One Hundred Mountains

Chiyoko’s Fuji (1)

2012-02-01T21:50:00.008+01:00

How a noh-master’s daughter saved her husband from sacrificing himself to science

To save her husband, she'd have to deceive him. That much was clear after Itaru came back from Mt Fuji in February. Flushed with the success of his solo climb – the first ever ascent in winter – Nonaka Itaru could no longer see any flaws in his plan. He'd dreamed for years of making an original contribution to meteorology. Now was the time for action.

In the coming summer, he’d realise his plan to build a hut on the summit of Mt Fuji, almost four kilometres above sea level. Then he’d climb up there in October, and take weather readings through the winter of 1895. Nobody had ever before made a round-the-year record of pressure readings at such an altitude. Success would give Japan a lead in the nascent science of weather forecasting…

The scheme was already bold. What tipped it into recklessness was Itaru’s resolve to take weather readings every two hours, night and day – even though Wada-san, Itaru’s sponsor at the Tokyo Meteorological Observatory, had told him that six readings a day would be quite enough.

Chiyoko knew her husband. They'd been married a few years and, besides, they had practically grown up together back in Chikuzen. She knew how the famous stubbornness of Kyushu folk can boil over into folly. If Itaru went up that mountain alone and tried to fight its ferocious winter without proper food or sleep, he wouldn't come back alive.

So – with her own streak of Chikuzen obstinacy – Chiyoko made her own plans. After spending the summer in a village at Mt Fuji’s foot, helping Itaru organise the hut’s construction, she’d travel back to her parents’ home, drop off her three-year-old daughter, Sonoko, and make ready to climb Fuji and join Itaru for his winter vigil. All without telling Itaru, of course, or he’d put a stop to her preparations.

The hut was finished in late September and Itaru took up his vigil there soon afterwards. As soon as the coast was clear, Chiyoko set out for Kyushu, a three-day journey. When she turned up unannounced, little Sonoko asleep on her back, her parents were first delighted, then aghast. Have you displeased Itaru in some way, her mother asked.

Kneeling on the tatami, Chiyoko explained her plan – if she didn't go up the mountain, she would soon have no husband. The parting with Sonoko brought tears, but she knew where her duty lay. In the first week of October, she was back at the village at the foot of Mt Fuji. The mountain loomed overhead like a colossus, snow-covered to its midriff.

Early on the morning of the 12th, she set out from Nakahata escorted by her brother, Kiyoshi, and two porters. As the light began to fade, they reached the hut and hammered on the door. Itaru looked amazed, then aghast: "What on earth are you doing here?" he asked.

To be continued

Images and ink (13)

2012-01-25T18:39:00.008+01:00

Ambiguous weather, a photo by threepinner on Flickr.

Image: Mt.Bieifuji ( left ) and Mt.Biei, up from Shirogane-onsen, Biei, Hokkaido.

Ink: How Biei came to be Biei, from Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964):

When Matsuura Takeshirō first visited this place and made as if to drink from this river, a local Ainu cried out "Piei, piei!" to stop him. "Piei" meant that the water was greasy from the sulphuric effusions of Tokachi-dake. The name Biei stems from this incident. The town was founded in 1896 (Meiji 29), and its name was originally written with the characters for beautiful (bi) and for excellent (ei). The latter character is also used to represent "England", however, and, in the wake of some chauvinistic thinking, it was replaced with a more difficult ideograph.

References

Many thanks to "Threepinner" for posting the elegant header picture on his flickr site, whence it comes here. Photography fans should visit his flickr pages to see more superb mountain photography from Hokkaido.

The professor of clouds

2012-01-23T18:47:00.022+01:00

Chance encounter with a man who spent nineteen years studying Mt Fuji's weather

A wet weekend in Switzerland prompted a visit to a show of cloud photography at the Winterthur Fotomuseum. My eye was caught by a film loop of speeded-up clouds. In fact, the clouds were flowing past a strangely familiar cone. In flickering, sparking black-and-white footage, winter stratus streamed over the peak, lenticular clouds nibbled at the clear skies of spring, and a summer cumulus boiled up over the scorching southern flanks…

I looked at the programme. Apparently, the video loop was compiled from film clips made in the early 1930s by Abe Masanao (1891-1966). It seems that this so-called Professor of Clouds (雲博士) devoted much of his life to recording the clouds and wind currents around Japan’s most famous mountain.

After completing his studies at Tokyo University’s science faculty, he set up an observatory in 1927 near Gotenba, on Mt Fuji’s southern slopes. Then, equipping it with all manner of meteorological gear, much of it purchased on journeys abroad, he spent the next nineteen years documenting every nuance of the atmosphere's behaviour over and around the sacred peak.

Abe was particularly fascinated by Fuji’s cap clouds. Usually heralding the approach of a front, these wave formations hover numinously over the mountaintop, shape-shifting by the minute. Abe recorded them in volume after volume of still photos, using trigonometry to plot their ground track and sometimes using cameras separated by several kilometers to make stereo images.

