If you’ve never heard of Yukigassen, you’re almost certainly not alone. It’s a seven-a-side snowball fight between grown-ups, but with international rules.
And in Japan, where the game originated in an effort to energise snow-bound communities during the winter months when all the international tourists had gone home, there is a move to introduce the sport to the Winter Olympics.
Yukigassen traces its roots to kids’ snowball fights and some 30 years ago in Hokkaido, international rules and special equipment were developed, and the game began to sell itself as “humanity’s oldest winter sport”.
Now, 150 teams descend on “ShowaShinzan”, the pinnacle of Yukigassen competition to compete for the Yukigassen World Championship.
I wouldn’t have known all this unless I had attended the UNWTO International Conference on Tourism and Snow Culture in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, where several experts on winter tourism offered their wisdom on how Japan might revitalise its snow resorts.
Yamagata was chosen for the event because it was one of the areas damaged by the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011. Despite the damage, Yamagata Prefecture hotels and guesthouses donated a total of almost 119,000 guest nights to evacuees from the worst hit earthquake regions in Fukushima and Miyagi Prefectures.
Japan has 279 snow resorts, ranking it second in the world behind the United States. It has more snow resorts than France, Italy, Austria and Switzerland, while South Korea – host of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang - has only 16 snow resorts.
China, host of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, is ranked eighth in the world with 78 snow resorts.
Yet despite Japan’s abundance of snow resorts, the skiing/snowboarding population has skidded from 18 million in 1998 to 5.8 million in 2016, a year when international ski visitors to Japan reached an all-time high of 2.4 million.
It was this slump in domestic numbers that brought UNWTO to Yamagata where it was generally agreed that “less is more” and that closing older ski resorts and developing new snow resort activities, including traditional Japanese performing arts and hot springs, was the way forward for the resorts that remained.
It was also pointed out that “snow country culture” could be further developed by drawing in local communities to be part of any diversification of products offered to international visitors.
Globally, the attraction of snow resorts is waning. “Our current model (in international ski areas) is against change but we need change,” said academic Tobias Luthe, a professor at Chur University in Switzerland. “Change is about adaption and innovation,” he added.
Which, surely, brings us back to Yukigassen, a game developed to promote activity in the snow, a kids’ game that could one day find itself as an Olympic sport.
And the chance of that happening? Hopefully more than that of a snowball in hell.