Seasons of a stratovolcano

A long-lost eyewitness account of a volcanic eruption reveals the violent past behind Kami-kōchi's idyllic landscapes

As the bus comes out of the Kama tunnel between Shima-jima and Kami-kōchi, writes Fukada Kyuya in Nihon Hyakumeizan, Yake-dake suddenly confronts you, as if the volcano stands guard before the mighty host of peaks beyond. The scene is well known, yet every time I see it afresh, as if for the first time.

On this crisp November morning, though, we couldn’t see Yake-dake at all. The last night bus of the year arrived so early that the little volcano still lurked in the pre-dawn shadows of the higher mountains. As it was too dark to start walking, I joined the group of photographers lined up like militiamen by the banks of Taishō pond. In few minutes, a fusillade of camera shutters would greet the first rays of the sun as it gilded the tips of the Hodaka range.

Taishō Pond was created in 1915 (Taishō 4) when Yake-dake erupted and sent mudflows cascading down into the Azusa river. While shivering in the gloaming, I wondered how this cataclysm might have appeared to an eyewitness. Now, thanks to the assiduous researches of Iain Williams of the Toyohashi Alpine Club, my curiosity has been more than satisfied. He has discovered an account by J Merle Davis, a missionary and associate of the Mountain Goats of Kobe, who happened to be the only guest at a local onsen when the volcano exploded. Here is Davis’s story:-

Sunday morning, June 6, I was awakened at seven by a series of earthquake shocks, which grew in intensity until it seemed as if the house would fall to pieces before we could get out of it. As I reached the door, half dressed, with an ear-rending concussion the big mountain, whose base is only two miles from the hotel, begun to get busy. From its eastern slope, a mile below the old craters at the summit, it blew out a volume of rocks, mud, and steam, smoke and ashes in a vast column, while the roar of Vulcan's forge mingled with the smiting of his sledge upon the anvil, filled the whole valley with a pandemonium of sound as the granite cliffs hurled the echoes back and forth at one another.

A heavy cloud of smoke rolling in huge puffs and waves, spread over the whole valley, turning bright sunshine into twilight. Soon ashes began to fall, but I must confess I did not wait to measure them for I was already making good time up the river path toward Shima-shima. At the bridge, a mile above the hotel, by the way a splendid viewpoint, I began to get ashamed of myself, and as nothing worse than a shower of light ashes had happened and since breakfast was waiting down the river, I returned. All day long the mountain roared in heavy pulsations, as the wind brought the sound of the crashing rocks and trees and escaping steam.

Four new craters had opened on the volcano, about half way between base and summit. From one of these, a stream of mud and rock was pouring out and slipping down the slope to the river, a thousand feet below. Toward night, a heavy rain began to fall, and after a second day of torrential rain and constant volcanic activity, this morning dawned upon as strange a world as the imagination could possibly picture.


A glorious alpine valley, with splendid fir and beech forests as fine as grow anywhere in Japan, but a valley from mountain top to river bottom sprayed, dripping, and drowned with mud. An area of forest, mountain, and valley fully ten square miles in extent is covered with a coating of volcanic slime from half an inch to four feet in depth.

The hardy bamboo grass, the terror of the climber, is beaten prone in the mud, mile upon mile of magnificent timber, the pride of the Imperial Forestry Reserve, is groaning, bending and breaking under literally tons of mud to the tree. Sharp reports and rending crashes fairly filled the air all day, as the great firs one after another refused longer to bear the strain of their load.

We have all seen a great forest with tree limbs drooping to the very ground under a fresh fall of heavy wet snow, but in place of the spotless winter covering, picture if you can, a clinging, sticky, slate-coloured mud, a mud that covers everything and oozes off the tree limbs upon you as you slip and stumble in the slime. A mud world; and but two days ago the fairest valley in Japan!


Yet even in the wanton destruction of the volcano, a feature of real beauty has been added to Kami Kochi, for it now boasts a blue alpine lake, a mile and a half in extent, filling the lower end of the valley, a sheet of water in which the snowy crags and pinnacles of Hodaka yama are mirrored. The same mud that was blown over the landscape like escaping steam, flowed for twenty-four hours down the mountain side, carrying huge rocks and trees and, in an ever widening stream, stripped a clean path through the forest, a path a mile long and four hundred yards wide in its lower reaches.

Into the river bed, at its narrowest point, the very portal of the valley, slipped this stream of mud, building a dam of mighty forest trees and rocks and filling the interstices with sticky mud. The Azusagawa, the chief affluent of the Shinanogawa, the largest river of the main island, was squarely stopped by this stone and timber barrier which must be full 60 feet in height. The waters of the river backed up to form the lake and are now running over the top of the dam, down a spill-way in a wild cataract, a full quarter of a mile in extent …..


The musketry of camera shutters interrupted my reverie – the sun had touched the top of the Hodakas, and it was time to be moving. I crossed the river at Tashiro Bridge, where another battalion of photographers was straining to capture the frosted trees by a smaller pond. Behind their backs, Yake-dake’s reflection floated luminously in the still waters. One fine autumn day, wrote Fukada Kyuya, it seemed as if Yake-dake had donned a coat of many colours. And so it seemed to me too.


But today, continued the Hyakumeizan author (in 1964), Kami-kōchi is a seething hive of activity that centres more on tourism than alpinism. Such mountaineers as there are shoulder their packs and vanish swiftly in the direction of the mountains, leaving the environs of Kappa-bashi and Taishō Pond to the day-trippers with their raincoats and sports shoes. Above them looms Yake-dake, a simple, half-day climb. The tourists would gain much if they added it to their list of sights to see.