But by far the best way to capture such clouds was in time-lapse movies, a technique so novel that he had to invent his own camera. The medium, he thought, suited the subject. Lenticular clouds look as if they are stationary yet, in reality, they consist of water droplets that blow ceaselessly through them. In a similar but opposite way, a host of static pictures, flickering past, creates the illusion of a moving image on a cinema screen.

Abe doesn’t seem to have come up with an all-embracing theory of clouds. Rather, he saw his role as setting down the phenomena as completely as possible, so that others could use the data as they wished. In 1937, the Central Meteorological Observatory (the precursor of today’s meterological agency) acknowledged his efforts when it recognized his institute as an affiliate.

After the war, Abe moved to Kamakura, far from Mt Fuji, leaving his observatory as a kind of museum. Following his death, the Gotenba city authorities took the instruments and records into storage, where they remain today. Meanwhile, the observatory fell into disrepair. The trees around it have grown so high that they hide all but Fuji's summit –and those tantalising, mysterious clouds, perpetually shape-shifting.

References

The Winterthur Fotomuseum runs “WOLKENSTUDIEN – Der wissenschaftliche Blick in den Himmel" until 12 February.

Fuji-san: oinaru shizen no kensho, Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1992.

Vielen Dank to Hellmut Völter for posting the video of Abe's film clips (see first link above) so that we can all admire and enjoy them.

Top three photos are from the exhibition website of Fuji-san no Juku no Mori (富士山樹空の森), a recently opened theme park at Gotenba. Not sure if the exhibition is permanent or temporary or whether it includes the instruments and publications that the Gotenba city authorities took into storage after Abe-sensei's death. Perhaps somebody closer to the spot can find out?

Men in a hurry

2012-01-15T19:59:00.028+01:00

The mountaineers who saw out Honshu's golden age of mountain exploration

Permit me to introduce Messrs Kogure and Tanabe. They look like men in a hurry, and well they might - since the Japan Alpine Club was formed, just eight years ago, most of Honshu's high mountains have already been explored. And soon the surveyors of the Army General Staff will issue the first modern maps of the mountains, banishing the thrill of discovery forever.

So now is a last chance to grab a piece of the action. This is August 1913, and the duo are setting out from Kamikochi to walk until they run out of mountain. They'll press north along the backbone of the Japan Alps, past Yari and over Tateyama, ever northwards, until the ridges falter away under them into the Japan Sea. For thirteen days, they'll follow paths as faint as dreams, or none at all, through the creeping pine and the drifting clouds.

Their conversation should be as elevated as the terrain. Both are Tokyo University men, yet both were brought up in remote villages that still adhered to the old mountain faiths. In this, they recapitulate, in their own experience, Japan's shift from traditional mountain worship to modern alpinism.

Kogure, we've met before. As for Tanabe, a recent graduate in English Literature, he's a devotee of Wordsworth and Walter Pater. Perhaps these high-mountain expeditions help him burn with that hard, gem-like flame. Although, as he's slight of build, he also complains about the heavy loads that they oblige him to carry.

Tanabe Jūji (above) was born in 1874, in a village near Toyama where people still worshipped the mountain deity of nearby Tateyama. However, Tanabe was frail as a child and didn't apparently go on pilgrimage. He went up to Tokyo Imperial University in 1905, where he got to know Kogure Ritarō and acquired a taste for travel and mountain literature.

His own mountain career got under way when he graduated from Todai, started on a teaching career, and moved into the same lodging house as Kogure. They made ambitious traverses the length and breadth of the Northern Alps, but are most often remembered for their explorations of Kogure's native hills, the forested Chichibu range near Tokyo. The aspirant painter Nakamura Seitaro, then still a student, joined them on many of these forays.

The Kogure-Tanabe partnership lasted eleven years - seeing out the end of what Kojima Usui called Japan's golden age of mountain exploration. Tanabe wrote up these mountain travels - more than a decade's worth - as "Pilgrimage to the Japan Alps and Chichibu" published in 1919. The title gave him some misgivings: "At present, there's no suitable word to describe the mountain ranges now collectively referred to as the 'Japan Alps'. Alas, though, I can't at the moment think of a better one."

Actually, Tanabe's problem with the Japan Alps went deeper than a purist's objection to a katakana loanword. At about this time, he'd started to feel the need for a change in his mountain journeys. Whatever it was that he sought, it was more likely to be found among the wooded ridges and gorges of the Chichibu mountains, where the hoary old trees were festooned with Spanish moss, than on the austere heights of the Japan Alps.

He alludes to this change of heart in the preface to his book. "It seems to me that, rather than introducing the Japan Alps, I've put most of my effort into describing the Chichibu range." Later, in an essay entitled "Thoughts about Mountains", he explained his new thinking as follows:

We don't look at mountains in the way that romantic or symbolist poets do, using them as mere subjective scaffolding in order to sing about themselves. Rather, we look at mountains objectively, seeking out points of congruence between them and ourselves. This is by far the most free, the most natural way of looking at them, and you can appreciate the mountain's character as a mountain. This is how the English poet Wordsworth approached all of nature. He strove to see nature objectively and, more than any other poet, he was capable of submerging himself in nature. And it is only through this powerful serenity of contemplation can we become one with the mountains.

