Kaede Terauchi is unique in that he has to deal with a very specific circumstance.
In the age when 10,000 hours of skateboarding get uploaded to the internet in a given day, there are very few… skateboard “circumstances” that have no precedent.
Kaede Terauchi’s circumstance is: a lot of people have not seen him skate …dry.
Wtf does that mean? Well, if the name-recognition part of you brain is lagging, he is who who went #viral last month for skating on fountains, into waterfalls and during rainstorms. He did a back tail fakie manny tre in a torrential downpour at top honors in a mid-September Top 10.
Yesterday, him and his homies dropped their new Japan scene video by Number:A™︎ Skateboards, entitled Brain Control. Today, we are offering his part as a one-off. If you were to draw a line from Fully Flared, through a generation that grew up on Shane O’Neill, and keep going, it’s probably going to zigzag through the decades to end up somewhere near Japan.
As the second ledge-heavy Japanese part to cross the QS front page this week, it provides a beautiful study in contrasts. The art of Ryuhei Kitazume’s ledge-work is the absolute confidence in the lock-in: a Brunson-esque “there’s 2.1 seconds on the clock and I have zero-doubt it’s going in” sort of thing. Kaede Terauchi? It’s more of a Kyrie magic trick: never sitting in one place, blinking and several things just happened, but it doesn’t matter because the defender is on his ass. Both are sublime. [Maybe there’s two clips when you’re given flashbacks of the floor-waxer-270-outers from the 2010s, but this is a guy who just filmed a part landing in water for five minutes so cut him a fuckin’ break will ya?]
Video by Naoya.