The inner world of Mt Asama

Investigating the crater’s secrets with some help from the academicians

Our luck was out. We’d left Tokyo in the early hours, hiked over the old volcano’s wall and now, around noon, we stood atop Mt Asama’s curving summit ridge. Sulphurous steam roiled at our feet before heaving its way up into the sky; today, there would be no gazing, spellbound, into the nether world of the crater floor, corralled by its ring of scorched and blasted cliffs.

What is it about Mt Asama? As a climb, it has little merit. Yet that crater has pulling power. It was Asama that Kojima Usui, the founder of the Japanese Alpine Club, chose for his first excursion over 2,000 metres. A few years later, the adventure photographer Herbert Ponting brought along a step-ladder so that he could peer just a mite further into the crater. And, as we have seen, he nearly paid for his temerity with his life.

Nor can the savants keep away. Scientific observations at Asama started in 1910, seven years after Ponting’s visit, “motivated by eruptions and a seismic swarm”. In fact, this was one of the earliest seismic observations made of an active volcano. Since our own visit in the mid-1990s, a quiet period, Asama has hotted up. In 2009, a light ash-fall drifted as far as Tokyo. A few months later, cameras on the crater rim caught the opening of a new vent in the crater floor.

For the academicians, this activity has been an incitement. Starting with “only six seismometers” just before the turn of the century, they’ve festooned the mountain and surrounding areas with 30 seismometers, 15 GPS sites, 10 tiltmeters, nine microphones, and two cosmic muon detectors.

The kit has helped the geologists put together a clearer picture of Asama’s underworld. They can now tell you, at least tentatively, what you might find if you ventured down into the crater – that is, provided you could stand the noxious gases and the 200°C heat there – and if, like Professor Lidenbrook in Journey to the Centre of the Earth, you then decided to investigate that mysterious vent in the crater floor.

Jules Verne would certainly get a run for his money from this journey. Once you’d dug or drilled a way through the congealed lava that plugs the vent, you’d find yourself in a “conduit” about fifty metres across, twisting downwards into the darkness. You’d need a long abseil rope or ladder: the shaft drops more or less vertically for three kilometres – the height of the mountain plus a further kilometre into the depths of Japan’s basement rocks.

At last, the vertical shaft debouches into the ceiling of a vast chamber. If the view were not blocked by a sluggish volume of semi-molten rock, you’d see it opening out into a vast cavern – somewhat like one of those Cyclopean storm-sewers in Tokyo, yet hundreds of times larger, and rather higher than it is wide.

Now you get the picture – the upwelling lava has forced the country rocks aside for several kilometres. You follow this dyke – a giant underground ravine – for several kilometres, more or less horizontally.

It takes you westwards and slightly north of Asama’s summit, out under the old Kurofu crater rim. Strange, you ponder: wherever the lava that feeds Asama’s eruptions comes from, it seems not to rise from directly beneath the mountain.

Five or so kilometres northwest of Asama’s summit, the rugged walls of the dyke start to close in. And there you start to sense far below you – another few kilometres down – a steady, intense reverberation of dull-red heat.

So this is where the lava comes from – a vast magma chamber, offset to Asama’s west, and doming out some four or five kilometres below sea level. From there, the molten slurries force their way up periodically into the dyke, and thence to the surface. Well, we’re not going down any further – it’s hot as hell here in the dyke, so you’ll have to imagine conditions in the magma chamber for yourself…

Up on the summit of Asama, at 2,568 metres above sea level, the summer breeze blew cool. Clouds had started to drift in too, mingling as they lofted over the rim with the steam from the crater. It was time to go. We found the path and followed its slant across the black-ribbed slope.

At the foot of the cinder cone, we met a troupe of Thai girls, in sandals and T-shirts, on their day off from some nearby bar or factory. We could hear their laughter for a long time, floating down from the summit, while we climbed the J-Band back towards the outer world. Perhaps they’d been rewarded with a better view.

Reference

Y Aoki, M Takeo, T Ohminato, Y Nagaoka and K Nishida: Magma pathway and its structural controls of Asama Volcano, Japan - image of vent and chart above from this paper.