Getting married may also have helped to change Tanabe's life. So might his appointment, in 1922, to a professorship at Hosei University. For whatever reason, he was no longer a man in a hurry; peak-bagging and mountain exploration had lost their meaning for him. Instead, he was more inclined to wander, alone and contemplatively, over passes and along old roads such as the Kiso Kaido or Basho's route to the deep north, less like a modern mountaineer than an itinerant haiku poet.

He didn't entirely turn his back on the high mountains. He became head of Hosei University's mountaineering club and even took up skiing. Yet something was missing in this modern age, when every mountain had long since been mapped and named. Nothing, it seemed, could bring back the splendour of those youthful ridgeways to the Japan Sea.

Envoy

When I was at school in Tōkyō, the Jōetsu mountains were less explored than they are today and the Northern Alps still fairly inaccessible. So I did most of my mountaineering in Oku-Chichibu, using Tanabe Jūji's "Pilgrimage to the Japan Alps and Chichibu" and the Chichibu issue of the "Sangaku" journal that I found in a second-hand bookshop. In those days, there were few paths, mountain huts were thin on the ground, and signposts almost non-existent. With rice and soya beans, a hatchet and a saw in our packs, we would light out for the empty mountains. If we had two or three free days, we preferred to spend them walking around the mountains of Chichibu, not in Tōkyō.

(From Fukada Kyūya's Nihon Hyakumeizan in the forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan)

References

Outline of Tanabe's life from Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka?, Volume 103 in the Taiyo Bessatsu: Nihon no Kokoro series (Heibonsha, 1998)

Quotation from Tanabe's essay comes from Miyashita Keizo's Nihon Arupusu: Mitate no Bunkashi, a book on the Japanese interpretation and importation of the Alps published in 1997.

Photos copyright of Yama to Keikoku illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering (目で見る日本登山史 by 川崎吉光、山と渓谷社).

Images and ink (12)

2012-01-11T20:08:00.011+01:00

Mt.Tokachidake under thin cloud, a photo by threepinner on Flickr.

Ink: On Tokachi-dake, from Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964):

Today, the sulphurous smoke vents not from the main crater but from the so-called New Crater that opened on May 24, 1926. The sudden explosion overthrew the crater wall, sending its debris and volcanic detritus cascading downslope in all directions. Fed by melting snowfields, the resulting mudflow cut a swathe of destruction for twenty-eight kilometres, burying homes, devastating countless fields, and snuffing out one hundred and forty-four lives.

References

Many thanks to "Threepinner" for posting the elegant header picture on his flickr site, whence it comes here. Photography fans should click on the picture to see more of Threepinner's mountain photography from Hokkaido. The photos of the 1926 eruption (as mentioned in the text) are by courtesy of Hokkaido Science Education Center

Purple mountains

2012-01-09T19:56:00.017+01:00

The painter who joined the pioneers of Japan’s golden age of alpine exploration

“Except for some literary society, I know of no other association that has more poets and writers than ours,” said Kojima Usui about the Sangaku-kai, soon after he founded Japan’s first alpine club. Perhaps he should have mentioned painters too. There was at least one in the Sangaku-kai. Nakamura Seitaro joined the club just two years after its inauguration. That was in 1907, the same year that he started as a student of the Tokyo Institute for Business Training (商法講習所|), the predecessor of today's Hitotsubashi University.

Nakamura was born in 1888, the only son of a couple who ran a shop selling yukata. He got his first training as an artist by practising the patterns used to dye the linen. While still at school, he organised a group of friends to go hill-walking. Joining the Sangaku-kai would allow him to tackle bigger mountains and perhaps even find new ways up them.

For Nakamura was fortunate enough to start his climbing career during Japan's “golden age” of mountain exploration, when mountaineers had to find their own way without the help of modern maps. In 1909, he joined Kojima on a traverse of the Southern Japan Alps. Unable to splurge on expensive foreign kit, Nakamura got a local smithy to bash out an alpenstock. This may have been Japan’s first domestically produced ice tool.

Atop Warusawadake the party discovered that pilgrims had been there before them. Recorded in the club’s journal, Sangaku, the incident was later quoted in Nihon Hyakumeizan (“One Hundred Mountains of Japan”):

On the summit, they found signs that others had been there before them. Three shrines of unvarnished wood stood there and a rusted iron banner leaned into a rocky niche. And nearby, the pilgrims had left scattered on the ground wooden tablets inscribed with the name of the deity Arakawa Daimyōjin.

In the late autumn of 1911, Nakamura climbed Saru-ga-dake (2,629m), shod in newfangled crampons (at that time, they were still called “kana-kanjiki” – iron snowshoes). This was the first time that a peak in the Southern Alps had been tackled in winter conditions.

In 1913, he joined Kogure Ritaro and Tanabe Jūji for part of their epoch-making traverse from Yarigatake in central Honshu all the way northwards to the Japan Sea. In 1917, he climbed volcanoes on Java and the Celebes and in 1919 he again teamed up with Kogure for an exploration of the Kurobe valley – they got as far as Ike-no-daira in Sen'nin-dani before porter troubles and lack of food forced them to cut short the trip.