Taking Fukada’s advice, I headed uphill through stands of larch trees flaming in their autumn yellow. The path flirted with the edge of an erosion gully, then led me to the hut on the volcano’s northern shoulder. By now, my boots were crunching through the season’s first light snows. The hut warden had long since packed up and gone down. I wandered on up to the summit, which was occupied by a group of lively pensioners, fresh from the previous day's conquest of the highest peak in the Central Alps.


Yake is a convincing if compact volcano: steam vents from a large fumarole and sulphur encrusts the frozen earth around several other vents. In the centre of the crater, there is a straight-sided shaft, just large enough for an Empedoclean leap, that plummets straight down to dark and unfathomable depths. As Fukada Kyuya observes, this is a summit that leaves you in no doubt that you are standing on top of an active volcano.


The mountain can be descended to the south, by a path down to Naka-no-yu, where an onsen used to ply its trade before the Abo tunnel was built. In 1995, a steam explosion killed four construction workers there, showing that titanic forces still lurk beneath the tranquil scenery. As I walked down through the beech woods, the autumn wind wrested the last leaves from the trees.

References

Eyewitness account of Yake-dake eruption by J Merle Davis, from “Inaka” (Vol II, 1915), the newsletter of the Mountain Goats of Kobe (see previous posting) - many thanks to Iain Williams of the Toyohashi Alpine Club for rediscovering "Inaka" and for generously sending me this extract!

Yake-dake chapter of Nihon Hyakumeizan by Fukada Kyūya in a forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan

Black-and-white photo of Yake-dake in 1925 by Hokari Misuo, a pioneer mountain photographer, from 人はなぜ山に登るか, volume 103 in the Taiyo Bessatsu: Nihon no Kokoro series (Heibonsha, 1998)

Goats and gaijin

How the foreign climbers of Kobe propagated the art of rock-climbing in Japan. Or perhaps didn’t

July 14th, 1904 marks something of a false dawn in Japan’s mountaineering history. For this was the day when, watched by three apprehensive companions, the Reverend Walter Weston struggled up the highest granite obelisk of the Hō'ō Sanzan, a range in the Southern Alps. The first recorded ascent is described by Fukada Kyūya in his One Hundred Mountains of Japan:-

A tall chimney is formed where the rock pillars lean together. After an inspection, Weston realised the only chance of success lay in getting up the convex angle of the lower pillar. He got his companion to press his ice-axe against his feet to steady him as he stood on a small ledge, then began to bombard the top of the crack formed by the stone pillars with a stone tied to the end of his eighty feet of alpine climbing rope. After half an hour of disheartening effort, a lucky shot went home. Grasping the rope in his left hand, he then fought his way upwards until he reached a protruding block where the rope could afford no further help. Then he committed his whole weight to the obstruction above and, after a struggle, hauled himself onto the top of the lower rock. From here to the actual highest point was comparatively easy, for though the way up was almost vertical, the holds were good, and Weston was able to finish his climb in good style.

“This may be our country's first act of alpinism and it is certainly its first recorded rock climb,” asserts Fukada. That may be so, but Weston’s feat was not soon imitated. According to Fukada Kyūya, more than a decade elapsed before Weston’s ascent was repeated. In October 1917, a party of three led by H E Daunt of Kobe and guided by three experienced porters from Ashiyasu climbed the rocks from the north side and descended Weston's route.

H E Daunt was a leading light of the Mountain Goats of Kobe (MGK), a group of Kansai-based foreign mountaineers. It’s uncertain exactly when the MGK was founded, but its journal, Inaka – edited by Daunt under his club name of “Bell Goat” – started in 1915 and appeared at intervals for almost a decade. Copies of its 18 individual issues are now so rare that they change hands for several hundred dollars apiece.


The Mountain Goats followed in Weston’s footsteps and perhaps ranged even further afield. Surviving photos show them on Tateyama, on Yari (see photo above, showing three mountaineers at Weston's Iwagoya bivvy site, although they may not be MGK members), on Shirouma, and on Senjo-ga-take in the Southern Alps. They practised their rock-climbing on the local crags of Mt Rokko and they organized expeditions on a generous scale, as an essay by a Reverend W H Elwin records:-

The preliminaries of deciding where to go, and of writing and then telegraphing for guide and carriers, of preparation of food and kit with the ideas of five people to work in, is an anxious matter if one allows oneself to indulge one’s feelings. But finally all is ready: tent, rope, provisions, garments, and footgear; and we are ready. The Japanese tabi and waraji (sock and sandal) are undoubtedly the best for the feet except perhaps for some of the snow work. Through a lack of co-ordination and some difference of ideas as to the best form in which to carry the needed calories we had an over supply of food. But on the whole we did well as our party of five only needed six carriers and a guide.

The MGK did not exist in isolation. Daunt was a member of both the (British) Alpine Club and its Japanese equivalent. Soon after the JAC was founded, in 1905, regional mountaineering clubs started to spring up all round Japan. Among the earliest was the Kobe Waraji (Straw Sandal) Club, founded in 1910, which later morphed into the Kobe Walking Society or KWS (神戸徒歩会). Its journal went by the name of “Pedestrian”, spelling out the English word in katakana.

Not all were content with pedestrianism. Moved to action possibly by watching members of the MGK scrambling on outcrops of Mt Rokko, the Kobe-based journalist Fujiki Kuzō set out to pursue steep, technical climbing. In 1924, he and other colleagues from the KWS founded the Rock Climbing Club. The concept was so new in Japan that it could only be rendered in katakana English. Thus the club’s name in Japanese is, quite simply, the ロック・クライミング・クラブ or RCC.