Fires of Tartarus

A close call for two foreign visitors on Mt Asama

What is it about Mt Asama? On a fine day in October 1903, while climbing the volcano's lower slopes, the two Englishmen had seen “a cyclopean pillar of writhing smoke and vapour pouring up into the vault of heaven”. This should have reinforced the warnings they'd already heard and dismissed. Yet still they pressed on – something drew them – until they stood on the very lip of the fuming crater.

SHOOTING THE VOLCANO IN OLD JAPAN -- Photographer and Coolie Living Dangerously, a photo by Okinawa Soba on Flickr.

Or perhaps Asama's attractive powers weren't so mysterious. Herbert Ponting - the photographer who would later accompany Captain Scott on his last expedition - was in Japan to write a travel book and take pictures, the more spectacular the better. He'd already visited Aso-san in Kyushu, but that gigantic crater had proved disappointingly mild-mannered. So he had high hopes of Asama... Here Ponting takes up the story in his own words:

We saw an immense pit, six hundred feet or more across, and almost perfectly round, with perpendicular walls towering up from the bottom, five hundred feet or so below. These walls were burnt, and scorched, and stained with fire to every colour of the spectrum, and from a myriad cracks and crannies sulphurous jets of steam hissed out, each contributing its quota to the filmy vapours that rose out of the abyss from the fires of Tartarus below. Through the thin steam the entire crater floor was visible. It was a huge solfatara, with numerous holes from which molten matter was spurting, and red-hot lava pools which now and then were licked by little tongues of flame.

The noise of the place was truly infernal. There is no other sound on earth that can be likened to the sticky, sputtering buzz of a volcano. It is fearful to listen to — this vibrating, throbbing, pulsating din of ceaseless, steady boiling. The thing seemed to be fermenting with suppressed rage, and one half expected that any moment it would burst open and loose the furies it could scarce restrain …

Whilst absorbed in the contemplation of these beautiful surroundings, and the wondrous red and purple colouring of an ancient broken crater on the mountain's western side, the time sped swiftly on, and it was not until 3 o'clock that we prepared to leave. Our coolies went on ahead, but Hurley and I stopped a few moments for a last look at the crater, from which we found it hard to tear ourselves away. As we stood on the brink of the diabolical abyss there was a crash like a thunder-clap, and the earth seemed to split before us as the bed of the crater parted asunder and burst upwards, throwing thousands of tons of rock against the walls. For a moment or two the noise was like the din of battle. Masses of rock were hurled against the cliffs and shivered to fragments with reports like exploding shells, and showers of stones, whistling past us, shot many hundreds of feet into the air.

It all occurred so quickly that I cannot recall all my sensations, but remember thinking that my last moment had surely come. It seemed we must inevitably be struck by the falling stones. My first impulse was to seek safety in flight; but after running a few paces it occurred to me that the stones were just as likely to hit me running as standing still. Hurley had also started to run, but was evidently seized with the same conviction, for, without a word, he stopped too, and we both waited for our fate. Just then the smoke, which rose from the crater immediately after the explosion, swept in a great cloud above us, so that we could not see the flying stones, or form any idea where they were likely to fall. I shall not soon forget those moments, as we gazed upwards, with arms involuntarily held tightly over our heads for protection, waiting for the descending missiles to drop out of the smoke-cloud and annihilate us.

And then the stones came clattering down — sticking, with sharp thuds, deep into the ash. By good luck the main force of the explosion was directed slightly to the east, and on that side of the crater most of them fell. We were on the southern rim, and in our vicinity only a sprinkling dropped compared with the hail of rock that must have fallen a little farther off.

No sooner, however, were we safely delivered from Scylla than the perils of Charybdis were upon us. The smoke that was belching from the crater's mouth now enveloped us, and in a moment we were choking and almost asphyxiated with the sulphurous fumes. It was impossible to breathe, as, with hands tightly pressed over our mouths and nostrils, we blindly ran through the smoke for air. Fortune again was with us. In less than twenty paces we emerged suddenly from the chaos into brilliant sunlight, and staggered well out into safety before we fell upon the ground, gasping and filling our lungs to their fullest extent with great draughts of sweet pure air. It was a happy thing for us that the strong breeze which was now blowing was coming from the south ; thus the smoke was blown away from our side across the crater. Had it been blowing from the north we should have been unable to escape from the suffocating fumes.

