With international tourists still absent, Japan’s ski resorts dig deep

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With international tourists still absent, Japan’s ski resorts dig deep

The ongoing pandemic could be the final blow for operators as memories of the ski boom — and bust — of the 1980s still linger

Yojiro Fukushima, director of the Tourism Commission of Hakuba Village, says just 800,000 or so guests visited Hakuba during the winter of 2020-21, which amounts to less than half of what the area had received in pre-pandemic times. | OSCAR BOYD

By Francesco Bassetti and Oscar Boyd
Contributing/staff writer

Jan 24, 2022

Hakuba, Nagano Pref. – Ask any skier or snowboarder for their list of must-visit winter destinations, and Japan will invariably feature.

“Nowhere in the world is there snow quite like it,” says a skier at the Hakuba Happo-One ski resort after more than 1 meter of snow fell in 48 hours during the opening week of January. “It’s fast, deep and just keeps coming.”

With mountains covering more than 70% of the country and some of the world’s heaviest snowfall, skiing is both an integral part of Japanese culture and a magnet for winter sports enthusiasts.

Yet, Japan has had a tumultuous love affair with the sport and resorts now face a number of long-term threats — from declining interest in snow sports to climate change — that have been compounded by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The domestic ski boom of the 1980s, fueled by the economic bubble and bookended by the 1972 Sapporo and 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics, led to a record 18 million skiers and snowboarders visiting the 700-plus ski resorts that dotted the country in 1998.

“When I was a child, Hakuba was a smaller ski resort run by local people,” says Toshiro Maruyama, who was born and raised in Hakuba and runs the award-winning Shirouma-so Ryokan that his grandfather started 85 years ago. “However, with the bubble era and then the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics, I experienced the ski boom first hand.”

The village of Hakuba lies at the foot of several large ski fields in Nagano Prefecture. | OSCAR BOYD

When that bubble burst, so too did the business models of many of those resorts. By 2016, there were only about 6 million active skiers left in the country and the number of resorts nationwide had fallen to around 500, many of which housed outdated infrastructure and were running with huge operating costs and spiraling debt.

“In the early 2000s, we had a very serious financial situation and we needed to find a solution that would bring tourists back to Hakuba,” says Yojiro Fukushima, director of the Tourism Commission of Hakuba Village.

“We realized that the Japanese economy was showing no signs of bouncing back, so we decided to promote Hakuba abroad, particularly in Australia,” Fukushima says. More recently, these promotional efforts have also targeted tourists from Asian markets such as China, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Before the pandemic, inbound skiers were a growing market, helping to stabilize the decline in domestic interest. Between 2013 and 2018, the number of inbound skiers in Japan increased from around 300,000 to more than 880,000.

The money that these winter sports enthusiasts brought to Japan helped to bolster local economies. According to the Japan Tourism Agency, inbound...