I meet Ryo and Itoshin at the Lesque house in an old suburban neighborhood.  Itoshin wants some photographs for his new sponsor, Elwood Clothing, a L.A. based skate clothing company with a cutting edge reputation.  With some stunning images, Itoshin is hoping to impress his new sponsor and perhaps even get an ad in a US skate magazine.  Ryo has several digital and analog cameras carefully packed in the rear of his car.  We add our boards to the back, and I climb into the rear seat with my video camera case and audio recorder while Itoshin finishes a cigarette and slips into the passenger seat.  Ryo navigates the narrow streets, slowly winding past large, houses in claustrophobic compounds until he reaches a main street, where he suddenly accelerates, flying past the local junior high school where girls in white uniforms practice badminton in the late spring dusk, their clothes luminescent under the blinding lights surrounding the court.  The dashboard GPS mapping system shows a schematic map of our location, the car represented by a large blue triangle turning and shifting the pixilated lines of the major road network.  Itoshin types into the system “Ikebukuro” and a polite, high-pitched woman’s computerized voice acknowledges the command.  Ryo reaches to the stereo and turns up the hip hop beats of Cincinnati, Ohio rap group The 5 Deez.

As Ryo drives, they debate where to go first to try and shoot. “There’s those steps, that long 3-set, in front of that boutique, across from Miyashita Park, you know?” Itoshin asks.  Ryo pulls out his cell-phone, clicking one-handedly through multiple screens till he gets to one displaying tiny thumbnail images—miniature versions of photographs stored on the phone’s data card.  He hands the phone over to Itoshin.  “Check out the 2nd or 3rd pages…I think those stairs are in there.”  The section of Ryo’s digital photo folder is thick with cellphone photographs of skatespots.  Weird public art, fanciful architecture in the plazas or out front of the entrances of big corporate buildings from Roppongi to Kawasaki, unassuming ledges or handrails, concrete embankments in factory districts or dead spaces adjacent to highway interchanges, a curved brick pedestal for a large sculpture.

Did you take all these photos, I wonder.  “No way!” laughs Ryo.  “A lot of those I got from friends who emailed them.  You know, like they saw this crazy thing out partying one night, or visiting some friend’s new apartment, or out on a job.  Yeah, a lot of cool shit gets discovered because guys are working jobs where they have to travel around the city, making deliveries or something, doing a part-time job takes workers to all parts of the city.”

The folder is a secret repository of visual intelligence gathered by skaters across Tokyo and from neighboring cities like nearby Yokohama and prefectures like Saitama to the east.  Arranged in tidy grids, one giving way to another, and still another, the images represent a fragmented, intentional cartography of post-war urban Japan.  I ask to look at the Ryo’s image files: a patchwork, collectively produced catalog representing a crazily diverse range of built environments.  They vary in their scale. They differ in their accessibility—some are spots in public parks, others are clearly behind barbed wire fences.  The temporal availability of each spot creates a chrono/site-map of urban life: a set of stairs at a train station is only rideable after the last train departs while another spot in front of a government building would likely only be skateable for a few minutes at any time before being swept by security. Ryo’s cell-phone contained an extensive archive he created with a network of other skaters, working collaboratively over time to assemble a coda of the urban imaginary rich with potential slowly mined for pleasure and labor. 

Ryo, without turning his gaze from the busy street crowded with rush hour traffic, described certain photographs, naming the trick and rider that were photographed for a certain ad or filmed for a company or magazine’s promotional video.  Those sites, already expended in the generation of authentic, situated value for those events/media artifacts, were unusable.  Ito wanted to ride something new.  At the same time it had to have “sustainability,” meaning that the site couldn’t be so delicately positioned vis-à-vis police or private security surveillance as to only allow for a brief window of interaction.  While skateboarding in its basic technical simplicity promises a nearly infinitely flexible mode of movement through the city, the spatial/architectural requirements for performing tricks are fairly specific and in the context of photographing, require enough time to set up lights and allow for numerous attempts by a rider to make even a single trick, a calculus made even more complex if the architecture is dangerous and the trick difficult.  The location for a trick should ideally be smooth with minimal cracks and debris, though those things make a site grittier, more “street” (the English word is appropriated to describe this visual/tactile amplification of the “real”), approach and landing areas from an obstacle should be open enough to gain speed and ride out safely upon landing.

Comment on this page