This column of smoke was a thing of most awesome beauty, and held us fairly spell-bound. It belched up into the air in great, black rolls, which were emitted with such force and quantity that they were pushed far back into the teeth of the wind, and several times we had to retire still farther off as they bellied out towards us. It rose to the heavens in immense, writhing convolutions, and from the centre of the mass huge billows of snow-white steam puffed out, and bulged against the smoke, seeming to fight with it for mastery. But as white and black rose higher and higher in turn they mingled with each other, and soared up to the skies in a gradually diffusing pillar of grey which was tilted northwards by the wind and borne off rapidly into the clouds above.

References

Herbert Ponting, In Lotus-Land Japan (1910)

Many thanks to Okinawa Soba for posting Ponting’s dramatic photo on flickr, whence it is linked here. And to Tom Bouquet, volcanologist and educator, for originally posting this photo on his own (alas, dormant) Japan volcano blog. I hope he won’t mind me duplicating his efforts.

The origins of alpinism (3)

How an association of young naturalists helped Kojima Usui get Japan’s first alpine club off the ground

By early 1905, the banker and journalist Kojima Usui had gathered round him all six of the friends who would help him found Japan’s and, indeed, Asia’s first alpine club. Of the club itself, however, there was still no sign. On March 25, Kojima was gently reminded of this fact by none other than Walter Weston, the mountaineering missionary.

Four days before returning to England, at the end of his second stay in Japan, Weston invited his friends to a farewell party (above) at the Oriental Palace Hotel in Yokohama. Among the guests were Kojima himself, Okano Kinjirō, a Standard Oil man and Kojima’s companion on the ascent of Yari-ga-take in 1902, and the two young naturalists, Takeda Hisayoshi and Takano Takazō.

It was Weston who had introduced Kojima to the idea of an alpine club at their first meeting in Yokohama, back in 1903. Now, at the farewell party, he presented Kojima with his copy of Ludwig Schröter’s Taschenflora des Alpen-Wanderers – which he’d recently brought back from an expedition to the Southern Alps. He also asked about progress with the alpine club; when it was founded, he’d like to sign up.

Weston’s hint seems to have galvanised Kojima and his colleagues. During the summer of 1905, hundreds of letters criss-crossed the city and scores of meetings took place. A particularly important one involved Takatō Shoku (right), a wealthy landowner from Niigata, who offered to cover the proposed club’s financial losses, if any, up to one thousand yen every year for ten years.

The club now had a bankroller; it remained to devise a structure. For this, Kojima looked to Takeda Hisayoshi and his cohort of young amateur botanists and beetle fans. Back in 1901, the year Takeda graduated from the Tokyo Dai-Ichi Middle School (equivalent to today’s high school), he had helped to found a club of his own, the Japan Natural History Society (日本博物学同志), complete with its own journal.

On October 14, 1905, twelve of the natural historians convened for the Society’s thirtieth regular meeting. Takano Takazō took the chair, reporting on a recent plant-hunting foray to Tō-no-dake in the Tanzawa range. After the meeting, Takeda, Takano and two more of the naturalists met with Kojima, Takatō, and Jō Kazuma, a lawyer, to agree the details of the new alpine club.

In November, the newsletter of the Japan Natural History Society announced that an “Alpine Club” (山岳会) would be established as a “sub-section” (支会) of the Society “with the aim of pursuing all manner of research on mountains or connected with mountains”. As for Takano’s write-up of his Tō-no-dake trip, this would appear in the forthcoming first number of Sangaku, as the new sub-section’s journal would be known.

Meanwhile, Kojima was assiduously placing notices about the Sangaku-kai in Bunkō, Shinchō, Shinsei, Myōjō and other magazines likely to be read by the young Tokyo intelligentsia. And with success: membership of the alpine sub-section quickly overtook that of the parent Natural History Society. In fact, four hundred new members would join in the first year.

If the Sangaku-kai could so quickly take root as an independent club, why did Kojima choose to start it as an offshoot of the Natural History Society? One suggestion is that Kojima feared that, without the respectability conferred by Takeda’s naturalists, they would fail to attract the calibre of members he was looking for.

If such were Kojima's concerns, he must have been swiftly reassured. Distinguished men of letters – or men of letters who would shortly become distinguished – flocked to join. The club's 67th member was Yanagita Kunio, later to be acknowledged as the father of Japanese ethnography, who signed up in April 1906. Shimazaki Tōson joined too, and so did Tayama Katai - whose last novel, appropriately for an alpine club man, would be entitled Zansetsu (Lingering snow).

