A meizanologist's diary (134)

29 March: the day after climbing Takadake, our hosts drive us back to take a more expansive view of Mt. Aso. The car is parked near a spacious tourist pavilion offering the usual comestibles.

The place used to be known as the Tōmigahana (look-off nose) but in 1922 the writer Tokutomi Sohō rebranded it as the Daikanbō (great viewpoint), apparently at the local mayor’s request.

The mayor was right. For this viewpoint did deserve a more dignified appellation. And it takes a moment before we can calibrate our eyes to the view's sheer scale. 

We’re standing on the brink of the “gairin-kan” – the outer rim of Aso’s giant caldera – and far off, over a sea of morning haze, float the five central peaks, including the two we visited yesterday. Everything within our gaze is part of one huge volcano.

“So they really do look like a reclining Buddha,” says the Sensei. We agree that the crags over on the left of the central mountains do indeed resemble an upturned face. The likeness is so often remarked that it even has a name: the Nehanzō, although the bronze versions seen at temples are usually lying on their sides.

Whether recumbent or reclining, no Buddha was mentioned by the celebrated poet and painter Kosugi Hōan when he came this way in 1930, his visit sponsored by the Kyushu Electric Power Company. Rather, he beheld:

a vast space, like the bottom of an urn, in which the caldera unfolds. Black smoke churns up in the centre to scorch the heavens. Under these incense fumes, sent up by the earth’s deity as if from some great censer, the five peaks of Aso vie with one another, each with its individual beauty.

As for the vast caldera’s backstory, Kosugi had this to say:

Originally, the crater plain, measuring four leagues east to west and six leagues north to south, covering forty thousand chō, was formed by a massive collapse. After the collapse, the five peaks that now exist erupted in the centre. Thus, surrounded by the circular outer rim, this plain should form a snake’s eye shape. However, Neko-dake, one of the five peaks, rose up and broached the outer rim near its southern edge, breaking the snake's eye shape at that point…

And pretty much the same account is related to us today by the Great Viewpoint's instructive signboards:

In Aso, the land subsided to create a caldera because of four super-eruptions occurred between about 90,000 years ago to about 270,000 years ago … The pyroclastic flow at that time spread the northern part of Kyushu island and volcanic ash curled up to sky covered all over Japan …The biggest pyroclastic flow of Aso (Aso-4) is the largest in scale in Japan in the past 100,000 years. Volcanic deposits would have reached the height of a four to five storey building if they were distributed uniformly in Kyushu island…

The collapse thesis was bolstered by the work of Howell Williams, an Anglo-American volcanologist who during the 1940s explained the formation of Oregon’s Crater Lake. More recently, though, a new generation of savants have objected that Aso was never so reprobate as to collapse in slavish imitation of a foreign model. Instead, as any self-respecting giant volcano should, it must have exploded heroically onto the scene...

But I only get to hear about these revisionist views at a later date. Right now, our host is waving us back to the car. We are soon driving across that flat caldera floor, which is – according to the application to have Mt. Aso listed as a UNESCO world heritage site – “an excellent site for learning about how humans live in a volcanic area”.

From what we can see from the speeding vehicle, the humans are living here much as they do elsewhere in Japan – in the same prefabricated houses, under the same tangle of overhead wires, and amid the same proliferation of vending machines. Speaking of which, it must surely be time for a coffee…

Already, however, we are slanting up the slopes of those five central peaks. Sliding by on the right is the parasite cone of Komezuka. “Rice heap” is a good name for it, chiming with the miniature volcano’s almost domestic scale. Its dainty proportions somewhat relieve the oppression of its pitilessly vast surroundings.

Parking the car near the Aso Volcano Museum, we set off across a grassy paddock, dodging the errant pony riders from the nearby dude ranch as we head for the local eminence of Eboshi-dake. 

Our path up the easy ridge is fringed with Japanese andromeda (asebi), the so-called drunken horse tree. Presumably the ponies are kept well away from them. 

Although it rises only a paltry few metres above the carpark, Eboshi-dake qualifies as one of Aso-san’s Five Peaks. 