Although Nakamura had already decided to become an artist, he left his painting materials at home for these youthful expeditions. From now on, though, he went into the mountains specifically to paint and his works started to appear in exhibitions and in the pages of Sangaku. In 1936, he founded the Japan Association for Mountain Art and exhibited seven paintings at its inaugural exhibition, including one of summer snow on Tateyama (below). He died in 1967, at the age of 79.

Inevitably for a Sangaku-kai member, Nakamura was also a writer. Perhaps inspired by that youthful encounter with pilgrims’ relics on Warusawadake, he published three books on Japan’s mountain religions. Dealing as they did with the mystic aspect of the mountain world, these studies were of a piece with his paintings. The unexplored mountains of his golden age were “vast, mysterious, sublime”, Nakamura wrote, “as if wrapped in some purple cloud, enshrined in the inner recesses of my heart”.

References

“Yama to Bijutsu” chapter in Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka?, Volume 103 in the Taiyo Bessatsu: Nihon no Kokoro series (Heibonsha, 1998).

Quotation from Nihon Hyakumeizan from the forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan.

Images of Nakamura's paintings are by courtesy of this website. Paintings show (from top to bottom) the snowfield on Yarigatake; glacial corries on Tateyama; a study of a creeping pine (haimatsu); summer snow on Tateyama, and an edelweiss.

The origins of alpinism (2)

2012-01-07T20:20:00.016+01:00

The story of the Sangaku-kai continued: How Kojima Usui's furious scribbling helped to found Asia's first alpine club

Kojima Usui was always clear about the chain of events that led him to found the Sangaku-kai, later to be known as the Japan Alpine Club. As related in the previous post, he picked up a copy of Shiga Shigetaka's Theory of Japanese Landscape (Nihon Fūkeiron) in 1896, and was inspired by the book to climb Yarigatake a few years later. This led to the famous meeting in 1903 with Walter Weston, the mountaineering missionary, who suggested the idea of a club.

But what happened in the two years between the fateful meeting with Weston and the Sangaku-kai's actual formation in 1905? Here the story lacks detail. According to Kojima, the blame for that lies with the Great Kanto Earthquake, which devastated Tokyo and Yokohama in September 1923. By that time, Kojima was working as his bank's representative in California, but he'd left all his papers relating to the prehistory of the Japan Alpine Club - hundreds of letters - at his parents' home.

When the earthquake struck, the house was badly damaged and the family took refuge for the night in a nearby bamboo grove. While they were away, the house was looted. Quite why the thief should make off with bundles of old letters is obscure. But, Kojima adds vengefully, if the felon had wiped his nose with them, "may it wrinkle up like that of a Nambu salmon".

So, when it came to the events after the meeting with Weston (right), Kojima had to reconstruct from memory. - there might be gaps and errors in the narrative, he warns in his essay on the run-up to the Sangaku-kai's founding. If memory serves aright, though, his first move after meeting Weston was (characteristically) to write an article about him. This account, probably the first write-up of Weston's doings in Japanese, was published in a magazine for middle school students. It led to another meeting with the Englishman, who this time paid a visit to Kojima at his bank.

Starting with his "Account of the Exploration of Yarigatake" (1903), Kojima's mountain writings were now getting his name about. This saved him the effort of having to seek out like-minded folk. Indeed, all he had to do was wait for them to announce themselves. The first to pay his respects at Kojima's door was Takatō Jinbei, scion of a wealthy farming family from Niigata. Takatō's destiny was to bankroll the club during its early years to the tune of one thousand yen a year, a good sum in those days.

Then along came two students, Takeda Hisayoshi and Takano Takazō (left, photo taken, presumably, rather later in life). Both had a strong interest in natural history - Takeda had already written articles on botany, while Takano inclined to ornithology - and they had already founded their own club, the Japan Natural History Association. Takeda would later publish the first guide to Japan's alpine plants. Umezawa Chikamitsu was a third member of this group.

Another key man was Jō Kazuma, a lawyer and a member of the Tokyo city council. Later, he became head of the Korean court of appeals and also made a name for himself as an expert on the Meiji constitution. At that time, however, he still had time for his hobby, which was seeking out rare flowers in the mountains. He was the first to collect an example of the rare Tsukumogusa.

Soon they had a quorum: "Brought together by the mountains, and backed by Takatō's resources and energy, Jō Kazuma's social standing and statesmanlike judgement, the young naturalists' dedication, hard work and dash of romanticism, to say nothing of my propensity to recite Byron in the mountains and scribble away furiously, it was quite natural that we should end up by founding an alpine club."

Kojima is probably understating his contribution here. He had a talent for bringing people together, and not only on mountains. Later in life, for example, he acted as a negotiator of marital ceasefires between Yosano Tekkan and his wife Akiko.