The new club appealed to scientists too. Yamasaki Naomasa, protagonist of Japan’s ancient glaciers, was there. So were Tanaka Akamaro, the first to study lacustrine sediments in Japan, and Jinbo Kotora, who researched both Hokkaidō's geology and the language of its native people, and there were many more besides.

Early editions of Sangaku amply reflect the interests of these scholar-mountaineers. And  often, these articles make for leaden reading. Yet this was a small price to pay for respectability. Alpinism had arrived in Japan. And, from the outset, it was established as a recreation fit for scholars and gentlemen.

References

Article by Kondo Nobuyuki on the JAC website about the club's origins:
近藤信行, 日本山岳会草創のころ

Chronology of Takeda Hisayoshi's life and career　

Previous posts in this series

Shiga Shigetaka: the great instigator

How Kojima Usui climbed Yari-ga-take

Towards a Japanese Alpine Club

New is old

An alternative list of one hundred mountains caters for Japan’s Silver Age

There was never anything definitive about the original Nihon Hyakumeizan. “And if there is a chance to reprint the book, I may well change a mountain or two,” said its author, Fukada Kyūya, back in 1964. But he probably never planned to rethink almost half his list of one hundred ‘famous’ summits.

Diamond SANUKI FUJI (IINOYAMA), a photo by y's_cafe on Flickr.

Half a century later, that is exactly what Iwasaki Motoo has done. In his “New Hyakumeizan”, published about five years ago, the veteran mountaineering author has junked fully 48 of Fukada’s peaks. Out go many of the big mountains such as Goryū in the Northern Alps or Poroshiri in Hokkaidō. And in come a host of lesser peaks, many of them lower than the 1,500-metre minimum altitude stipulated by Fukada.

What’s going on here? A glance at Iwasaki’s CV on Wikipedia gives a hint. In his youth, he led a Himalayan expedition but, more recently, Iwasaki has specialised in leading treks and mountain training events for senior citizens. He’s also published a ‘how-to’ guide to mountain walking for older people.

This explains why so many of Iwasaki’s ‘new’ mountains are easy to climb or approach. Mountain No.1, for example, is Rebun, an island off Hokkaidō more famous for its flower fields than mountain views. And many of these easy peaks have hot spring resorts conveniently sited nearby, ready to marinade aching limbs. One or two are even furnished with cable cars or chair-lifts.

Atagoyama / 愛宕山（京都）, a photo by Kaoru Honda on Flickr.

This is not to say that Iwasaki’s mountains lack distinction. To take a few examples, Atago (924 metres, photo above) is the guardian of Kyoto’s northwestern quadrant. There is Hyōnosen, favoured by Katō Buntarō for his first essays in solo winter mountaineering. And there is Iinoyama on Shikoku (see header picture), famous enough to feature both in a poem by Saigyō and on a recent postage stamp.

So Iwasaki has flagged up some mountains that certainly deserve more notice. And he’s made an appreciable dent in the average height of the one hundred mountains. Whether these efforts will actually be appreciated, though, remains to be seen. But, you know something; as our knees begin to creak and our lungs start to wheeze, we may all one day be glad of this New Hyakumeizan …

