Got here on the weekend so the busiest time. The road to the ski hill is as mellow as a road to a ski hill can be although at the end of the day kids were wallowing around on a tight corner by the stairs making the exit harder than it needed to be.

Lift tickets, cheap! Their website isn't the first that comes up when you search but and "Internet Discount Coupon" green tab on the bottom right gets you 500 Yen off. So around 4400 yen on the weekend or 3800 on during the week. It looks like they are trying to encourage people there on a Friday to spread out the crowds with the happy Friday price of 3000 Yen which includes 1100 Yen meal voucher! So basically your lift ticket is costing around $25 Aussie! As there isn't many places to eat on the hill being restricted to the official resturant for the meal voucher isn't much of a impost.

Kids learner area is tucked off to the side so no chance of interacting with faster riders. Bottom section was being well used but once you go up to the mid section the top two twin chairs (romance chairs) are both high speed. I didn't know high speed doubles existed? Maybe they're called a quick romance?

The amount of young Japanese with swallow tail boards was interesting. These aren't park, jump boards but rather powder/ tree boards. The lift on the skiers right takes you to a high spot and looking ahead there is a cat track up the hill which they encourage you to walk and drop in on an open section that used to be serviced by a lift that is no longer in operation. The restaurant at the top was closed when we visted. The run down from this area was a nice wide constant gradient blue. What was interesting was the big jumps and random features scattered all the way down. Normally in Japan this stuff is tucked away off the side, but to have big hits on the main run was interesting. There was no warnings or visibility (poles, paint) on the jumps so in low visibility you could easily end up on one of these. Anyway this run was a favourite with the locals although not many were hitting the big jumps or the fun boxes and rails towards the bottom.

The other high speed lift took you a bit higher and there was a section of trees between the two. A look in them answered the question where all the locals with powder boards had been heading. It had the easiest exit out of the trees imaginable. No steep walls onto a groomer, no creeks, no tight saplings, just a nice gradient out onto the groomer.

The aspect is westerly facing so the snow got sticky in the afternoon and shortened our day but a great little spot that was bigger than I expected. Maybe the random cartoon drawing of the ski hill tricked me into thinking it was smaller but it was fun for a day and on a cloudy day with new snow a fun place to play.
See our video here

We’d dismissed Oze Tokura as a naff low elevation ski resort on our previous visit to Katashina, so we’d neglected to visit Tokura other than to look at it from the car park. We thought we’d give it a go this time around, but considering it was such an uncharacteristically bad snow season we had low expectations for getting off-piste. When we walked up from the car park and saw a major building half fallen down, we really wondered what we’d got ourselves in for! Luckily for us, we left absolutely stoked from our day filled with fresh powder lines.

It was a weekend and a couple of the runs were a bit congested with happy snowboarders that hadn’t progressed enough to learn about peripheral awareness. Meanwhile there was absolutely no one riding the off-piste. Maybe this was because it’s totally taboo and a few fence lines seemed to suggest this, but other areas had zero fences and even though we were being discrete, no one approached us regarding our off-piste ways. It also seemed that they’d done some glading in areas because stumps were poking through the lean base, and you don’t glade trees if you don’t want people to enjoy them!

We had so much fun in the trees without any competition for the freshies, and whilst the snow wasn’t deep, either the top fluff or the base for that matter which was about 1m, the snow quality was quite lovely.

Even though it’s common in Japan for the contradiction of risk aversion and simultaneously having some questionable approaches to safety, Oze Tokura seems to have weighted the scales to the latter. Most Japanese ski resorts won’t open a run until absolutely every twig is covered up, yet Oze Tokura had just opened an advanced run that had little stumps all over it that were like spears and ridiculously dangerous. The positioning of some of the terrain park features was also hazardous and we were surprised there weren’t more collisions. And then there’s the dilapidated building at the base sitting right next to the kids’ snow park. It makes you laugh!

We wouldn’t recommend Oze Tokura as a ski resort for powder hounds to visit in its own right, because there’s not enough terrain variety for multiple days of entertainment. However it’s a great adjunct for a multi-day trip with the amazing Oze Iwakura and other nearby ski resorts (but forget Marunuma Kogen!). Oze Tokura is a great way to score unadulterated lines of powder, unless of course the temps have rise and the low elevation becomes a problem.

You can see our thoughts on the pros and cons on the Oze Tokura overview page and see how we score it on the Japanese ski resort ratings.
See our video here