The following year, Fujiki published a manual on climbing techniques and led an epoch-making trip to Takidani, a system of cliffs and gullies in the Hodaka massif. Twenty years after Walter Weston made his ascent of the Jizō pinnacle, rock-climbing had finally taken hold in Japan.

Simple accounts are persuasive. The story of how Weston made Japan’s first rock-climb, then passed the baton to the Mountain Goats of Kobe, who, in turn, inspired the RCC is seductively straightforward. Perhaps too much so. When writing history, it’s always wise to heed Mark Twain’s jibe: “In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.”

One problem with the Weston-MGK-RCC thesis is that the Mountain Goats may not have made the second ascent of Weston’s climb at all. According to a Japanese authority (see References), the credit should go to two middle-school students from Kofu, who climbed the Jizō pinnacle in 1910, seven years before the MGK got there.

Equally difficult to fit into the Kobe schema is Maki Yūkō (1894-1989), a native of Sendai, who was climbing rocky ridges on Tsurugi-dake as early as 1917. Maki went on to make a widely publicized first ascent of the Eiger’s Mittelegi Ridge in September 1921, a feat that probably did more to inspire the new generation of Japanese alpinists than anything the Mountain Goats did. Rock-climbing in Japan stemmed from several roots, making for a more complicated but much more interesting story than can be pursued in a single blog posting.

References

Hō'ō-zan chapter of Nihon Hyakumeizan by Fukada Kyūya in a forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan

目で見る日本登山史 by 川崎吉光、山と渓谷社
Chapter on RCC (page 160) suggests that Fujiki Kuzō and his RCC cohorts were influenced by watching the MGK at work on Mt Rokko. This book also has photos of the Mountain Goats on various Japanese peaks

人はなぜ山に登るか, volume 103 in the Taiyo Bessatsu: Nihon no Kokoro series (Heibonsha, 1998): chapter on 日本の岩登りsays that students from Kofu were the first to repeat Weston’s ascent of the Jizō pinnacle

More on Walter Weston and the history of mountaineering in Japan at Weighing up Walter Weston

Source of photos: Rock pinnacle from The Playground of the Far East (facsimile edition) by Walter Weston, other photos from 目で見る日本登山史. Click on pictures for larger versions.

"Mountains my dearest!"

An alpinistic credo: from a letter written around 1908 by Kojima Usui, founder of the Japan Alpine Club, to Walter Weston. Says it all, really ....

“From what I have seen, I feel certain that mountaineering is prevailingly flourishing year by year, and the necessity of associating the Japanese Alpine Club will be recognised by many young peoples in the future not so long. They are delighted with mountains because they can have the pleasure to breathe in the pure, invigorating air, and refresh their weary souls and bodies, and wash their eyes by looking to the green forests, the foaming rapids, and a hundred other attractions of nature. Quite so to me, too! Mountains my dearest! Here I get the safety of my mind. Really eternity neighbours to me here. Mountains are the holy throne of Truth. Mountains have a silent eloquence which amuses me forever.”

Source

The Playground of the Far East, by the Rev. Walter Weston, MA, FRGS - above passage quoted on page 29 of facsimile issue of first edition

More about how Kojima Usui came to found the JAC in Inventing the Japan Alps

Special moments on Kita-dake Buttress

Neophytes recapitulate alpine history on Japan’s second-highest mountain

Below us, a primeval sea-monster heaved itself out of the clouds. We'd traced our way over its back and now, ebullient with relief, we looked back at our line, a ridge route straight up the face of Japan’s highest alpine peak. All afternoon, the looming headwall had menaced us with imagined difficulties to come – but when we got there, we found we could skirt the cliff on easy slabs. Kita-dake’s frown had turned into an indulgent smile.

We'd seen this line as soon as we awoke from our road-head bivvy. We kept it in view as we sweated up the bouldery valley under the weight of our packs, pushing to make up for the late start. We were bleary from lack of sleep, but this was a line worth travelling for. There it was, soaring up the edge of the buttress, a ladder into the mid-summer sky.


Then we lost our line. Or rather it slid out of sight behind overhangs as we clambered up the talus slope. Bemused, as if by a fox, we cast about for a clue. The route description, photocopied from a guidebook short on detail, wasn't much help: find the ridge, it said, and climb it to the top.

A passing climber sorted us. You can go up there, he suggested, pointing to a white smear on a nearby wall, or you can take that spur yonder. We voted for the second option; it looked friendlier. We were deceived. The spur lured us into a steep thicket, booby-trapped with rotten logs and boulders looser than the morals of Kabuki-cho.

Half an hour later, filthy with sawdust and leafmould, we emerged onto scree. Across the gully, at last, we recognized No.4 ridge. We'd found our line again. The rest was easy. We started our climb from a cluster of rusty pitons and trodden-out cigarette butts that marked the first belay ledge. Accommodating crack-lines ushered us up easy slabs. As we moved higher, pitch by pitch, clouds started to boil up around us, but before they closed off the view, we glimpsed Fuji looming above the nearby ridgeline.


It may have been from that standpoint, somewhere near Hapomba Col, that the banker, mountaineer and writer Kojima Usui first set eyes on Kita-Dake in 1908. He settled on the English word "buttress" to describe the pyramidal spur that shores up the mountain's eastern cliffs. And, as Kojima was a founder of the Japan Alpine Club, the name stuck when he wrote up his trip in Sangaku, the club’s journal.

It took another twenty years for climbers to venture onto the Buttress. The first to try was Takahashi Kenji, in 1929, leading a four-man crew from Kyoto University. They climbed No.5 ridge – perhaps trundling some of those lubricious boulders – and North-East Ridge. They also named the cliff's salient features, such as the Matchbox, and numbered its ridges from one to five.