Iwasaki Motoo’s New Hyakumeizan

Hokkaidō

Rebun-dake, Rishiri-dake, Me-akan-dake, Daisetsuzan, Moiwa-yama, Yoteizan, Esan

Honshū

Ōzukushiyama, Hakkōda-san, Iwaki-san, Shirakami-dake, Nanashigure-yama, Iwate-san, Kurikoma-yama, Zaō-san, Akitakoma-ga-take, Taihei-zan, Chōkai-san, Gassan, Ō-asahi-dake, Nishi-azuma-san, Ryōzen, Issaikyō-yama, Adatara-yama, Bandai-san, Oku-kujinantai-san, Tsukuba-san, Nantai-san, Tanigawa-dake, Arafune-yama, Ryōgami-san, Karasuba-yama, Kumotori-yama, Tenjō-san, Hiru-ga-take, Kami-yama, Donden-yama, Hira-ga-take, Myōkō-san, Amakazari-yama, Asahi-dake, Tsurugi-dake, Tateyama, Ningyō-san, Hakusan, Arashima-dake, Kinpu-san, Kaikoma-ga-dake, Hō'ō-zan, Nōtori-dake, Kushigata-yama, Shiga-san, Azumaya-san, Shirouma-dake, Karamatsu-dake, Jiigatake, Tsubakuro-dake, Yari-ga-take, Kirigamine, Akadake, Senjō-ga-take, Kisokoma-ga-take, Ontake-san, Okuhotaka-dake, Norikura-dake, Dainichi-ga-take, Amagi-san, Numazu-Arupusu, Fuji-san, Shiomi-dake, Akaishi-dake, Hōraiji-san, Ōdaigahara-yama, Buna-ga-take, Atago-yama, Iwawaki-san, Rokkō-san, Hyōnosen, Shaka-ga-dake, Eboshi-yama, Daisen, Sanbe-san, Hiruzen, Misen, Higashi-Hōben-san

Shikoku

Tsurugi-san, Iinoyama, Ishizuchi-yama, Inamura-yama

Kyūshū etc

Hikōsan, Kurokami-yama, Fugen-dake, Aso-san, Yufu-dake, Kujū-san, Sobo-san, Takachiho-no-mine, Kaimon-dake, Nagata-dake (Yakushima), Omoto-dake (Okinawa)

Many thanks to Y's Cafe and Kaoru Honda for posting their splendid photos of Sanuki-Fuji and Atagoyama to flickr, whence they are linked above. And thanks to Wes for the photo of the Iinoyama "Shin-Hyakumeizan" summit marker.

Yellow sand, black snow

Kōsa: the dust in Japan's skies takes a turn for the worse

Back then, it was just part of the natural scenery. Swathes of dust – we understood it drifted in from China – overlay the spring snow, so that our skis cut white tracks in the tawny slopes as we swung down them. Even on high Tateyama (see photo below), the dust would collect in the gullies and rills, dulling the snow’s brilliance.

Kosa, a photo by Alpine Light & Structure on Flickr.

In recent years, “kōsa” – the term means ‘yellow sand’ – has taken on a more sinister character. Borne on high-altitude winds from China’s desert regions, it seems to be obscuring Japan’s skies more often, and for longer. And the same winds are bringing in more industrial pollutants too.

In March this year, the Fukuoka local government issued the nation’s first-ever health warning over smog from China; citizens were advised to stay indoors or to wear a mask if they ventured outside. In Korea, where the yellow sand is known as “hwangsa”, far more drastic measures have been taken: bad air days have forced the closure of schools, airports and high-precision factories.

Everyone agrees that breathing dust is bad for you. But the yellow sand’s other effects are disputed. Nobody is quite sure, for example, whether those characteristic milky skies help to warm or cool the earth’s climate. And the dust particles from China’s deserts might actually absorb and neutralise the industrial pollutants that cause acid rain.

Even so, the pollutants are getting through. A professor at Tohoku University has found that metallic precipitates lodged in the soil of Hachimantai – one of the Hyakumeizan – have increased two to fivefold from the levels of the 1950s. At the other end of the archipelago, a rare species of pine is dying off on the slopes of Yakushima, another of the One Hundred Mountains.

Nagafuchi Osamu, a researcher at the University of Shiga Prefecture, believes that industrial pollution is causing this "Waldsterben". He was alerted to the possibility during a hiking trip to the island in 1992, when he noticed black snow. Testing it, he found that the soot contained silicon, aluminium and other byproducts from the burning of coal. Whatever its effects on the trees, this dust was never part of the natural scenery.

References

Japan Times, No clearing the air over neighbour’s pollution, March 10, 2013

Yoshika Yamamoto, Recent moves to address the KOSA (yellow sand) phenomenon, Science and Technology Trends - Quarterly Review, Japan National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP), January 2007

New York Times, Scientist says pollution from China is killing a Japanese island’s trees, April 24, 2013

Stamps of authority

Is the Japanese Post Office trying to challenge the Hyakumeizan canon?

“Philately, that’s it – now I’m definitely going to take up stamp-collecting!” At moments of stress, back when we were serving our mountain apprenticeships, this was the phrase I’d sometimes hear from my rope companion. 

Yesterday, philately popped up again in the shape of a brown envelope bearing a Tokyo postmark. Tearing it open, I found a complete set of the recently issued “Japanese Mountains Series No.2” stamps, together with a note from Japan-based mountain photographer and fellow Hyakumeizan enthusiast Peter Skov.

