BAY AREA DIY – JAPAN

Words by Hashipon
Photos by Shukid

Originally printed in Confusion Magazine – issue 23

We started building this DIY called Bay Area about five years ago in Ise, Mie prefecture.  It began at a different spot but road patrol found it and we had to move to the parking lot of my dad’s company.

Business was slow at that time because of side effects of the 2011 disaster so the parking lot had a lot of open space.  I asked my dad if it would be OK to pour concrete and he was down!

 

Our area didn’t have any parks with pool coping and some street guys thought it was wack to skate trannies and it pissed us off so bad. We had skated some pool coping outside of our town and knew it was fun and wanted to change that bad reputation.

Once we started working on it a lot of new guys came in to help us. Some guys showed up with tools from their work and I happily remember seeing so much passion from the people. No one knew how to build skateparks at first, but we kept learning and building.

Lots of people from all over the place started to come skate and hang out with us and it gave us more power to keep building.

 

 

 

 

There is another DIY called Papua Land in Ibaraki and they would come to our park and we shared info about how to build stuff without dirt and filling.

My dad’s business was pretty bad at the time we started building and I never thought this skatepark would go this far. I started to think I should work harder to keep our company going to save our skatepark and our life! And it works for now.

We are still planning to build more in the future as long as money and time allow us because we have more space in this parking lot and bushes around it.  We have help from a skate shop to raise money for this project, so our future looks really bright!