B ST FRIENDS Series

B ST FRIENDS – Painted Skate Deck Series

B ST FRIENDS is the first painted skateboard series I made after moving to Tokyo. At the time I was living in a 6-meter room with my partner while we both went to language school. The only real luggage I brought from the U.S. was a stack of blank decks.

I painted them using old paints I found at the hostel downstairs, and each one came together slowly through late nights in November and December of 2023. At first, they were tough to sell — shipping costs pushed away the American market and the Japanese scene wasn’t biting yet.

These decks stayed with me for about a year, moving with me into my first apartment. That’s when things started to change, thanks to the help of Issei. B ST FRIENDS became the series that marked the beginning of Kaba’s Tokyo chapter, where the art started finding its place.