Japan, 1931.

Of the myriad foreign inventions that made their way into Japan during the Meiji period, snow skiing was a latecomer. But it didn’t take long for the sport to take off. The man credited with introducing skiing to the country is Theodor Edler von Lerch, an Austrian army major who began training Japanese infantrymen on Alpine skis in 1911, on the snowfields of Joetsu in Niigata prefecture. The following year, a Nagano-based company became Japan’s first homegrown ski manufacturer—though some industrious enthusiasts, like the city-bound kids pictured above, would manage to make do with boards of their own design. The first ski resort in the country opened in the 1920s on the slopes of Mount Zao, some 300 kilometers north of Tokyo, and ski lifts debuted during the years of occupation following World War II. The rest, as they say, is history: Japan has twice hosted the Winter Olympics—at Sapporo in 1972, and Nagano in 1998, when its own ski team took away three gold medals—and is today Asia’s top skiing and snowboarding destination, with more than 500 resorts. The islands of Honshu and Hokkaido may not have the soaring peaks of von Lerch’s Alps, but they do offer plenty of deep, dry powder, plus the chance to soak in hot springs after a day on the slopes. And that’s enough to bring out the child in anyone.