Whatever the extent of Kojima's influence - and it was probably larger than he admits - the new Sangaku-kai met for the first time in Kojimachi, Tokyo, on 14 October 1905. Soon all its members and not just Kojima were scribbling furiously. The first edition of the new club's journal, Sangaku, came out the following spring.

Even before that, Takatō Shoku (Jinbei) published his magisterial Nihon Sangakushi (History of Japanese Mountains), a 1,200-page vade mecum to 207 peaks of the Japanese islands (including Taiwan) with contributions from Kojima Usui and several other Sangaku-kai members. Interestingly, an earlier version of the book was entitled "Nihon Meizan-shō (A Selection of Notable Japanese Mountains), foreshadowing the title of a much later author's masterpiece.

In this way, the Japan Alpine Club was almost literally written into existence. A bestselling book about nature had inspired its founder to start mountaineering. And Kojima's own writings were the operative instrument by which he gathered together the first few club members. Once Sangaku was established, the output of club members accelerated. In the end, Kojima's collected works would occupy half a shelf. And two collections of his essays are still in print today, as are two books by Takeda Hisayoshi.

The Sangaku-kai's belle-lettrist origins make an interesting comparison with the beginnings of alpinism in eighteenth-century Europe. There it was the savants who led the way, starting with Paccard, the young doctor who found the route up Mt Blanc, and continuing with Saussure, the scientist, who followed in his bootprints. In subsequent decades, there were Agassiz, Desor, Hugi, Forbes and Tyndall, who all made glaciers their study as well as climbing mountains. In Japan, by contrast, Kojima launched alpinism on a decidedly literary vector.

References

Kojima Usui: Sangaku-kai no seritsu made. Essay in Arupinisto no Shuki (An alpinist's diary).

Anecdote about Kojima as a mediator between Tekkan and Akiko Yosano is from 多才なアルプニスト：小島烏水 article by 瀬戸島政博 (Setoguchi Masahiro)　The Japan Journal of Survey, September 2008.

Photos copyright of Yama to Keikoku illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering (目で見る日本登山史 by 川崎吉光、山と渓谷社).

元日や！New Year's Greetings

2012-01-03T18:47:00.008+01:00

Mt Fuji 富士山 - his first appearance of the year -, a photo by sunnybeauty on Flickr.

元朝の見るものにせん富士の山

宗鑑

Make it our first sight
On New Year’s Day
Ｍt Fuji’s snowy height

Sohkan

Thank you, dear readers, for visiting this blog in 2011 and for all your interesting and perceptive comments. All best wishes for 2012: 今年もよろしくお願いいたします。。。

From Project Hyakumeizan

The origins of alpinism (1)

2011-12-29T18:50:00.035+01:00

How Kojima Usui inaugurated the Japan Alpine Club and a rich tradition of mountain writing

I had long thought of climbing Yari-ga-take.
Why was this?
Because Yari is high, Yari is sharp, and Yari is steep.

These words introduce the account of Japan’s first alpine excursion. The motivation is recognisably modern – to climb a mountain not to worship it or survey it, but simply because it is high, sharp, and steep. Because it’s there.

The story of this climb begins in 1896 when a 23 year-old bank clerk emerges from a bookstore in Yokohama clutching a copy of Shiga Shigetaka's best-selling Theory of Japanese Landscape (Nihon Fūkeiron) in its sixth edition. This purchase leads directly to a pioneering ascent of Japan's fifth highest mountain, a meeting with an English missionary, and the founding of the Japan Alpine Club, as well as a tradition of mountain literature that is the equal of any in the world.

The future bank clerk was born in Takamatsu, on the island of Shikoku in 1873, the year in which the samurai class was officially abolished. His father – of samurai stock - was a customs official at the city's harbour. While Kojima Kyuta was still a boy, his father moved the family to the growing international port of Yokohama, a city of greater opportunity. Kyuta was enrolled in the Yokohama Commercial High School, where he received a good grounding in English. "Knowledge of commerce would be the thing for the new generation," his father thought.

Graduating in 1892, Kojima dabbled in journalism, contributing numerous articles to Bunko, a literary journal. One essay, “About Miss Higuchi Ichiyō”, impressed the editors so much that they invited Kojima to join the magazine's editorial board. By this time, he’d already exchanged his given name, Kyuta, which he'd always disliked, for the nom de fudè of Usui.

This was in 1896, a turning point in Kojima Usui's life. In the same year, he joined the Yokohama Specie Bank, the forerunner of the Bank of Tokyo, a career change that consigned his writing to the evening hours. It was around this time too that he made the fateful purchase of Shiga Shigetaka’s masterpiece.