Nobody had yet plumbed the central reaches of the Buttress. That task fell to a Rikkyo University team led by Sakai Yoshikuni in August 1932. They tackled No.3 ridge, then traversed across to No.4 ridge and climbed its upper part. This left ridges Nos. 1 and 3 for climbers from Tokyo Shodai. Finally, Matsunami Akira pioneered Chuo-Ryo, the highest, most difficult line, in 1942.

Unaware that we were recapitulating Japanese alpine history, we worked our way upwards. Holds came easily to hand on the aery spine of this ridge and our climbing shoes gripped well on the lichenous rock. Amusing misunderstandings arose over climbing calls; there was a Mark in each of our two rope teams.

Suddenly, it was over. Perched on a convenient branch of creeping pine, we eased the climbing shoes from our sweaty feet. We packed away the gear, swung our packs onto our backs, and made our way up to the summit, now wrapped in drifting clouds. It was too late to get back to Tokyo, so we stayed overnight in a hut. Everyone else piled out at 4.30am to watch the dawn, but we slept on. The rising sun could have gone nova for all we cared.


Two months later, I was back on the Buttress. Or, to be precise, I was poised on a steep slab of magnificent porphyry, just above an overhang. A few feet away, a rusty but solid-looking piton beckoned with its promise of security and (if admissible) direct aid. But getting there would take an act of faith.

I scanned the slab again; perhaps I’d overlooked some thank-god hold (“gubba” in local parlance) or foolproof ledge. No: the move would have to be made on miniscule rills – what English-speaking guidebooks like to call “rugosities” – and faith in the properties of climbing shoe rubber soles. Suddenly, the autumn breeze blew chill.

The twin climbing ropes sagged from my Troll harness down to a stance below the overhang, where Yamada-san had them belayed on a figure-eight. He said nothing, but a twitch in the ropes as he took up slack told me that he expected action. We weren't well acquainted yet, but I was already tuning in to his extensive repertoire of non-verbal signals.

Yamada-san had turned up at our hiking club’s monthly meeting, looking for people to climb with. His employer, a pump manufacturer, had brought him back to Tokyo after a sales assignment in Gunma. While in that mountainous prefecture, he’d honed his climbing skills under local tutelage – it was alpinists from Gunma who made a winter ascent of Chris Bonington’s famous Everest South-West Face line. One of them was photographed smoking a cigarette on a belay stance at 8,000 metres. Perhaps the route wasn’t hard enough for them.

I’m not sure what Yamada-san was looking for in our easy-going club. Maybe he didn’t know himself. “Do you do alpine?” he asked me. “We do,” I replied, thinking of our recent visit to the Buttress. “Then how about Pyramid Face next weekend,” Yamada suggested.

One should carefully check the guide-book before accepting such invitations. But too late now. We made our approach with dispatch. Instead of the slow night train, we arrived in Yamada-san's hard-driven Subaru and walked far up the valley to a bivvy site close under the cliff. The October day would be short and we needed to get an early start. Instant noodles and espresso-style instant coffee were tipped down before sunrise and then, with the upper tiers of the Buttress steeped in the orange light of dawn, we half-ran up the talus slope. Frost pillars pushed out of the earth beside the path.


As we roped up under the route, an angry hornet hummed past us. Or so I momentarily thought, until disabused by the snap of a ricocheting stone. So that's the drone of falling rocks, I realized, just as advertised in the mountaineering classics. In those innocent days, we scarcely gave a thought to the possibility that stones could hit people. Or, if they did, surely our neat grey carbon-fibre helmets, then at the height of fashion, would deflect all incomings.



Yamada-san led off, which left me two or three pitches later to confront The Move. Still no comment from below; the twin ropes remained motionless. You have to trust your feet, I told myself, edging a red-and-grey Boreal climbing shoe – remember those? – onto a rill. Trying to convince myself it wouldn’t slip, I slowly eased my weight onto my left foot, then stretched upwards towards the piton, scrabbling at my harness for a quick-draw as it came within reach. Could I have been so remiss as to weight the piton as I clipped the rope in? Never mind, now the abyss below could yawn in vain …

It wasn’t until we’d finished the route – early enough this time to get back to Tokyo – that I realized that a test had been set. A fail mark would have been awarded for backing off or, worse, falling off the pitch. As it happened, our easy-going hiking club seemed to have made the grade: Yamada-san would climb with us.

That winter, the weatherbeaten white Subaru criss-crossed Honshu in search of snowy mountains to ski-climb. In spring, we honed our rock skills on local crags, then moved out to sawas and the Japan Alps in high summer. Yes, we did alpine. To make that official, Yamada-san formed a club, affiliated to the Japan Workers Alpine Federation, the only such organization that would let us in. So it was that we became Alpine Workmen.


We went back to the Buttress every summer. We may even have studied it intensively. The rock, by the way, isn’t porphyry at all, but rather a purple-dyed chert, laid down in some deep-sea trench of yore. Unlike Yari, with its ignimbrites or the granodiorite towers of Takidani, Kita-dake is the very model of an alpine-type fold mountain. So, as Hyakumeizan author Fukada Kyuya says about another mountain in the Southern Alps, it has “preserved the heritage of its sedimentary strata intact, while Hodaka, Yari, and Shirouma, like rebel angels, have invoked plutonic forces to raise them aloft.”

The geology has some practical implications. Curving away down the face, the sedimentary strata overlap like giant tiles, creating a series of overhangs for climbers to surmount. Sometimes the upper layer of rock has started to spall away at these steps, leaving massive blocks to impend over the abyss with no apparent means of support. We approached such places tentatively, as if tip-toeing into the presence of unexploded bombs.

