Nothing More. Nothing Less.

In 1997, I was studying photography at a community college in San Diego when I saw a small photo of a young Japanese kid in Longboard magazine. His name was Seitaro Nakamura, he was 15 years old, and he had great style. 

A year later, while I was surfing in Encinitas, a local surfer named Michael Fukumura said to me, “I saw a Japanese kid who was doing these crazy hang tens on the most critical section the other day. Is he a friend of yours?” Somehow, I knew who Michael was talking about. He also mentioned that he thought the kid was attending a nearby high school. 

I called Japanese pro longboarder Takuji Masuda, who was running Super X Media up in Los Angeles at that time, thinking he might have some information. He did. I got Seitaro’s number and called him right away to set up a photo shoot for the following week. 

On a sunny morning in October 1998, I met Seitaro for the first time, in Cardiff. He was very calm and collected when he paddled out, but he was like a totally different person when he stood up on the board. Even though he’d been surfing for only three years, he was already a young master, and he seemed to know what every wave was going to do before it happened. 

From his style, I assumed Seitaro was really into Joel Tudor. His answer surprised me when I suggested that to him after the session. 

“I’m more into Kevin Connelly,” he said.

I thought we were going to shoot again soon, but that morning was the only photo session Seitaro and I ever had in California. 

Later, when I was making prints in the college darkroom from the single roll of black-and-white film, I asked myself, “How on earth can such a young person surf like that?”

*

Seitaro was born in 1981 in Zushi City, Kanagawa. He grew up bicycling, roller-skating, playing soccer, and boogie boarding in a small beach community called Hayama.

In the summer of 1994, when Seitaro was 13, he and his friends started surfing in Hayama. Riding a shortboard, he quickly found that he couldn’t catch the weak waves, and he became frustrated and exhausted. The next year, Seitaro’s father, Seiichiro Nakamura, asked him to go surf on longboards with him.

It was very rare at that time for a father and son to enjoy traditional longboarding in Japan. But Seiichiro grew up in Chigasaki, where he began surfing in the early 1960s. As a teenager, he joined a prestigious surf club in the Shōnan area, called the “Surfing Sharks.” He began reading foreign magazines like Swing Journal and Playboy. He made several American friends, who invited him to see The Endless Summer at an American air base in Atsugi. He became an excellent surfer and finished third place in the Junior Men’s division of the All Japan Surfing Championship in 1968. Though that was the period in which longboards were becoming shortboards, Seiichiro didn’t go through the revolution, and he developed his own unique philosophy about traditional longboarding. 

“It’s kind of a game that you are playing with the wave,” Seiichiro says. “You are in the circumstance to try all the best you can do with your surfing abilities and its components, like speed, weight, and board length. Ultimately, if you do the best, it becomes your style. The most important things of traditional longboarding are smoothness and grace.”

It was under such tutelage that Seitaro began his studies. 

“Seitaro was so pure as a natural surfing student,” his father explains. “That’s the reason he got better so quickly.”

In 1996, Seitaro met fellow teenage longboarder Rio Ueda, who is the son of Yoshinori Ueda. Yoshinori learned to shape while studying with Gerry Lopez and ran the brand called YU. Soon after they met, Yoshinori began to support Seitaro, a relationship that would last for more than 20 years. Seitaro also started hanging out with Toshiya Omi, a pro surfer, who provided Seitaro with surf magazines and VHS tapes. One of those films was the J Brother–directed Adrift, starring Joel Tudor and Kevin Connelly, which Seitaro studied religiously. 

Right before Seitaro graduated from junior high, in 1997, his father recommended he attend high school in Southern California. They picked San Diego and, through Takuji, were introduced to the family of none other than Kevin Connelly, nicknamed “Magic Feet,” one of the few surfers who could switch between traditional and modern style. 

“I couldn’t believe my role model was picking me up from the airport and I was going to live with him,” Seitaro says. “I always looked up to Kevin’s traditional style, from reverse drop-knee turn to soul arch hanging ten. He always did something new and surprised me in the water.”

Belén Alvarez Kimble, Connelly’s former wife, who was also a pro longboarder during the era, remembers the time that Seitaro lived with them. 

“We were trying to teach him everything we possibly could about American culture and longboarding,” she says. “Kevin coached Seitaro and helped him make a board. We wanted to show him about the past and what was happening at that time—about California traditional surfing, smoothness, what it meant for a single-fin longboarder.” 

In 1999, the longboard movies The Embryo of FineFlow and The Seedling were released. I went to see the latter at La Paloma Theatre in Encinitas, and I remember popcorn all over the old velvet chairs. To my surprise, Seitaro was featured in the movie, introduced through director Thomas Campbell’s narration: “At 18, Seitaro’s small-wave approach is extremely nimble and executed with cat-like precision.” 

“I met Seitaro through Takuji Masuda in about 1998,” says Campbell today. “He had a regal approach for a young surfer that made me interested in documenting his ocean sliding.” 

“He was such a sweet and humble guy, with a beautiful, graceful logging style,” says Kassia Meador, who surfed with Seitaro during the making of the film. “It was so wonderful to watch how he glided through the water. I think surf style is a reflection of your personality, and his vibe was graceful and fluid.”

