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Rip Zinger approaches life with the curiosity of a child. A traveler, photographer, skateboarder, snowboarder, surfer, health-conscious Japanese human, Rip is one of the most fun and positive people you could hope to know. Rip’s photography is genuine, raw, candid, and on the move. When he hit us up about covering Bowl & Banks we of course jumped at the opportunity. Read on to see why this fun event was created at Alts Bandai Resort in Fukushima, Japan. — Susie Floros, Editor in Chief
Hayato Maruyama, aka Bubbles made a Bowl that was inspired by pool skateboarding in 2005 and after that he kept making unique, original terrain, all hand-shaped for a long time.
He started to get orders from ski resorts so he had to figure out a format that can be maintained by a snow cat. That happened to appear at this resort Hakuba Hoppo One. It’s called “Banks.” As you can imagine from the name, this place has banks everywhere. Slashing the bank here and there is more surf inspired, I would say.
So this event B&B (Bowl & Banks) is the first event Bubbles wanted to bring both of these together. Pool skating = Dogtown & Z-Boys style, no jumps, handrails, fun boxes or others. Just get low and pure style status.
Surfing essence will bring the style of maneuvers, deep turns will bring rad top turns and big long slashes. Japanese have a little bit different perspective about snowboarding from the US or Europe I would say. Maybe because the mountains are not that steep. Maybe Japanese people are not as powerful as others. Instead of going straight to catch speed and make pointy impact explosion turn, we tune the edge and learn how to run the edge on the snow by carving. That will bring us the joy of connecting curve to curve, to draw one clean line top to bottom is the goal of riding, not catching people’s attention by fancy tricks.
It’s harder than pop and land, it’s more about taking advantage of snowboarding, not trying to skateboard or do rhythmic gymnastics on snow, it’s about taking advantage of binding straps.
It is maybe something that people in other countries won’t experience or appreciate. Everybody will try to find a spot to bust out their tricks they learned in the past. This aspect could be too mellow/quiet for some people. The world of lines, maneuvers — very surfy thing, deep and simple. This event Bowl and Banks is the mecca of this kind of snowboarding.
Pros invited from the US and all over Japan had to work on digging because record breaking snowfall buried the Bowl and Banks three days before the event. Everybody sweats together and rides together. In two days, 400 total people showed up under magical sunny weather. Amateurs, to pros to boys and girls.
Everybody rode free and had the best time and made the biggest smiles at this event.
Check out more of Rip’s work and adventures on Instagram: @ripzinger.
Watch also: Take an insane tree run with Travis Rice in Japan