A particularly fine and intimidating set of overhangs looms over the top of the buttress, next to No.4 Ridge. This is Chuo-Ryo, the Central Ridge. “How about it, then?” Yamada kept asking. This time I checked the guidebook before committing myself. “The concave overhang is surmounted using artificial techniques,” I read. A glance at the topo revealed that the first pitch was graded IV+, A2 (5.10a), a shorthand for tangled etriers dangling and twisting from dubious pitons. I told Yamada I would study his proposal intensively, but before that could happen the bottom of the route crumbled into space one winter night. Honour was saved.

The Buttress has certain protocols. One is to start early, if you want to stay above the cloud that boils up on most afternoons. Another is to stay clear of D-Gully, the natural conduit for stones dislodged by climbers above. Clearly, we’d not taken these rules sufficiently to heart when I found myself stymied in D-Gully one afternoon, unable to move up or down. Cloud cut off all views, so that we hovered, Andy and I, in a grey bubble, the cliffs fading into nothingness above and below.

Spreadeagled across the gully’s angle, with legs trembling under the strain, I took in the blue bell flower growing out of a crack within inches of my nose. Above it, just within reach, winked a rusty piton. I considered the options. I could try to climb free, in which case I might slip, or I could grab the piton. Around that time, the mountaineering magazines carried an advertisement for a certain brand of climbing rope. Under a picture that showed a climber peeling backwards from a cliff, the tagline read “Special moments”. We couldn’t afford one of those here.

Yes, I could grab the piton, and afterwards the blue bell-flower would still nod in the breeze, secure in its earthy crack. But the climbers might be at the bottom of the cliff. We’d been lucky to avoid that fate a couple of years back in Takidani, when a pin pulled out during an aid move. And here was no friendly ledge to break the fall.

‘Watch me,’ I called down to Andy, superfluously. Then I stuffed a toe in the earthy crack, and udged upwards, hand fluttering upwards over the stone, bypassing that temptress of a piton, seeking the fingerhold that should, that must be there. I found it, a neat indentation in the wall, hidden from below, and moved my feet up. A ledge, running sideways, liberated me from the slimy corner and I set up a belay. When Andy came up, he pulled out the suspect piton with one tug of his hand.

Two years later, we judged ourselves sufficiently proficient – we’d survived, anyway – to organize a mass ascent of the Buttress. Two cars, carrying eight Workman Alpinists, converged on Hirogawara, where our patron joined us, a Himalayan veteran (G2, not by the normal route), from Gunma. The carpark was empty: on this last-but-one weekend in October, Yamada-san had chosen to call the weather forecast’s bluff.

We walked into a boulder field and pitched the tents. A pleasant evening round the camp fire ensued, faces overheated by the nearby flames and backs dampened by the autumn drizzle. By Gunma standards, we kept the drinking within modest limits. October days are short.



At 4.30am, when we started up the stoves, Orion reclined on the neighbouring ridge like a Roman patrician at a banquet. It was still dark when we started walking, and we were already pushing through the stunted mountain birches under the cliff when the sun peeped over the eastern hills. Here we split up to tackle three different routes.

I headed for No.4 ridge, to give Araki-san and Yoshiko their first experience of alpine climbing. A couple of stones bounced down the white rake of C gully as we started out, adding to the authenticity of the occasion. Two pitches up, a short traverse to the ridge proper took us through another stand of birch, leaves yellow and sere.


As we climbed higher, Fuji floated into view over the lower mountains to the south. Today it juggled lenticular capclouds like straw rainhats, stacking one on top of another. Yoshiko led a section of white rock, stepped like a staircase, and then a harder move took us onto the dinosaur’s back, a spine of rock leading to the mountain’s upper reaches. My companions laughed at the novelty of the height and the exposure.


While we abseiled down to the purple slabs below, ready to start the final three pitches to the top, Yamada-san’s rope appeared behind us. Topping out at the withered branch of creeping pine, I noticed that, since our last visit, some predator appeared to have taken a chunk out of the ridge below. The rocks seemed to be eroding away even faster than we could climb them. I glanced at my watch. Not even 2pm yet. Perhaps the Buttress had taught us something about time discipline over the years.

In July, the faint trail to the summit passes through a flower meadow, but yellowing grass was all that remained now. On the summit rocks, already rimed with ice, I called Yamada-san on our two-way radio to let him know that we would start down. The rain set in again after we’d reached the camp site and picked up the tents.

Back at the cars, Araki-san offered to drive but was soon snoring in the left-hand seat. Conversation flagged as we drove up into the gathering gloom. I glanced in the mirror: Chiemi huddled in a corner, nodding off, Yoshiko was asleep sitting bolt upright, a samurai daughter. Soon we would be on the motorway and I could delegate the driving to the Subaru’s cruise control.


A week later, I went back with another aspirant. We started too late and, as we crossed the pass into the Southern Alps, a snow-squall blotted out the peaks. We wandered about trying to find the previous week’s campsite, but the fitful moonlight made everything look different. In the morning, snow had dusted every ledge and rill on the Buttress. The alpine season was over; winter had come to Kita-dake.

*************************************************************

With its clean-cut lines, Kita-dake is the all-surpassing aristocrat of the Shirane Sanzan ... That spire-like summit block towering into the skies, that pyramid without a hint of the facile, that elegance unsullied by frivolity, all these add up to a spell-binding beauty. Fuji is there for everybody, but this is a mountain for philosophers.

