Hokkaido calling

A week before he came across the sea to film Hokkaido Calling, Sam Smoothy was seeping himself in the hi-fi totalitarian weirdness of North Korea. As he toured the Hermit Kingdom’s fledgling snowfields, guides provided by supreme leader Kim Jong-un shadowed Smoothy’s every step – each stop strictly scheduled, each rendezvous carefully choreographed. “It was an interesting way to come into Japan,” says Smoothy, “because Japan felt like being back in the West after that, like being in a much more normal country. Which is funny because when you go to Japan, it’s so bizarre and amazing and quirky and weird.”

Japan is weird. (Pachinko parlours and Harajuku girls and cuddle cafes! Fugu fish and men paid to jam salarymen into rush-hour trains! Vending machines and $300 melons!) But it’s also a country where you’re free to roam – and, armed with an A6 quattro and two companions – Smoothy was keen to make the most of it.

(watch full film below)

The three-man coterie of freeride world tour professional skiers – Smoothy, from New Zealand, Swiss Jérémie Heitz and Australian/American Dane Tudor – decided to plan a “simple and pared back” two-week Japanese sojourn as loosely as possible.

“Yeah, we just collected the cars from Audi and said, ‘Let’s go hunt snow!’,” says Smoothy. “Often with road trips, you have a schedule you have to stick to, even when it might not be good where you are, and you wish you were somewhere else. 

“Instead, we just drove, hunted snow and chased pow[der] turns. I think we took one ski lift in the entire time. We’d just see something, stop, skin off the side of the highway and head into the back country! We’d ski in a place for a few days and then push our noses around another valley and see what was up there and ski all day in the back country, not see anyone else, and then come home, have a big feed of sashimi and ramen, have an onsen and be in bed by 9’o’clock.”

The result speaks for itself in terms of powder. The region receives 15 metres of snowfall a season, and as Hokkaido Calling’s opening scenes suggest, the trio found new opportunities at every turn.

“There’s so much snow there that it’s pretty incredible,” says Smoothy. “Deep fields of over-your-head powder that you just fly through, and bounce down, and glide on. It’s pretty surreal. 

“It’s pretty clichéd, but it’s hard to describe what it’s like skiing proper deep powder. It really is basically just like floating – like flying down a hill of big, fluffy pillows as this incredibly dry, cold ‘smoke’ billows around you. It’s an incredible feeling.”

Smoothy is a #quattroroadtrip pro – he starred in the last year’s sojourn to Haines, Alaska, which began with unusually bad snow in Canada but ended up scoring blue-sky days in America’s 49^th state. That trip wrapped with three days of what Smoothy calls “life-changing” heli-skiing. “But Japan!” he says, “I think I liked Japan even more.”

Hokkaido Calling’s closing scenes, on a steeply tiered roadside, are something else again. Exploring Hokkaido in their A6 (“I’ve never been in cars as beautiful as that”), Smoothy, Heitz and Tudor spied what the Kiwi describes as “a big landscaping project, I guess, to stabilise the hillside above the highway”. Naturally, they decided to try to ski it.

“The engineers had concreted in these huge ledges to stabilise everything, and then the ledges had just become buried in snow. It was very steep, the face of it, with these constant, tiered pillows. 

“On the first run I was definitely nervous – it looked like you would start bouncing, and then eventually just bounce 200ft to the road below. So we were pretty tentative at the start. But we soon realised that it was not only possible, but really good fun, and we had an awesome time.”

“It was one of the weirdest, but also one of the more enjoyable things, that I’ve ever skied. It was incredible.

And a nice final memory to take home from a country that, in the end, is not as weird as Smoothy once thought.

Back in North Korea, Smoothy says, the newspaper runs a front page image of Kim Jong-un, in every single edition. “And the big thing for them is not disrespecting the leader, so after you’re done with the paper, you can’t fold it up, you can’t scrunch it up, you can’t throw it in the bin,” says Smoothy. “I don’t know how you get rid of it. I just had to… carry it around in my hand.” 

For nine days. Eventually, in exasperation, Smoothy handed the paper back to one of his minders. 

On the contrary, over his two weeks in Japan, Smoothy’s only minders were his mates. And when not on the slopes, his hands were usually occupied by his diary – the ruminations in which Smoothy used, retrospectively, to give Hokkaido Calling its philosophical voiceover. 

“We were moving at such a nice peaceful pace, going wherever we wanted, skiing whatever we wanted, and all in these beautiful cars,” he says, “that it was nice to sit there and ponder, and ponder what all that means to you.”

For Smoothy, it means he’ll be heading back as his earliest opportunity. For every other snowfields fan watching, it means Hokkaido is calling them, too.