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Endless Question

Youth Becomings and the Anti-Crisis of Kids in Global Japan

dwayne dixon, Author

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Lesque

Lesque is an independent skateboard company founded in 2007 by two prominent skateboard pros--Arahata "Ishiko" Junichi and Itō Shinichi (Itoshin)--and a skateboard videographer, Asada Koji. Ishiko is one of Japan's oldest and most respected pros, having become representative of a new level of skill among Japan's small skate scene at the age of 16 when his first video part, Top Six, was released in 1993. He moved to the Los Angeles in the mid-90's and was the only Japanese professional skating in California during an influential period of innovation and experimentation with difficult, technical tricks taken into the streets.

After changing sponsors and weathering difficult economic periods as well as instability within the corporate-controlled sports distribution market inside Japan, he was frustrated by how he and other pros were easily discarded and the unpredictability of his own finances even as major sporting goods chains were doing vigorous business in skateboard lifestyle goods and hardware by the early 2000s. Skateboarding had become a multi-billion dollar industry by then with most of the revenue generated not by boards and other hardware components, but by softgoods--clothes, hats, accessories and most importantly, shoes. Within Japan, distributors were funneling in American-based product and Japanese pro or amateur skaters, even those with the rare sponsorship deal with these companies, was struggling, pinioned between West Coast industry trends and the desire to represent a Japanese-specific version of skateboard culture.

On a skate trip to Barcelona, Spain in 2006, Ishiko filmed a part for a video along with a handful of other innovative Japanese skaters. Costa-Rican born Japanese videographer and skater Koji had conceived of the trip and video project as a way to situate Japanese riders among an increasing interest globally in skate scenes across the world, signalling the beginnings of a shift away from the powerful organizing imaginary and economic heart of skateboarding located in Southern California.

After the underground video was released in Japan it drew considerable attention to the style and skill of the skaters featured, as well as their ability to ride some of the most desirable urban terrain of the moment (Barcelona had become a requisite location for any pro to shoot video and photographs by the mid-2000s). Itoshin, another of Japan's rising stars, and Koji were convinced they needed to form an independent board (deck) company in order to give would give longstanding pros like Ishiko and newer but influential arrivals like Itoshin much needed creative and professional autonomy. This was a radical shift and a risky proposition. It placed these riders outside the mainstream distribution channels and with very limited access to the highly structured relations between large corporate skate companies, the retail shops and the average Japanese skateboarder.


The company is “underground” meaning specifically that Lesque is attempting to operate in the open marketplace without formal outside investments, loans, or the support (and financial claims) of one of the major action sports distributors in Japan.  The company is exclusively owned and run by skateboarders with the intention of retaining autonomy over finances, business relationships with shops and riders, and significantly, image.

The crew called their new project "Lesque," intentionally projecting a cosmopolitan aura through its name, a portmanteau of the English suffix less derived from “endless” and the Spanish interrogative que arriving at the convoluted meaning, “Endless question,” a foundational concept to Lesque’s philosophy.
The name reflected a desire "to create possibilities" within the "infinite problem" (無限なる問題) using the "immeasurable passion of skating" to explore life's ever-changing terrain. Far from being a caricatured slogan of the action sports lifestyle ("Go big or go home!" or "Skate or die!"), the concepts expressed through the name locate the skateboard itself as the object through which ceaseless wonder and struggle could be focused and explored. Lesque described itself as a deck company devoted to empowering skaters to exert themselves 100% in pursuit of impassioned action.

For Lesque, being based in Japan means having limited to no visibility within the tightly networked and dominant matrix of the skate industry arrayed along the West Coast of the U.S.  Technological innovations, new tricks, influential personalities and perhaps most significantly, fashions, seem to emanate from, or at least are pulled into the authorizing/tastemaking orbit of California’s skate scene from where they are circulated globally.  YouTube has provided Koji a medium to beam carefully edited representations of his riders outwards towards an international audience of fellow skaters.  With luck, Lesque’s riders will get noticed within skateboarding’s metropole of California and become sponsored by a company situated at the center of this cultural and economic matrix.  This arrangement gives the US company a local connection and presence in a lucrative market while extending a heightened authenticity to the Japanese rider and thus to Lesque, insofar as the rider is then recognized by the legitimizing force of a Californian hegemony.

The crew was built around a creative, expressive ethos and drew together skaters with demonstrated technical skills complemented by stylish body performance and innovative sensibilities to various terrain as well as an inventive videographer in Koji. The three then recruited two amateurs to their company--Masataka from Okinawa, and Tokyo native Shota. Additionally, they drew on their friendship with Kawasaki-based photographer Ryo Yamamoto as their primary camera person. With four solid skaters representing a variety of styles and strong media support in both video and still images, the company began filming its first video while working with Tokyo-based designers to draw up their board graphics.

Itoshin, Koji, Masataka, and Shota had rented an single-family home in Tokyo's western suburbs and moved in together in the summer of 2007, just before the company became official in November. The living arrangement itself was unusual and attracted suspicious attention from the neighbors. Koji recounted having to face a group of worried neighbors who rang the bell one morning. Koji, who at the time was 30 years old, stocky and wearing a full, thick beard, was confronted by his confused neighbors who wanted to know what all the young men were doing coming and going from this house. Their main concern, Koji said, was that they were afraid a cult had taken up residence.

Koji's bearded and intimidating figure aside, the inter-generational drift of young men and teens around the house had become a source of concern for the surrounding residents of the quiet neighborhood. The very fact that the original purpose of the house had deviated from domicile for a thriving middle-class nuclear family signaled larger shifts in the country--even the meaning of buildings could longer be counted on to hold themselves in place amidst economic, cultural, and demographic changes. The intense homosociality of the house also seemed to be a cause for anxiety. Young people almost never live together in group houses of their own accord. Worker dormitories and cheap accommodations for day laborers are familiar spaces for same-gender co-habitation of working class men, but their living arrangements are structured by their laboring identities. That is, being lower class and single, they come under the care of their companies if fortunate enough to work for a robust corporation or they are consigned to the yoseba













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