Even better, it commands fine views in all directions. Behind us, we now see that what we took to be a grassy paddock is in fact the crater floor of a retired volcano, a kind of caldera within the caldera. East of us, and fortunately downwind, is Nakadake, still venting its corrosive fumes high into the hazy air. 

And in the opposite direction, riding hull-down on the dust horizon, are the upperworks of Unzen, the westernmost of Kyushu’s volcanoes. A helpful signboard helps us locate it.

All this looking-off works up an appetite. We hurry down Eboshi’s eastern ridge, looking for somewhere to eat our lunches. 

Alas, several of the benches considerately installed for that purpose have burned to the ground. They apparently get torched during the annual grass-burnings (noyaki) that are carried out to prevent these uplands tumbling down into scrub. 

When we finally reach an uncharred picnic place, we watch an elderly couple struggle up a variation route on another nearby hill. Not for us, we decide, as we tuck into our bento boxes. Although we have been hiking almost as efficiently as we did thirty years ago, just one of the Five Peaks will do nicely for today. Besides, we still have a Place of Power to take in on our way home.

A meizanologist's diary (133)

28 March: the Sensei takes charge of the plan. We’ll drive up to the Sensuikyo parking lot at 800 metres or so, then tackle a ridge route up to Takadake, at 1,592 metres the highest of Aso-san’s Five Peaks. 

At mid-morning, we park the car soon after passing a stupa dedicated to world peace by a local monk.

It seems that Nichidatsu Fujii, who was from Aso City, built more than seventy of these giant reliquaries around the world, in Europe and America as well as in Asia. Alas, judging by current events, even that considerable number may not have sufficed.

A whiff of sulphur greets us as we get our kit out of the car. And just in case we haven't noticed, the sign at the trailhead gets straight to the point: “Release of volcanic gas (S02: sulfur dioxide) has been continuing around Mt. Aso. Be ready to protect yourselves individually with full understanding of the risk from volcanic gas.” 

A nearby row of memorials brings the message home: accidents can and do happen around here.

Our ridge is like the scaly back of some gigantic sea beast. We weave to and fro, seeking out a line before we realise there’s a series of painted yellow arrows to guide us. We’re working our way upwards on solid lava flows: nothing but knobbled black rock, except for a patch of withered yellow grass here and there.

The heat and the stench intensify as we struggle upwards. Flies buzz round us. And now we can see where the fumes are coming from – the roiling clouds of asphyxiating vapour spilling over a ridge crest to the right. Although Aso’s main crater is still kilometres away, it must sit exactly upwind of us.

Like the mountain in Dante’s Purgatory, the slopes ease a bit as we gain height. Gradually, Nichidatsu's stupa shrinks down into a white wen in the hazy depths below. 

When a headwall starts to loom above, we decide it’s too tiresome to tackle right now and sit down for lunch. I must be having a bad day: having forgotten my water bottle on our hosts’ kitchen counter, I now discover that my bento box has leaked into my pack. The lunch is still delicious though: Hirai, the local bentoyasan can only be recommended.

I must be looking debilitated: the Sensei passes over a “bakudan” (bombshell) rice ball to supplement the bento. This too goes down gratefully. After lunch, a cool breeze starts to blow, dispelling the sulphurous fumes, and we pick up the pace. 

When we arrive in the shadow of the headwall, the yellow arrows direct us rightwards, up a ramp like Mt Asama’s famous J-band. Judging by Canto IV of his Purgatory, Dante must have been here too:

Squeezed in between the tight walls of the pass,
we struggled upward through that broken rock,
using our hands and feet to climb the ground…

Illustration by Gustave Doré for Canto IV of Dante's Purgatory

A few hundred metres more takes us to the summit ridge. The breeze strengthens as we walk over to Takadake’s trig point – there doesn’t seem to be a shrine up here. Perhaps the scenery is too desolate even for a god.  Then we walk carefully over the boot-shredding lava edges to the descent path. 

All of us have visited Aso-san before – heck, I even cycled across the massif in my student days – yet it’s still impossible to get a grip on this volcano’s dimensions. Mote-like figures on a ridge between us and the steaming crater dramatise the gargantuan scale...

Gargantuan? Adjectives crumble under the load of representing this scene. Other Japanese volcanoes - yes, even the boss of them all - fit into a surrounding landscape. Here, as far as the eye can reach, all you see is the volcano. 