If Kojima had been looking for something more in his life, he certainly found it in Nihon Fūkeiron. He read the book again and again, "carefully trusting it as though it was the scripture of natural beauty". What especially captured his attention was the appendix to the book, curiously entitled "Tozan no kifū wo kōsaku subeshi" (Cultivate the mountaineering spirit). And, within that treatise, one passage in particular haunted him:

Start out from the village of Shimashima. After ascending for about eight hours, you will reach the hut on the Tokugō pass at about 1,500 metres in altitude; from there, in about three leagues, you will find the Miyagawa hut, which you can regard as the foot of the mountain proper; from Miyagawa, climb six leagues or seven hours, and you will reach the summit; for the first three of these hours, you will follow a fast-flowing river that cuts through granite walls; mountains made of granite rise skywards one above the other; as you leave the river, the mountains become still more precipitous, the view more and more impressive, the granite presenting its mysterious forms as if it were a huge landscape painting; as you continue, you will step onto snow, and at times you will see ptarmigans, bears, and mountain goats (kamoshika). In short, if you want to know the real nature of granite mountains, then you must by all means climb Yarigatake.

It matters little that Shiga probably cribbed much of this appendix from the English-language Handbook for Travellers in Central and Northern Japan, published by Ernest Satow and A G S Hawes a decade or so earlier. Nor that the Japanese author had scant personal knowledge of mountain-climbing. For the effect on Kojima was electric; on reading the passage about Yari, as he later recorded, he felt "as if his heart and soul had been blown away".

Kojima could not set out for Yari right away. For one thing, his bank allowed him a bare ten days or so of annual leave. For another, he knew nothing about mountain travel, even though he resolved now "to get involved more deeply with mountains". His first ventures were modest and it wasn’t until 1899 that he first climbed above the 2000-metre mark, on Asama volcano.

From the start, there was a literary angle to his journeys. The travel essay, or kikobun, he thought, would be "a good way to demonstrate one's writing skills and techniques". He attempted to give a new twist to this well-worn genre by describing places that previous authors had ignored. Published in 1899, his first book, Sentoh Shohkei, draws its materials from rambles on the plains, along rivers or in the low foothills.

In the following year, Kojima made his first foray onto one of Japan's high mountains. Climbing Norikura, an extinct volcano and his first 3000-er, he got a first glimpse of his ultimate goal:-

Jagged peaks heaved themselves into the air like waves, the clear ranges lapped up against my feet, and among them one wave rose higher than the rest, breaking through the violet shadows and shaking the purple light as it thrust from the centre of this raging ocean, and this, my guide said, was Yari.

Actually getting there took a little longer. Among the causes of delay were his parents, who were opposed, a dearth of accurate maps, and – most vexing of all for the prototype salaryman-alpinist – that desperate shortage of annual holidays. Nevertheless, after one false start, Kojima reached Yari's summit in 1902, together with his friend Okano Kinjirō, an oil company employee.

The Yari climb led to an introduction to the English missionary and mountaineer, Walter Weston (as described in the post on Shiga Shigetaka). Acting on Weston’s suggestion, Kojima and six friends formed their own "Mountain Club" in 1905. At first, it was known simply as the "Sangaku-kai", on the model of Britain’s Alpine Club.

A few months later, the club launched its journal, Sangaku ('Mountains'), with Kojima as its first editor. In an early issue, Kojima boasted that "Except for some literary society, I know of no other society that has more poets and writers than ours." By design, mountain writing would be almost as important in the new club as mountaineering itself.

Now opened what Kojima termed "Japan's golden age of mountain exploration". In 1906, the year after the Sangakukai was formed and accompanied by Takatō Shoku, another founder member, he traversed the ridges between Tsubakuro, Jōnen and Chō-ga-dake in the Northern Alps. One of the party’s aims was to verify that a mountain called Ōtensho-dake really existed and, if so, where it was situated. Large-scale maps were still unavailable – although the surveyors were busy doing the groundwork – and so mountain travel still included an element of exploration. In writing up this trip, Kojima was the first to use the word “juso” (縦走) to describe a long traverse across high ridges, now a standard term in the Japanese hiking lexicon.

In the following two summer seasons – when the novel by Nitta Jiro suggests that he was attempting to race the government surveyors to the summit of Tsurugi – he explored the river valleys that run through the Southern Alps, also traversing the Three Mountains of Shirane. It was on this trip that Kojima spotted and named the famous Buttress of Kita-dake.

In 1909, he returned to the Southern Alps again, traversing the Akaishi range. That trip gets him one of several mentions in Fukada Kyuya's Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan):

Warusawa-dake was then climbed in July 1909, by those distinguished pioneers of the Japan Alpine Club, Kojima Usui, Takano Yōzō, Takatō Shoku, Nakamura Seitarō, and Saegusa Inosuke. On the summit, they found signs that others had been there before them. Three shrines of unvarnished wood stood there and a rusted iron banner leaned into a rocky niche. And nearby, the pilgrims had left scattered on the ground wooden tablets inscribed with the name of the deity Arakawa Daimyōjin.

In 1910, Kojima essayed a long traverse from Yari via Mitsumata-renge to Washiba, and then followed the headwaters of the Kurobe over to Yakushi-dake. The following year, he traced the ridge between Hodaka and Yari. In 1912, he was on Senjo and Shiomi in the Southern Alps, and in 1913 he visited Sugoroku and Kasa-ga-dake. Then, in 1915, this golden age came to an end when Kojima’s bank posted him to Los Angeles.

