SHINPEI UENO, My Life with Skateboard

Newly appointed UT Creative Director Kosuke Kawamura had one thing on his mind for this season’s collections: to use the T-shirt as a medium for informing the public about the cutting edge of arts and culture. By collaborating with a variety of cultural communities on a series of T-shirt collections, he hopes to promote their culture to a wider audience. First up is the Skater Collection, which incorporates skateboarding culture. The designs were provided by a couple of renowned skaters: Shinpei Ueno of Japan and Alex Olson of the United States. We sat down with them and talked about the joys and highs of skateboarding and what it means to live the life of a skater.

Shinpei Ueno may be best known as a pro skateboarder for Evisen Skateboards. But he’s also a passionate grass-roots promoter of skateboard culture who approaches Japan’s skateboard scene with a seriousness belied by his bad-boy vibe. It’s this thoughtful devotion to skateboarding that led him to set up his own production company, Tightbooth Production, so he can pour his heart and soul into skate videos that he can transmit all across the world.

Ueno began skateboarding when he was in the third grade. He lived in a housing complex where each building had a storeroom that could be freely used by the building’s residents. One day, he and his friends found a skateboard in the storeroom—and that’s how it all started. But Ueno didn’t begin trying tricks until he was 15, when he happened upon skate videos playing on the monitors of a skateboarding shop. At the time, Japan was going through a major skateboarding boom, and the videos had a huge impact on Ueno, who immediately began practicing.

“In my teens, I practiced in local spots in my hometown of Osaka,” he says, “but in my 20s I started venturing out to other areas so I was skating down different streets every day. Then I discovered that Umeda [a district in central Osaka] after 1 a.m. is the perfect area to skate, because there’s nobody there. You get to skate around these shiny marble sidewalks that are well lit even at night. So I began to skate there all through the night and sleep during the day. And every day, I felt like I was getting a little better. Like, oh, I jumped one centimeter higher than yesterday. I knew it intuitively because I really was skating every day.”

Today, Ueno’s tricks can be seen in a number of skate films he has produced. His best- known work is his Lenz trilogy, in which each film introduces dozens of Japan’s top skateboarders. At the end of 2022, Tightbooth Production released Lenz III, the nine-years-in-the-making conclusion to the trilogy. Screenings of the film were held in Tokyo, Osaka, London, and New York to wild acclaim.

“It might sound like an exaggeration for me to say that we put our lives on the line to make this movie, but that’s honestly how I feel,” says Ueno. “We literally paid in sweat and blood as we gave our all to repeatedly capture just a few seconds of skateboarding magic. It took us nine years to make this movie. Kids who were 7 and influenced by us when we started making the movie have become young men and women who have their own trick videos. People who were inspired by our last movie and joined the company as assistants are now full-fledged members of the production team. We needed this time to properly nurture the next generation of talent who could continue the legacy of Japanese skateboarding.”

Ueno has been filming himself ever since he started skateboarding to provide himself with a record of his ollies and other techniques that he could study to get better. At some point, he began editing his videos on his home computer and adding music, initially as a fun little diversion to give his recordings that skate video feel. Eventually, Ueno decided he wanted to create actual skate videos and began using Final Cut Pro 7 and other professional tools to up the quality of his videos.

“The way I approach my videos is that I remove anything I don’t like,” Ueno says. “I also try to balance the quality of the images and the soundtrack so neither shows up the other—keep it fifty-fifty. I like to describe my videos as ‘visual grooves.’ It’s all vibes, but I try to maintain a good rhythm so the viewer doesn’t get bored and none of the sections go on for too long.”

Ueno’s ambitions go beyond video production; one of his dreams is to create public skateboarding plazas in Japan’s cities. Many such spaces—essentially, skateboarding parks that seamlessly blend into the cityscape—can be found across Europe, for example, but not a single one exists in Japan. Ueno sees such spaces as important for allowing skaters to coexist with non-skaters instead of being unnaturally constrained to one area.

“I was a restless child who was always out and about doing something,” Ueno says. “I enjoyed sports and gym classes, but I didn’t really like being told that there were rules or that I had to be a team player. But then I encountered skateboarding. There are no rules in skateboarding. You don’t need a coach if you don’t want one, and no one forces you to do anything you don’t want to do. Nobody forces you to wear a uniform; you can wear whatever you like. It’s this level of unconstrained freedom that drew me to skateboarding in the first place. As a result, I made many of my best friends through skateboarding and learned all of my most important lessons through skateboarding.”

Photos: ROLLSWYZE, REECE LEUNG, DEIB, MASAHIRO YOSHIMOTO

The moment Ueno encountered a skateboard, he decided to live the rest of his life with one. Along the way, he supported his fellow skaters who, in turn, supported Ueno, ensuring that each of them grew in renown and ambition so they could properly carry on the legacy of Japan’s skateboarding scene—and convey this legacy to the rest of the world. When asked what is the most important thing to remember when skating, Ueno replies: “To be yourself.” It is perhaps this attitude that has allowed skateboarding to thrive in a country that tends to prioritize rule and order.

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@Shinpei Ueno