- Fukada Kyuya: One Hundred Mountains of Japan

References

Nihon Hyakumeizan by Fukada Kyūya in a forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan

山の地膣学講座　北岳、深海底からの手紙　by 佐藤岱生　in 岳人　9.93号

日本の岩場（上）クライミング。ガイドブックス　CJ編集部編

日本のクラシック。ルート７　バットレズ弟四尾根　in 山と渓谷　１０．１９９３号

There goes the neighbourhood

Deer and monkeys invade Japan's high mountains, decimating alpine plants and the birds that live off them

Just below Kita-dake's summit, a snow ptarmigan and her chick were taking a dust bath in the middle of the path. A beady glare from the hen assured me that she had no intention of moving aside; it was for me to walk round the birds. Unthreatened by predators in their high alpine habitat since the last ice age, snow ptarmigan (raicho in Japanese) have little fear of people.

On Japan's second-highest mountain, this was no unusual encounter in the 1990s. It might be now. When Nakamura Hiroshi visited Kita-dake in October 2003, he found none of the friendly birds on a mountainside that once harboured one of the largest colonies in the Japan Alps. Instead, the ground was covered with monkey droppings and deer tracks, something he'd never seen before at this altitude.


Nakamura, a professor at Shinshū University, has been surveying Japanese snow ptarmigan populations since 1981. But it is only in the last five to ten years that monkeys and deer have started to move up beyond the treeline into the alpine zone of creeping pine and alpine shrubs. The implications for snow ptarmigan, which depend on those shrubs for cover and food, are ominous, he believes.

Writing in Yama to Keikoku, Nakamura suggests that Japan's high mountains are being invaded on a broad front. In September 2002, he saw 30 monkeys stuffing themselves on bilberries (kuromame-no-ki) near the top of Otenshō-dake, an almost-3000er in the Northern Alps, Never before had he seen a monkey troop at such a height.

Then in June 2005, he made a traverse between Hijiri-dake and Tekari, two "famous mountains" in the Southern Alps. Deer tracks were seen everywhere along the connecting ridges and all the alpine flowers had been grazed away, except for the poisonous species. The damage was most severe towards the south of the range, between Izaru-ga-dake and Tekari, where all the flower fields (hanabatake) marked on the map had been erased. "And what has already happened in the Southern Alps is only a matter of time in the Northern Alps," warns Nakamura.

The snow ptarmigan are menaced on all sides. Monkeys and deer are cropping their food supply. Kestrels and crows, also newcomers to the mountaintops, are raiding their nests. Foxes are hunting them. Monkeys have been seen stalking the unwary birds; they may have acquired a taste for fresh ptarmigan.

In the past, all these predators and competitors stayed down in the beech and oak woods at the mountain's foot. Dark and inhospitable, the evergreen forests at the middle altitudes kept them from foraging higher up. What has now pushed them beyond their traditional bounds?

Professor Nakamura believes that modern agriculture has caused the population of wild animals to explode. The decline of hunting has also helped numbers to increase. "But it's not the wild animals that have changed their habits," he concludes. "It's that we Japanese have moved from a co-existence with nature to a wholly human-centred way of life."

References

危機に瀕するライチョウ：日本の高山で、今何がおきているのか ("Snow ptarmigan on the brink of disaster – what is happening in Japan's high mountains") article by Professor Nakamura Hiroshi (中村浩志）in Yama to Keikoku, one of Japan's leading mountaineering magazines, January 2007 edition.

Photos of flowers taken on or around Kita-dake between 1991 and 1995; photo of raicho from Natural Monuments of Japan (Kodansha); photo of raicho and yama-skiers by Sunnybeauty

Update

In May 2009, a snow ptarmigan was spotted on Hakusan for the first time in 70 years. The bird became extinct on Hokuriku's highest mountain in the early Showa years. Full report in the Chunichi Shinbun

Et in Arcadia ego

The Adatara chapter of Nihon Hyakumeizan and the story of Takamura Chieko

If you're looking for the dark side of mountains, then Nihon Hyakumeizan may not be the book for you. Fukada Kyuya climbed not to test his limits but to find solace: "The hour I spent on that bright and peaceful top was as close to heaven as one gets in this world," he wrote after climbing one of his Hundred Mountains.

To round out his mountain portraits, Fukada ranges far and wide through the treasure-house of Japanese literature. At first sight, these gleanings support an Arcadian view of mountains and mountaineering. The essay on Adatara, for example, starts with a couple of lyrical verses from the Manyōshū, Japan's earliest poetic anthology, and then cuts to two modern poems by Takamura Kōtarō (1883– 1956).

In the second of these poems, Takamura and his wife Chieko are sitting under a tree, looking out at an idyllic landscape:-

That's Adatara-yama
That's the Abukuma river, glittering there
……
This is the town where you were born
And the speckles in that little white wall
Those are your sake sheds.
Come now, let's stretch our legs
And take in some country air
Fragrant with pine under a northern clear sky
…….
That's Adatara-yama
That's the Abukuma river, glittering there

Adatara, in Fukushima Prefecture, was Chieko's native mountain. She was born in nearby Adachi-gun in 1886, the eldest daughter of a prosperous brewer – hence the sake sheds in the poem. The Naganuma family took a progressive attitude to the education of women. After Chieko showed artistic talent, she went on to study first at a high school in Fukushima and then at Nihon University.

A classmate recalled that Chieko was "calm, reticent, and shows enthusiastic concentration in whatever she does. She is also very humorous and amazing. For instance, she learned to ride a bicycle more quickly than the rest of us. She also invented an "easy hakama" that required no folding. She was good at playing tennis and surprised us with her sizzling shots that we were hardly in keeping with her meek and quiet character."

After graduating from the university's home economics department, she decided to stay in Tokyo and pursue her vocation as an artist, often painting in oils. One commission was to design a cover for the first edition of Seito ("Bluestocking"), a magazine for women writers launched in September 1911.