The era after the Sangakukai’s founding had also been a golden age for Kojima's writing. All the while, he was adding to his oeuvre at a prodigious rate, his inkbrush (as his brother recalls) fairly hopping and skipping over the manuscript pages. In 1910, he came out with the first of four volumes on the “Nihon Alps”, his choice of title helping to establish the modish new name for these mountain ranges. He also found time for a book on Japanese woodblock prints and landscape art.

At the same time, Kojima was searching for a style that would better suit his subject. His early travel essays were written, perforce, in a conventional literary language, larded with figurative language and Chinese-influenced phraseology. Typical of this period is the following excerpt from his 1902 essay on the exploration of Yarigatake:

In height, a full 11,700 shaku or feet above sea level, Yari surpasses the rain clouds whirling at his foot, he rises head and shoulders above the mountains that surround him, as if abruptly demanding their fealty and their acclaim for his royal majesty. Yes, the mountains of this region may be the greatest and tallest of all Japan, they may exceed all other Japanese mountains in stature, indeed there are none here but lofty mountains of unrivalled magnificence, yet still they bow down before him; none of them would dare flout his command, whether Hakusan of Kaga to the west, Ontake of Shinano to the east, Tateyama of Etchu to the north, or Norikura of Hida to the south. Like the Four Deva Kings, they surround and salute him from far and near, one standing guard with a white band of snow on its forehead, another with an icy sword raised above its head, one riding astride a stout horse that bristles its mane, as if about to trumpet forth a neigh, and if anyone, be they a sentient or a non-sentient being, dares to approach, these guardians would hurl down lethal rocks, let slip their winds, or blow down their mists, never desisting until the trespasser kneels and begs for mercy…

Only a few years later, Kojima decided that this ornate, elliptical language was no longer "fit for the description of nature full of life". Instead, he sought "a new style of Meiji" that would let him depict the natural world as it really is. Kojima was not, of course, the only one in pursuit of a new style. As a part-time literary critic, he would have been aware of parallel efforts such as those of the philologist Mozume Takame (1849-1928), who, In an essay of 1886 entitled Genbun Itchi, had called for written Japanese to be brought closer to the spoken language. A novel that applied that principle, Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo (Drifting clouds) had also recently appeared.

As an aspiring nature writer, however, Kojima would find no exact model among compatriot novelists or essayists. That meant looking abroad for inspiration. English writers impressed him, particularly Byron. The English poet’s works, he wrote, “are more strictly topographical than those of Wordsworth and Shelley, dramatising and giving meaning to places readers might themselves visit, often in vivid and sensuous terms.”

This comment sheds light on the type of style that Kojima was seeking to develop for himself. According to Nobuko Fujioka, the breakthrough came in 1907 with the publication of an essay entitled Umpyō (Above the clouds). As it turned out, though, Kojima's stylistic model was less the poetry of Byron than the prose of John Ruskin, whose descriptions of nature in Modern Painters and elsewhere shaped the literary tastes of several generations. Modern Painters Volume IV - which contains the famous chapter on "Mountain Glory" - was introduced to Kojima by Weston at their first meeting in 1903. "Up till then, I hadn't heard of him," Kojima recorded later, "but, when I heard his name, I felt like bowing my head."

Kojima clearly followed up on Weston's hint. Indeed, the great Victorian sage – who, like Kojima, was both an art critic and (briefly) a member of an alpine club – is cited by name in an essay on Mt Fuji that Kojima published after his return to Japan in 1927. In that essay, the characteristic concave curve of the volcano's slope is described as follows:-

The arc described from the contour of the summit shrine, some ten thousand feet above sea level, down to Ōmiya, at the foot of the main route up the mountain – this arc, slanting, somewhat steeply, yet always in an easy, serene, almost carefree way, across a flawless sky – this gigantic line is, except for the sea horizon, the mightiest that the eye will ever see in this country.

It’s surely not too much of a stretch to see Ruskin's influence in the great arc of this perfectly controlled periodic sentence, slanting as it does, in easy, serene and almost carefree clauses, towards that dramatic and irrefragable conclusion.

Be that as it may, this passage happens to be the only quotation from a modern writer that Fukada Kyuya chose to adorn the Mt Fuji chapter of his Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan), which was published in 1964.

This tribute was no more than Kojima’s due. For he did much more than just found the Japan Alpine Club – of which Fukada was the 1,586th member – and kick off a golden age of mountain exploration. By inaugurating the journal Sangaku, he provided his literary successors, especially Fukada, with a treasure trove of material and quotations. Even more importantly, Kojima invented a way of writing about mountains and encouraged others to find their own voice. Where once samurai had pursued ‘the way of the ink-brush and the sword’, Kojima saw to it that henceforth Japan’s mountaineers would go out onto the hill with an ice-axe in one hand and, figuratively speaking, a pen in the other.

(Continued: How Kojima assembled the six other founder members of the Sangaku-kai.)

References

Details of Kojima Usui’s early life, climb of Yari, and literary development come mainly from Nobuko Fujioka's article, Vision or Creation? Kojima Usui and the Literary Landscape of the Japanese Alps (Comparative Literature Studies, Vol 39, no 4, 2002).