It was most kind of Peter to send them over. For you really have to see the originals of these stamps to appreciate their superb colours and print quality; web images just don’t do them justice. 

Sitting up there in pride of place, at the sheet's top left-hand side, is Mt Fuji. As you’d expect, Japan’s top mountain has been adorning the nation’s stamps for quite a while, especially in times of crisis. 

After the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, for instance, a new stamp design featured the imperial chrysanthemum crest over Fuji against a background of cherry blossoms. These stamps had to be printed on private presses, as the earthquake had levelled the official printing office.

During the turbulent years of early Shōwa, Mt Fuji appeared on set after set of stamps – for the full details, refer to H Byron Earhart’s magisterial book on Mt Fuji. But more than crude nationalism may have been at work. According to Baron Takaharu Mitsui, writing on “Japan portrayed in her postage stamps” in 1940:

Even those Westerners who have not been to Japan know that Japanese nature is symbolized by Mt Huzi (sic) and the Japanese character by her cherry-blossom … The snow-crowned Huzi, the charming cherry blossom, the frost-braving plum blossom … these are to be taken at a higher connative worth than their mere ornamental value.”

When the smoke of war cleared, it temporarily became illegal to show Mt Fuji in a film, for fear that its silhouette would somehow rekindle nationalistic sentiments. And, whether or not by official diktat, the mountain also vanished from coins and banknotes for some years, reappearing only in 1951 (or was it 1969?) on a new 500-yen note.

But, curiously, this ban or abstention never applied to postal issues. On stamps, at least, it was as if Mt Fuji rose above the petty differences of the humans running around at its foot. A Japanese stamp catalogue explains the apparent anomaly in official policy as follows:

Postwar efforts at postage stamp making in Japan were marked by the implementation of a program for revising designs so as to symbolize a country out for peace. The first step toward the avowed object was the issuance on August 1, 1946, of a stamp, 1 yen, blue, R 217. The design is taken from the ‘Shower at the foot of Mt Fuji’, one of the masterpieces of Hokusai Katsushika…

Mt Fuji is, of course, the pre-eminent member of Fukada Kyūya’s One Hundred Mountains of Japan. And seven other mountains in the current stamp series – Tsukuba, Kasa-ga-dake, Ibuki, Zao, Gassan, Ryōgami, Kujū – also belong to this elite cohort. But that leaves two mountains that are quite unknown to Hyakumeizan fans: Nijō-san, a twin peak on the ridge dividing Osaka from Nara, and Iinoyama, a lowly if shapely eminence on Shikoku.

Neither was high enough for Fukada to include them in his 1964 list of Hyakumeizan – for which (with two exceptions) he stipulated a minimum altitude of 1,500 metres. But that doesn’t mean that these hills are lacking in aesthetic and literary charm. Iinoyama, for example, is a mere 422 metres high. Yet its Fuji-like form was once immortalised by no less a poet than Saigyō:

讃岐にはこれをば富士といいの山朝げ煙たたぬ日はなし

And never a day goes by
When no smoke curls from Sanuki’s
Fuji up into the morning sky.

That still leaves the question of just why the Post Office selected this particular mountain for its Series 2 set. Now a reader of this blog suggests an intriguing possibility. As it happens, Iinoyama belongs to an “alternative Hyakumeizan” chosen and published by the mountaineer and writer Iwasaki Motoo in 2007 – a list that diverges from Fukada’s selection by no fewer than 48 peaks. Might it be that the Japanese Post Office has decided to let a little variety – not to say competition – into the Hyakumeizan canon?

Well, thanks again Peter. I had no idea that stamp-collecting could be so potentially subversive of the established order. You know, if the Post Office keeps stirring up the Hyakumeizan scene like this, I really could see myself taking up philately one of these days…

Alpines from the abyss

How Kita-dake got its flowers: an essay in geo-poetry

You’ve taken the hard way up Japan’s second-highest mountain – twelve pitches on the Buttress – and this is your reward. Hauling yourself onto the exit ledge, you peel off the sweat-soaked climbing slippers and admire that distant cone floating over the nearby ridges. Then you pull on hiking boots and start up towards Kita-dake’s summit, on a path that leads through the secret flower meadow.