Around this time she met Takamura Kōtarō, who had recently returned from Paris, where he had studied sculpture and art. After a painting trip to Kamikochi, they announced their marriage in 1914. Chieko then branched out into writing. She earned a certain amount of recognition as one of the "New Women" authors, but not enough to alleviate a hardscrabble existence. As Kōtarō recorded in one of his famous Chieko poems:

In the storm lashed rain
Like a drowned rat
Bought some rice
For 24 sen and 5 rin
5 dried fish
1 pickled radish
Some pickled ginger
Eggs fresh from the farm
Nori that's like flat steel
Fried fish balls
Salted bonito

We boil some water
And wolf down our supper
Like starving people

(From the Chieko Poems, translated by Paul Archer)

Meanwhile, the Naganuma family was struggling in the post-war recession. After the death of Chieko's father in 1918, the sake business started to go downhill. The firm went bankrupt in 1929, depriving the family of its home. The shock was too great for Chieko: a few years later, she began to show symptoms of schizophrenia. Her decline is movingly chronicled in the Chieko poems. One of these is set below Bandai, another of the One Hundred Mountains:-

The foothills below the forked peak of Mt Bandai
Lour grimly at the August sky,
Their slopes seethe
With pampas so overgrown it could bury you.
My half-mad wife sprawls in the grass,
Leaning heavily on my arm,
Sobbing like an inconsolable girl.
It won't be long now, I'm cracking up.
Looming inevitability, cornered
By the demons crowding her mind,
There's no escape, her soul severed away.
It won't be long now, I'm cracking up.
The mountain wind blows coldly on my hands wet with tears.
I gaze at my wife without speaking.
She looks back for the last time from the edge of consciousness
And clings to me.
Nothing now can bring my wife back to me.
My heart cracks in two, slips away
And becomes one with the world which silently surrounds us.

(Translation by Paul Archer)

Kotaro took his wife to various hot springs but her condition worsened. During this period, he visited the village office which administered Chieko's permanent address, and registered their marriage. She died in 1935, after contracting tuberculosis.

In the light of Chieko's life story, it's worth re-reading the section of the Adatara chapter in Hyakumeizan that mentions her. It starts like this:-

The name of Adatara, as it is seen from Nihonmatsu along this route, has been immortalised in the poem by Takamura Kōtarō. Chieko, the poet's beloved wife, was born to a brewer's family in Nihonmatsu. While living in Tōkyō, she fell sick and recovered her health only after moving back to the family home in the country. Takamura wove the artless words of his wife into these verses:

There's no sky in Tōkyō, says Chieko
If only I could see a piece of sky, says she
………….
Looking into the distance, she sighs
The blue sky bends over Adatara every day
That's the sky where I belong, she says.

Without spelling it out, Fukada alludes to the whole trajectory of Chieko's life. He puts more into his mountain essays than appears on first reading. There are shadows as well as sunlight, depths as well as heights. That may be another reason why his book has stood the test of time.

References

Translations of the Chieko Poems by Paul Archer

The dreamer of Fukushima: Chieko Takamura (source of images above)

About Seito magazine. See Wikipedia

Wes Camus's guide to climbing Adatara today

The Hot & Cold Hyakumeizan challenge (18)

Travelogue concluded: learning respect for Arashima-dake

8 December: Never diss the mountain you are about to climb. On approach marches, Sherpas take this principle so much to heart that they eschew all drinking, swearing, and lechery. Not that we were using profane language or thinking impure thoughts on our drive towards Arashima-dake – the Sensei, for one, wouldn’t hold with that. Even so, I fear that we may have offended our peak's tutelary deity.

“You know,” said the Sensei as she guided the van deftly over the frozen road, “Arashima gets low ratings on internet forums. It’s as if people are asking why it was chosen as one of the Famous Mountains.”

Now it’s true that Fukada Kyuya provoked some of these doubts himself – he says in Nihon Hyakumeizan that he considered other mountains in this Hokuriku district as alternatives. But he hadn’t climbed them, so Arashima was chosen by default. All the same, it might have been wiser not to raise this touchy subject in the mountain’s presence.

And there it was, now, looming against the orange glow of a winter dawn. There were the “two gentle ridges” described in Hyakumeizan, spreading out to embrace the small plain like the paws of a sphinx. We were heading for the ski-ground at the mountain’s foot. Soon the van was parked on frozen snow and we were unloading our gear from the back.

The Sensei had borrowed an extra pair of snowshoes. They were made by a company more famous for its petrol stoves, but I was glad to see them nonetheless – the lack of such aids had led to my summary rejection by Rishiri-dake two weeks previously.

I did a quick calculation: Arashima is 1,523 metres high, but we’d parked several hundred metres above sea level, so we had a mere 1,200 metres to climb. ‘Mere’… I shouldn’t even have thought that word, let alone said it out loud. Mountain kami-sama may be very sensitive about their height.

We walked up a short ski-piste and entered the woods, following a trail trampled into the deep snow. “They were wearing kanjiki,” deduced the Sensei. Kanjiki are traditional snowshoes, formed from a hoop of bamboo and tied onto the boot with rope thongs. People have used them here for centuries; they’re even mentioned by the twelfth-century all-terrain poet, Saigyō. But I was sure we’d get further with our high-performance footgear from the Seattle stovemakers. This peak was a sure thing…



The Sensei drew my attention to the trees, beech perhaps, with maple or holly lurking in the understorey. Dead branches hung down here and there. Perhaps they had taken ill from the exhaust fumes of all the tour buses that crowd the summer car-park, my companion suggested. Or it might be that the trampling boots of the peak-bagging hordes have exposed their roots. This is the curse of the Hyakumeizan: any mountain so designated attracts armies of visitors, thus robbing it of the charms that attracted Fukada Kyuya in the first place…

I began to wonder if the internet scribblers who diss Arashima have a point. After all, the mountain scrapes in above Fukada’s own minimum height stipulation by a mere – that word again – 23 metres. And to describe it, as Fukada does, as “sternly Matterhorn-like” is frankly preposterous. Could it be that the author was guilty of insider trading or plain misrepresentation in raising this mountain to the ranks of the Hyakumeizan?