Two decades of selects between surfer and shooter.

“Seitaro was the original seedling from Japan,” says Joel Tudor. “He was an instant part of our club. Seitaro just had a super-clean single-fin style—no leash, good footwork, cool to watch. You gotta give him credit. The movie had that name for a reason.”

The year after the film was released, Seitaro moved back to Japan in order to focus on competition and continue to refine his approach. He kept his national rank in the top 15 on the Japanese Pro Surfing Association longboard tour for six consecutive years.

“He looked so sensitive and fragile, but I felt his confidence and passion about longboarding right away,” says Yuta Sezutsu, a professional longboarder and the first Japanese surfer to be invited to the Vans Duct Tape Invitational, referring to the first time he met and surfed with Seitaro, as a fifth grader, during the freesurfs for a contest in Fukuoka in 2001. “I saw my future in Seitaro.”

In 2005, Seitaro won a pro longboarding event, his biggest accomplishment yet. However, after the victory, he felt something strange. At the time, the judging system and rules did not always favor the classical turns, flow, and noseriding of traditional single-fin longboarders. Instead of focusing on the performance style he knew he would need to become a grand champion, Seitaro, at 24 years old, decided to stop competing. He explored careers as a sushi chef and a carpenter, and he went underground for the next six years. 

Then, in 2011, a unique surf event called Style Masters, which drew a line between two-plus-one and single-fin longboarding, was held in Japan. The best traditional longboarders were invited, from California, Australia, and Japan—including Seitaro, who competed in the event six years in a row and made the finals every time. (In 2012, he won.) 

Afterward, Seitaro began to gain recognition in Japan, especially among younger longboarders.

“The biggest of Seitaro’s achievements was that he brought a huge revolution to Japanese surf culture,” says Toshihide Tanaka, who runs the surf shop SEAKONG in Tokyo and Kanagawa and supports many surfers and shapers domestically and abroad. “He doesn’t say much about it, but he’s shown us how longboarding is supposed to be done.”

In 2020, just before Seitaro turned 40, he made another drastic change: He walked away from all of his sponsors to free himself of any obligations and took over his family’s real-estate-management business. 

Seitaro’s office is located on his father’s estate. In the yard, there is an old Japanese tea room built in the Edo period. Seitaro’s grandmother was a teacher of Urasenke (one of the schools of Japanese tea ceremonies), and she used this room for every tea event throughout the year. While Seitaro never took a lesson from her, he remembers how it looked under her care and says it serves as a reminder of both the values of Japanese culture and traditional surf style—a generational approach to keeping things simple.

Coincidentally, in the winter of 2020 I started to read books about chanoyu, which is the Japanese tea ceremony. I found the wabi-sabi spirit within it was very useful. To me, it seemed to have a similar vibe to traditional longboarding—a mindset not about flamboyance, but instead focused on seeking the essence of what’s going on in front of you. For some reason, as I read, Seitaro Nakamura came to my mind. 

I wanted to know where his focus was. I also wanted to take photos of him again.

*

Today, Seitaro lives in the Shōnan area, an hour from Tokyo. Shōnan is one of the biggest surf towns in the country, dating back to when Seitaro’s father spent time there in the 1960s. That also means that it’s often crowded, especially on good days, which can be tough, as the region has a limited swell window. Still, it can sometimes have incredible longboard waves. 

Seitaro and I began meeting in Shōnan to shoot. To sidestep the crowds, we maintained a meticulous schedule. We avoided national holidays, Saturdays, Sundays, and even weekday mornings. We also waited for exactly the right swell, tide, and wind. It was like a stakeout. 

On one occasion, we waited in the car for five hours for the conditions to line up for a 45-minute session. On another, we waited for the final game of the World Baseball Classic to start, knowing that everyone else would be watching Japan face the United States instead of surfing. We scored perfect longboarding waves at Chigasaki. (And we watched the game afterward. Japan won.) We also spent some time in northern Japan, enjoying the quiet atmosphere and beautiful waves of the countryside surf communities.

Seitaro keeps everything minimal. He wears a black wetsuit and prefers to ride a white board, a contrast that makes for a great balance. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s what traditional longboarding is all about.

In the water, Seitaro blew my mind, just like he did in 1998. Every move made perfect sense and harmony. He never did meaningless “tricks.” There was no ding-dong-ditch noseriding, either. His goal is always to maintain minimal, stylish form until he can find the perfect spot to hang ten—ideally in the steepest, fastest part of the wave—and stay there for as long as possible. 

“The ultimate hang ten is a soul arch,” Seitaro says. “When the shape of the wave and the positioning is just right, it comes together so naturally.”

That’s the highest stage of traditional longboarding technique and the wabi-sabi mindset: the intangible. It’s not a trick. It’s about how you see the things around you to make your life simple and happy.

[Feature image: Essential elements only: clean knee-slappers, an 11-foot glider, and Mount Fuji as backdrop. Winter 2021, Kugenuma Beach.]