Tag Archives: Evisen

Katsumi Minami and the ideal Japan

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caBJXQH8DXE]

Japanese skateboard brand Evisen unveiled a candy coated quickie for us yesterday from the 2017 Evisen Video. It features it’s founder Katsumi Minami. I find it delightful.

It completely reenforces the no-doubt completely unrealistic perception of the entirety of the island nation of Japan as a clean, beautifully tiled, crisply angled abstract urban playground. The marble embankments are unmarred, the ground is often brightly colored, and there are imaginative railings everywhere.

The editing is rapid but rhythmic and conspicuously cut to the music without shame. The filming is so tight on the spots that one wouldn’t recognize them from afar. Smooth lumps of concrete connect to ledges and banks. It is hard to tell what is a skatepark and what is a plaza sculpture and what is just straight up architecture. ALL the ground is neatly tiled and well lit at night. There are no pedestrians.

And the tricks are creative and accessible. It’s reasonable to think that given access to spots like this, a little time, and some funky beats, even I could be doing some of these tricks. It’s a sensation one rarely gets from skate videos anymore. Katsumi and the ideal Japan does that very sacred thing that all decent skate skate videos should accomplish: make you want to ride a skateboard immediately.