—but the terms were impossible to resist. After contracting with a Japanese manufacturer to produce a set number of shaped blanks (anywhere from 50 to 200) over a set period of time (usually two to six weeks), the shaper was flown into Tokyo on the company account, housed and fed, given a clean state-of-the-art workstation, and paid anywhere from two to four times his usual piecework rate. Everyone came out ahead. The shaper left with a five- or six-digit check. The manufacturer got a big stack of “name” boards without having to pay import prices. The customer had a better and less-expensive range of boards to choose from.

Japanese wetsuit and neoprene companies meanwhile were exporting their wares. The country had a gift for taking foreign-developed products and making them better and less expensive than the original, and so it was with neoprene rubber. By 1980, the Japanese had come up with a softer, more flexible neoprene, and were shipping it by the thinly-sliced ton to leading wetsuit companies in America and Australia. Victory and Hotline, both Tokyo-based manufacturers, were by then exporting wetsuits to California. Neither company was identified as Japanese in their US advertising; American customers had grown to love their durable Sony and Toyota products, but “Made in Japan” still had a cheap-goods rap left over from the '50s and '60s. Victory and Hotline marked the opening of an East-to-West trade in finished surf goods, and in years to come, this only expanded.

At its height, Japan’s mainstream surf retail made all previous efforts—including America’s mid-'60s surf boom—look penny-ante by comparison. By 1982, Marui, the Japanese version of May Company, had not only turned over much of their sporting goods department to boards, wetsuits, and wave-riding equipment of every description, but it also filled the activewear sections of both the men’s and women’s departments with endless racks of surf company T-shirts, sweatshirts, trunks, walkshorts, and bikinis. Surf products made up $10 million of Marui’s annual sales, and other Japanese department stores weren’t far behind. Marui sponsored its first pro tour contest in 1981, launching the event with a uniformed marching band, skyrockets, a field of helium-filled balloons, and a cheerleading squad in matching “Marui Surf Pro” satin jackets. Surfing as yet had no trade associations, and nobody bothered to produce any composite national or international surf industry sales figures. But 

 ventured a guess in 1983 that the sport was “now a bigger industry in Japan than perhaps anywhere else in the world.”

 magazine hired South African world tour pro Michael Tomson to report on the IPS contests in Japan. “It’s hard to believe that such enthusiasm for 

 could reach these dizzying heights,” he wrote from the bleachers at Tsushido Beach, one of the event sites, looking out at a huge afternoon throng of spectators. Was it the biggest crowd ever gathered for a surfing contest? Close, but probably not. Then again, 

 At 7 am, a lack of surf had forced a postponement until the following morning. Yet the beach and surf zone continued to fill up. “Stretching down the coast,” Tomson continued, “all you can see are surfers, hundreds and hundreds of them, sitting in large clumps. This mystifies me. The surf is flat. Not one foot or one-to-two feet, but dead flat. In fact, from where I’m sitting it looks almost 

Tomson was the era’s most urbane pro, well-traveled and college-educated. But in Japan it was one episode of future shock after the other. He visited surf shops that carried surf-themed cologne, snacks, and stationary. At the bars and discos, he saw huge corner-mounted TV screens jacked into an amazing playback device the Japanese called a VTR, or video tape recorder. For hours at a time, the TV screens showed nothing but world-tour surfers riding the North Shore. Even the unflagging politeness of the Japanese surfers was a bit unsettling. Surfing newcomers In Durban—and in Los Angeles, Honolulu, Sydney, and every other surf-world capital—were ignored or vibed. In Japan, visiting surfers were met with smiles and bows. Not just the pros. Everybody.

The growth continued. In 1981, Japanese National Railways began allowing passengers to ride with surfboards, which by some accounts doubled the crowds overnight. Two years later, 

, a Tokyo-based monthly magazine combining pro surfer interviews and contest coverage with fashion spreads and makeup tips, had a 600,000-strong readership. This wasn’t just the biggest surf-themed publication in the world. It was roughly equivalent to all other surf magazines combined.

 subscribers didn’t wax up and paddle out, just as the readers of magic-girl 

 didn't go to battle against evil monsters. It was the look—the trend—that counted. Japan’s surf vogue was of a piece with the tens of thousands of landlocked Americans who bought Weber Surfboards T-shirts in the mid-'60s, and the squealing roomfuls of Aussie schoolgirls who stomped away their Friday nights to Little Pattie records. But Japanese surf fever hit a new level of consumer extravagance. It also introduced the sport to trend-fusion: by the early 1980s, the coolest bus-riding Tokyo teenagers, outfitted head to toe in the latest surf gear, were hunched over a new handheld electronic game called “Surferboy”— the forerunner to Nintendo’s Game Boy.

Japan was the most trend-happy country in the world, and it went crazy for surfing. In 1983, readership for 

, a Tokyo-based monthly, was 600,000-strong—roughly equivalent to all other surf magazines in the world combined.

Chapter: 6

The Fortune Seekers

Big in Japan

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos

Contests