How do you start a holiday blog about Japan, from the beginning is the normal place but my beginning comes from a very long way off. As a young whipper snapper I have loved skiing and snowboarding and have always wanted to ski on every continent. Having watched the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano and then seen Taku Hiraoka beat Shaun White in the 2015 winter X Games Japan became more than a viable venue for the Asian resort to tick off this amazing continent from my list.

I’m a big fan of Eastern culture (and food) but have had little interaction with anyone of Japanese descent and very few people within my circle of friends have been there so had zero points of reference. So I did what all people do in this situation and hit google, Pinterest, Facebook, tripadvisor and all those other famous search engines of modern times which add excitement to any trip but at the cost of an element of surprise.

First of all the important bit – how long to spend away? Tokyo is approx. 12 hours from the UK and 9 hours ahead of time so we weren’t talking about a long weekend.
We also needed to assemble a team of snow fans to go big in Japan and fly the English flag (more on this crack team in the later blogs). With the team assembled we decided a 14 day visit would be spot on with 6 days in the mountains and then the rest of time exploring some of the cities.

Picking a resort was the next phase. Did you know there are over 500 resorts in Japan across the 4 main Islands? That’s a lot of choice, get it wrong and an epic experience just becomes a standard ski holiday – the pressure was on and not a lot of initial help. Hokkaido, the northern island, looked geographically sound but the Olympics were in Kyushu, the southern island. There’s also mountains accessible from Tokyo on Honshu so do your research carefully.

The more research I did the more one name kept coming up, Niseko. This is probably the most famous ski resort in Japan because it is powder Nirvana. It’s located in the Abuta District, Shirbeshi Subprefecture on Hokkaido about an hours flight from Tokyo to Sapporo and a 2.5 hour bus journey from the airport. This seemed to be the puppy we wanted and ticked every box for our Asian adventure.

Don’t take my word for it though check out Niseko for yourself. Other worthy mentions are Shiga Kogen, Zao, Furano and Hakuba which should be carefully considered as well.

With Niseko selected for the pow part of our JaPow adventure we then looked at the cities. Tokyo was a given as it was our first time in Japan and we flew back from Haneda so it wasn’t rocket science to finish our trip there. The mid part caused a few lively debates down the pub but we finally settled on Kyoto the old imperial capital and town of 10,000 shrines (more me pushing, as said I am sucker for Eastern culture and food and this is where the roots of modern Japan are firmly ensconced). So this is our planned Ja-Pow trip 2016.
Niseko – Kyoto – Tokyo

With the destinations selected we had the age old debate of whether to book ourselves or use a company. We used the power of 3 (speak to three companies to get an average idea of the options and prices available) to see what the crack was  which were Crystal (I’m not a big fan from experiences years ago but always willing to give the benefit of the doubt however this time they put me through to a sister division as Crystal don’t book Japan trips themselves which kind of lost me), Japan Ski Experience who were great and really informative but we ended up going with Ski Safari as they were were everything the other two companies were but really nice, great to deal with and happy to give all sorts of advice and have a general chat with about the holiday and we haven’t been disappointed.

Before our holiday we received everything we needed in a quality pack from Ski Safari including details on flights, transport (which they couldn’t book for us but were brilliant providing information about), maps and information about the places we were visiting (Niseko, Kyoto and Tokyo).  It was a really well put together pack, with plenty of thought about what our needs might be, what questions we might have and a couple of delights we weren’t expecting. This pack has exemplified ski safari’s service and is exactly why we will be using them again in the future and i will be recommending them to my friends and family (and no i don’t work for Ski Safari, have a vested interest or get anything for this it’s just a result of the great service we received from them).

I would recommend Ski Safari but as ever pick 3 companies and do your due diligence as this trip isn’t cheap and you need to be sure you are getting the right deal for you.