Consider the charge sheet: Fukada was born in the neighbouring prefecture of Ishikawa, but his mother was from Fukui and he went to school there. That would prejudice him in favour of slipping a prominent Fukui peak into his celebrated list of One Hundred Mountains. Prior to its debut in Hyakumeizan, Arashima was pretty much unknown outside the prefecture …

The prosecution was warming to its case when we left the dingy lower woods and stepped up into the radiance of a beech grove in winter. Shards of hoarfrost glittered in the morning sun as the wind blew them through the open rides between the trees. The sky was blue, but a faint halo surrounded the sun. That is always a bad sign in the north country. Already we were losing the favour of this mountain.

We came out into a glade called Shakunage-daira. It was a pretty place, even without its namesake rhododendrons, buried as they were metres deep under the snowdrifts. We paused for some food and tea.

“Now the work begins,” said the Sensei, nodding to the other side of the glade. I saw what she meant. Yesterday’s trailbreakers had come this far and no further; from now on, we would have to make our own tracks. “No problem,” I said blithely, “with these excellent rackets, we’ll make good time.” The Sensei looked skeptical but said nothing.

I took a step forward and sank deep, just as if red-hot stoves were attached to my feet. The softness of the new snow was to blame, of course, not the high-tech shoes. Suddenly, 1,200 metres seemed like a long way. We waded across a connecting ridge to the main body of the mountain.

I'd got back into my stride and was preparing Fukada's defence in the Hyakumeizan misrepresentation case - namely that the author wasn't the first to include Arashima in an all-Japan list of famous mountains - when the Sensei interrupted my thoughts. “Next we have Mochi-ga-kabe,” she announced.

That sent a chill down my spine. Mochi are the glutinous rice-cakes that regularly choke to death numbers of hapless New Year revellers. A wall named Mochi could bode no good. Soon my fears were realized. A short but steep ramp barred the way. A tentative kick with the high-technology snowshoes dislodged a small snow-slide, revealing blue ice underneath.


In need of a good reason to go on, I found one when I looked over my shoulder and saw the Sensei standing there, arms folded. She seemed to be expecting action. It wouldn’t dare, I decided: Mochi-ga-kabe wouldn’t dare avalanche while a university professor and a member of the illustrious Fukui Mountaineering Club was looking on.

I set to work. Every step up caused the snow to collapse and minutes ticked away before I could work high enough to grab a spray of panda grass and haul myself up in vegetation-assisted A-zero mode. Not even The Thicket on Rishiri had called for such unwholesome tactics.

As soon as we came up on the main ridge, the sharp easterly found us. Stray fronds of panda grass rattled in the wind. While I waited for the Sensei to join me, I looked for a friendly beech trunk to shelter behind, but there were none. Now we stood among sparse stands of mountain birch. Strange, it seemed, to have climbed so quickly through vegetation zones – maple, beech, and birch – especially when the deep snow had slowed us so much.

I looked at my watch: 1.30pm already! Clearly a fox was at work here, speeding up time and stretching distances. While we tackled Mochi-ga-kabe, he’d also made off with the blue sky. A pall of cloud had come posting up from the horizon and buried the sun in its grey tendrils.

We could allow only another half-hour if we wanted to get down before nightfall. I hurled myself at another slope of deep snow, only to be smothered in its mochi-like depths. Slowly I engineered a trench towards the skyline. The Sensei followed, hardly less laboriously. We seemed to be re-enacting Death March on Mt Hakkoda, albeit with a smaller cast.

At 2pm we came out on a small top, above the trees and within sight of the top. Well this would have to do for the day. We allowed ourselves a minute to take in the view. Behind us loomed Hakusan, luminously pale against the darkening skies. Below, like a snowy patchwork, was spread the snowy plain of Ono, sprinkled with farmsteads.


Above, spindrift plumed Everest-style from the ridge; this mountain clearly insisted on being taken seriously. “There used to be a hut and an antenna up there,” said the Sensei, “but they knocked them down because this is a Hyakumeizan. They also took away the shrine.” No wonder the kami-sama is aggrieved, I thought: it must be mighty cold without a shrine to bivvy in.

We started back. Even the downhill going was slow, but again I noticed how soon the dake-kamba (birches) gave way to the beech woods. Perhaps the fox had rearranged the scenery too.


It turns out, though, that Arashima’s treelines really do bunch more closely together than on other mountains. Its beech trees give way to birch at a mere 1,420 metres, compared to 1,700 metres on nearby Hakusan and in the Northern Alps. The savants ascribe this downshifting of vegetation zones to the mountain's exposure to the Siberian winds sweeping in from the Japan Sea.

That makes Arashima, climatically speaking, the equal of a higher or more northerly eminence. It has the stature of a famous peak, even if it packs its height into a smaller interval.

The light was fading when we got back to the car. As we drove away, All Angels playing on the CD drive, I looked back and saw a black bar of cloud, like a sword, hanging over Arashima-dake. For the first time, I considered the meaning of its name: the wild island peak. Yes, this is a mountain that deserves the utmost respect.

References

Nihon Hyakumeizan by Fukada Kyūya in a forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan

百名山の自然学西日本編　by　清水長正

Random acts of mountain photography by Project Hyakumeizan and (more) by the Sensei