A series of descending ridges bring us to the crest above the main crater. This vast declivity is still venting nonchalantly to itself, the fumes thinning and thickening almost as if the beast is breathing. Occasionally, a mushroom of vapour writhes silently upwards and drifts off with the wind. 

Still groping for an adjective to qualify this spectacle, I settle on "Dante-esque". Or should that be "Dantean"? Overused, admittedly, but like the poet's Inferno this scenery doesn't belong to the world we know. 

I stand there enthralled until a sulphur-laden gust blows my hat away. Probably one shouldn’t hang about here too long. Dilapidated shelters along the concrete-surfaced path bear witness to an eruption in 1958 that did for twelve of Aso-san’s visitors.

And over yonder, like a line of monuments, are the pillars of the Mt Aso Ropeway, now abandoned. After starting up in the same year as the eruption disaster, it managed to keep operating for half a century or so, in the face of corrosive effusions, ash falls and earthquakes. But the volcano won in the end.

The Sensei and our host are already far down the path. I hurry after them, putting as many metres as I can between ourselves and that monstrous crater at our back.

 

A meizanologist's diary (132)

27 March: if they won’t come to us, then we will go to them – ever southwards, on a series of trains, each slower than the last, but with a hipper paint-scheme. 

Strictly speaking this is a social visit to a rural part of Kyushu. But since, back in the day, we and our hosts, the K-sans, all belonged to the same climbing/hiking outfit, the temptation inevitably arises to see if our knee joints can still creak their way up a hill. Is this a good idea? Well, there’s only one way to find out.

A meizanologist's diary (131)

24 March: resisting the temptation to pour myself another cup of strong and fragrant coffee from the hotel’s “bottomless” pot, I catch the 7.05 bus to the ski resort of Sugadaira. “People who have skied at Sugadaira,” wrote the Hyakumeizan author, "will remember two mountains confronting them across the valley: these are Neko-dake and Azumaya-san, without which Sugadaira would not be worth much.”

Fair enough, but when the bus drops me at a stop called “Davos”, after the Swiss resort, the only mountain I can see is “Davos Hill”, which still has a few ski tracks etched into its dwindling snow cover. Otherwise, the pistes have already lapsed into the somnolence of the “Zwischensaison”.

A roadside map suggests that Azumaya lies somewhere to the east. A long straight lane leads me in that direction, past deserted chalets and the rugby pitches of university summer camps. 

Orange drifts of last year’s larch needles cushion my footfall on the hard tarmac. After the trees end, snow starts to dapple the pastures on either side of the road.

At a farm’s gate, a sign on a wooden box invites me to fill in a tozan-todoke or mountaineering plan. Hmm, truth to tell, there isn’t much of a plan today. And the only map I have is on my phone, copied off the monitor of our home computer. But I file a todoke anyway.

The wisest course seems to be to follow the footprints. Most of these lead up a snowslope towards Neko-dake. It can’t be a mistake to climb a Cat Mountain. 

I pause at a rustic pavilion to admire the serried array of the Northern Alps, all floating luminously above the haze horizon.

Next comes a quiet grove of silver birches, their branches still bare. Mmm, interesting – these seem to be occupying the height band that beech trees would populate in our home mountains of Hokuriku…

Above the wood I catch up with a couple from Kanagawa – they must have started their four-hour drive in the graveyard hours to get up here so fast. Our arrival on the summit is announced by tolling on a ship’s bell that hangs from nearby post, somewhat away from the regulation-issue shrine. 

Like last night's hotel, this summit seems to be fairly eclectic in its cultural references.

As there’s also a panorama table, you could even call Neko-dake a fully equipped public facility. I sit in its lee to down some rolls and cheese. Although it's too early for lunch, mountaineers need to eat when they can. Thus it is that I’m lagging somewhat behind the Kanagawa couple as they set off towards Azumaya proper.

Just as the snowy ridgetop starts to narrow, the couple disappear like March hares down an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole. Reaching the spot, I’m in time to see them kick their way down the side of the ridge and along a ledge that runs underneath a giant rock. For folk equipped merely with instep crampons, with no ice-axes or poles, they’re moving with confidence.

