The sushi-ski set

Before we start, let's get one thing straight: Japan is a long way to go to ski. It's a 13-hour flight from Heathrow to Osaka, then a 90-minute hop to Sapporo on the north island of Hokkaido and then a two-hour coach transfer. By the time I got to the Rusutsu Resort I was pretty exhausted.

But ski specialist operators reckon Japan is going to be the next big thing for UK skiers frustrated by European snow conditions, who feel as though they've "done" the US and can't face the cheap Bulgarian and Slovenian options.

So what do you get when you ski in Japan?

The Rusutsu Resort Hotel is vast, with 859 bedrooms linked by a halfmile monorail. The dozen restaurants include one themed on a Disneyesque interpretation of the Munich Oktoberfest, complete with life-sized dancing bears and clockwork wenches in dirndls. There's also an indoor working carousel, and fountains that light up to the Blue Danube and Sound of Music.

The skiing is just outside the door. I was expecting tame runs covered in wet snow or ice and teeming with people dressed in Day-glo. Instead I found myself revelling in the kind of thighdeep f luffy powder you usually reserved for Utah.

The pistes are wide and perfectly groomed, with 16 lifts. Despite being the busiest week of the year, the slopes were empty by European standards.

Lunch on the mountain was also delightfully different from rip-off France. A beautifully prepared bowl of noodles or rice with soup, fish or meat costs less than £5 including a beer or flask of hot sake. Dinner at the hotel was sashimi, crunchy green soya beans, rice and tempura.

I moved on to the larger and betterknown resort of Niseko, which is a 45-minute drive away and has 30 lifts. This is more European in layout with three separately owned resorts sharing one ski area.

Niseko has superb skiing, with wide pistes reminiscent of Whistler and powder runs among the widely spaced birch trees and bamboos. If you fancy a further challenge you can hike 20 minutes up to the 1,308m Annupuri peak before skiing down in yet more deep, talcum-like snow.

Winter sports started in Niseko in 1911 when the Japanese army experimented with bamboo planks for skis. Recreational skiing began in 1945 when an Austrian instructor visited the resort and introduced Alpine skis.

A good Niseko base is Higashiyama. The main hotel, the Prince, has a chairlift starting inside it. However, the hotel is pretty much self-contained with doorstep night-skiing, karaoke, and an onsen (Japanese spa). In the onsen, men and women are segregated and wallow stark naked in steaming hot indoor and outdoor pools.

The night skiing is on floodlit slopes, which are almost empty, apart from two inquisitive foxes at the time I was there. After a trip to the hotel's Sapporo Bar where it's all you can drink in 90 minutes for £8, we are fuelled up enough to tackle the karaoke. It turned out to be a disappointment, with only three non-Japanese songs on the menu.