The Japanese Professional Windsurfing Association (JPWA) just recently held a freestyle event called “JPWA TRICK’N TRY MOTOSUKO” at Lake Motosu. The lake belongs to the “Fuji Five Lakes” region, which is located at the base of Mount Fuji.Â
Most of the Japanese windsurfers are racers or slalom sailors and some of them are competing on a quite high international level. The freestyle scene is smaller and needs to catch up a bit. Sporadic you can meet a Japanese freestyler at PWA events, like Kenichi Suzuki, Hiroumi Yoshida or Dai Nagamine. But it definitely would be cool, to see more Asian windsurfers on the PWA tour.
Result of the event
- Hiroumi Yoshida (JP/Neilpryde)
- Yuma Kobayashi (Starboard/Gaastra)
- Tsutomu Umekawa (Naish/Hen-Line)
Hiroumi is on Bonaire at the moment to train! =)
pumping grubby into downwind 360 is pretty sick
With as much respect as possible for the asian scene, there are a 1000 better freestylers than these guys.
A lot of room for improvement! Hopefully Freestyle can gain some popularity over there…
looks like they don’t get a lot of wind either which makes it hard to progress…
commentary is awesome tho!!