To reinforce mine, I put on my own crampons, which have the full twelve points. Then I drop down the rabbit hole onto the snow ledge - in days gone by, this would have been a descent into the ancient crater, which lay on the present mountain's north side. 

After a short crossing on frozen snow above a shadowy slope, the trail leads back to the ridge. As there are plenty of trees to hang on to, the ice-axe is superfluous. I come up with the Kanagawa couple again on an intermediate col.

Now we’re zig-zagging up through the shadowy pine forest on the main peak, our crampons biting well into yesterday’s still-frozen bootprints. 

The summit ridge is a magnificent whorl of snow, from which a corner of the half-buried shrine peeps out. Fukada compares it to "the roof of a thatched hut, standing on four pillars but without walls, as if atop a garden pavilion". The Hyakumeizan author and his friends came up here on skis in mid-March: even now, these open easy-angled slopes must be ideal for ski-touring when there's enough snow.

I take a look along the ridge to see if anyone has continued traversing eastwards: no tracks, so this must be the terminus. It’s time to admire the view. A local climber kindly provides an orientation – judging by his proprietorial air, he must come up here often.

Westwards, the Northern Alps are gradually fading into the noonday haze. To the south, Asama looms large – the unflattering angle renders it as a gigantic slagheap. 

As for that teapot dome to the north, that’ll be Myōkō. Mmm, interesting – three big volcanoes all lined up as if on parade, although so far Azumaya has shown little sign of its kinship with the other two cones.

On the way down, I’m momentarily embarrassed. Since the relevant arm has fallen off the key signpost, I’m uncertain if I’ve reached the turn-off point. I’m starting to regret the lack of a proper map, not to mention GPS (I can’t say that Bre’r David didn’t warn me), when a woman happens by with her young son. She turns out to be Brazilian, but we have enough Japanese in common to sort matters. Yes, I am heading down towards the Torii Pass, where most of the climbers who arrived in cars seem to be coming from...

It was at this pass, by the way, that the mountain got its name. As told in Nihon Hyakumeizan, the story goes that, while returning from his eastern expedition, the warlord Yamato Takeru looked eastward from that spot and uttered a cry of longing ("Azuma-haya!") for his absent wife, the Princess Ototachibana (right)...

Alas, there's no time to pay homage to Yamato Takeru or his commemorative carpark.  Well above the pass, I break off southwestwards to slant across the mountain’s lower slopes. Immediately, the track I’m following dwindles to just a scatter of bootprints, perhaps from earlier in the day. This obviously isn’t the trade route.

At a col where the snow has melted to reveal bright ochre rubble, my nostrils start prickling with the scent of sulphur. And if any doubts linger that Azumaya was once a vigorously erupting volcano, they are dispelled by that view across a gully to the layers of crumbling lava shoring up the main peak’s headwall. Once upon a time, the savants say, Azumaya was a tall, conical stratovolcano, but an eruption blew away its summit cone, leaving behind only the gently sloping lower slopes...

... on which the snow’s now becoming too thin and slushy for crampons, so I strap them onto the pack to dry. The tracks, such as they are, lead across a succession of ridges and troughs, then sink down into the silver birch forest. There’s a mid-afternoon bus to catch if I’m to have any chance of supper with the Princess Ototachibana, so I start pushing the pace, occasionally plunge-stepping into the softening snow.

What about the bears, I start to wonder. Not without reason, you understand, as Azumaya ranks in the top tercile of bear encounters on the Hyakumeizan, as collated by Kumamap. Since my bear bell doesn’t seem to be chiming with sufficient vim, I have recourse to chanting “o-jama shimasu” ("please excuse the intrusion"). The gambit is borrowed from the playbook of the extreme Hyakumeizan athlete Tanaka Yōki, although he probably doesn’t go as far as rendering the phrase to the tune of a well-known hymn.

At which point, I pop up over the brow of a rill to encounter what appears to be a human mother with her daughter coming the other way. Escaping with no more than a weird glance from them, I continue my hasty descent in bear bell-only mode, arriving at “Davos” with ten minutes to spare before the 3.10 bus down to Ueda. With luck, I'll be in time for supper...