Gentians, a photo by Alpine Light & Structure on Flickr.

Unseen by hikers on the normal route, those bellflowers and gentians might start you thinking. How is that alpine plants so favour Kita-dake? And why are the Northern Alps so lacking in them?

If the savants are to be believed, the difference has less to do with the climate than the terroir. For, geologically speaking, the two mountain ranges have completely different backstories. To simplify a bit, the Northern Japan Alps sit in the ruins of a giant volcano, leaving them with the slaggy ground of an industrial wasteland. By contrast, Kita-dake and the rest of the Southern Alps emerged from the ocean deeps, which endowed them with a rich and varied burden of minerals.

One hundred and thirty million years ago, the future Kita-dake was a volcano somewhere in the southern ocean. Coral reefs fringed its upperworks, growing up towards the light. Slowly, the volcano rode the sliding Pacific plate northwards, creeping centimetre by centimetre towards an oceanic trench.

On Kita-dake Buttress, a photo by Alpine Light & Structure on Flickr.

As the volcano slid further into the depths, the reef died off, its coral lithifying into a crumbly white limestone – you pulled onto a ledge of that when you finished your climb. Meanwhile, a constant drizzle of dead plankton filtered down from the sunlit regions above, covering the volcano’s slopes in siliceous ooze. After millions of years cooking in the pressure-cooker depths, this sea-floor slime hardened into overlapping rafts of purple chert – these are now the very slabs that you climbed over on your way up Kita-dake’s eastern face.

Seventy million years ago, and the wreckage of the volcano had sunk to the bottom of the Japan Trench – although, strictly speaking, there was still no Japan. Submarine avalanches of mud and clay unfurled silently from the continental slopes above, laying down layer on layer of marl and sandstone. Arriving at the bottom of the trench, the volcano jammed in the maw of the subduction zone. Eventually, the mountain’s upper works, former reef and all, tore away from the volcanic base and welded themselves to the understorey of the future island nation.

Japan itself came into being a mere thirty million years ago, when a plume of molten rock, rising from deep within the earth’s interior, rifted a long strip of territory away from the continent. As for what induced the plume to rise just then and there, even the savants cannot say. One speculation is that it formed from the rock that melted when a downgoing slab of the Indian plate broke away, like the Titanic’s bow section, after sinking beneath the nascent Himalaya.

But this might be altogether too much of a geo-poetical conceit. What’s certain, though, is that Kita-dake’s varied melange of rocks and soils will show you several different herbiaries, depending on the route you take down the mountain. If you head northwards, you’ll find gentians (トウヤクリンドウ, Gentiana algida) braving the summit ridge, and cinquefoil (ミヤマキンバイ, Potentilla matsumurae) too.


Then, sheltered from the wind on Kotaro Ridge, you’ll descend through a meadow spangled with buttercups (ミヤマキンポウゲ, Ranunculus acris var. nipponicus), anemones (ハクサンイチゲ, Anemone narcissiflora), and globeflowers (シナノキンバイ, Trollius japonicas). Don’t disturb the photographers, though, who are desperately trying to focus on those black lilies (クロユリ, Fritillaria camtschatcensis) nodding in the breeze.

Or you might decide that it’s too late to get back to Tokyo. Then you’ll set off southwards to Kita-Dake Lodge. Just above the tumbled limestone blocks of Hapomba Col – more remnants of that ancient reef – you turn right, towards the big hut. The plants change too hereabouts. Here you’ll find the saxifrage (シコタンソウ, Saxifraga bronchialis subsp. funstonii var), the mountain avens (チョウノスケソウ, Dryas octopetala), and the alpine forget-me-nots (ミヤマムラサキ, Eritrichium nipponicum).

And, if your luck is really in, you might see a Kita-dake ranunculus (キタダケソウ, Callianthemum hondoense), named for this mountain. Elsewhere it’s found only on a single peak in Hokkaido, on Sakhalin, and on the ferociously cold Mt Pekto in North Korea. Round about you’ll see boulders of sandstone and serpentinite, a greenstone from deep beneath an ancient seabed. They seem to like here, these rare flowers, amid the scattered relics of a former ocean.

References

Shimizu Chōsei, Hyakumeizan no Shizengaku (Nishi-Nihon), Kokon Shoin 2002.

Flower photos: from Wikipedia.