Is there anyone who has joined a horse riding club in Japan and would care to share any experiences/insights?
I have moved to Japan last year and I find that I miss horse riding a lot and want to get back into it. I will be moving (again) to Hokkaido and found some potential places, but I would like to hear other’s experiences.
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Back home I was hugely into riding. Here, it’s expensive as hell. I’m talking 150,000 yen joining fees right off the bat. And many of these places seem to cater to rich people who want to socialize, as opposed to the barn rats who would happily muck out stalls in exchange for catch riding.
If you find anything though, feel free to share 😀
I’m sure you’ll have a good time in Hokkaido because it’s properly rural.
I’m in Toyota’s shitty bougie feifdom and found riding here to be *insanely* snobby. The excellence of the instructors where I went failed to cut through the miasma of rich bored housewives living out their European ohimesama fantasies. Everyone just wanted to study for tests and get certifications, and the other students were passive-aggressive and nasty to me because of some weird racialized inferiority complex, like I was personally shitting on their dreams by being just a regular out-of-practice adult despite growing up with horses. Do you know what tea ceremony is like, with the heirarchy-obsessed backbiting grind? Like that. There are no former horse girls, only people for whom golf was too middle class.
Also, because English horseback riding here exists as a sort of spin-off of thoroughbred racing, the horses are predominantly off-track thoroughbreds, if that matters.