Details of Kojima's climbing career come mainly from 多才なアルプニスト：小島烏水 article by 瀬戸島政博 (Setoguchi Masahiro)　The Japan Journal of Survey, September 2008.

Thoughts about the influence of Ruskin on Kojima’s writing were prompted by Miyashita Keizo's Nihon Arupusu: Mitate no Bunkashi, a book on the Japanese interpretation of the Alps published in 1997.

And Project Hyakumeizan is indebted to the Sensei for the translations from Nihon Fūkeiron and from Kojima Usui’s Yarigatake no Tankenki (Account of an exploration of Yarigatake). Translations from Nihon Hyakumeizan from the forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan.

Photo of Kojima Usui copyright of Yama to Keikoku illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering (目で見る日本登山史 by 川崎吉光、山と渓谷社).

The Tsurugi enigma

2011-12-06T21:22:00.009+01:00

A recent study deepens the mystery of who made the first ascent of Japan's most rugged 'famous mountain' - and when

Defended by its iron citadels and snowy moats, Tsurugi's summit was long held to be inaccessible, writes Fukada Kyūya in Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan). According to legend, this was the mountain where Kōbō Daishi wore out a thousand pairs of straw sandals in vain attempts to scale it. And this was, in truth, the last peak of the entire Japan Alps to be conquered.

At last the day came when Tsurugi was stripped of its mystery. On the thirteenth of July 1907 (Meiji 40), a government survey party reached the summit. It turned out that they were not the first to visit what they had assumed to be an untrodden peak. In fact, the mountain had been climbed long before, as the surveyors realised when they discovered on the summit a spearhead and the tip of a priest's staff.

This scene is recreated in the film Tsurugi - Ten no Ki - during which the famous guide Uji Chōjirō stumbles across the relics in a patch of grass. If the film is to be believed, the discovery didn't do either the guide or his clients any good. When they learned that Tsurugi had already been climbed, the Army top brass lost all interest in applauding or promoting the surveyors' mountaineering achievement.

Today, the spear and the staff can be seen in the refurbished Tateyama Museum in Toyama. This is how Fukada describes them in Nihon Hyakumeizan:

About a foot in length, the spearhead was used as a ritual weapon by adepts during their ceremonies on the summit. As for the priest's staff, the tip measuring some eight inches in length and three in breadth, this was found to be extremely old. Scholars conclude that it dates from the T'ang dynasty (618-906) and is similar to the staff held by the Buddha of the Longmen caves in China. After centuries of exposure to wind and weather, the objects were found lying a little apart from each other. The spearhead looks all but uncorroded, while the tip of the staff has acquired a beautiful green patina.

The relics were dated to between the second half of the Nara period and the early Heian period by the archaeologist Takahashi Kenji, who published a paper about them in 1911. And since then, as the Hyakumeizan quotation shows, Takahashi's opinion has generally prevailed.

Until, that is, the Tateyama Museum curators decided to revisit the subject a few years ago. Teaming up with the Gangoji Institute for Cultural Properties Research in Nara, they subjected the bronze alloy of the staff to x-ray fluorescence. The alloy does contain copper and tin, reported the curators in 2007, as every self-respecting bronze should. It also has a smidgeon of lead in it. Unfortunately for the Takahashi thesis, though, the alloy has not a trace of antimony - a metal which was commonly mixed into bronze made in the Nara period.

Inconveniently, x-ray fluorescence cannot, on its own, show when a metal object was made - it can only reveal what kind of metal the object is made of. So the recent study has deepened rather than dissipated the mystery of when the enigmatic spear and staff reached Tsurugi's summit.

In the end, Fukada Kyūya's thoughts about this episode remain as valid as when he set them down on paper, some time in the early 1960s. This is what he says in the Tsurugi chapter of Nihon Hyakumeizan:-

All this means that some bold monk did succeed in climbing this supposedly inaccessible peak. When and by what route he performed this feat remains obscure. Nor do we know whether he was the one who brought up the spearhead and the staff. Or whether the objects were deliberately placed there to commemorate the ascent or if they were left behind as the sole witnesses to some disaster, perhaps when their owner succumbed to a sudden change in the weather. What is certain is that some mountain mystic made this ascent, fired by unshakeable courage and an iron will.

References

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

Details of the Tateyama Museum/Gangoji Institute for Cultural Properties Research study from this blog

Illustrations: Tsurugi-san woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi; spear and staff from Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka?, Volume 103 in the Taiyo Bessatsu: Nihon no Kokoro series (Heibonsha, 1998); mountain mystic: still image from Tsurugi - ten no ki film.

Avalanche

2011-12-02T21:05:00.032+01:00

Two workman alpinists acquire some respect for snow

When it hit, I announced ‘avalanche’ in tones as flat as those of a waiter setting down a mint julep. (“Your snowslide, sir.”) Or so Richard later alleged. I might have said more if the rushing snow hadn't instantly plunged us, face-down, out of control, into its tumbling smother. After surfing for 30 metres or so, we fetched up on the surface. The ride was not uncomfortable, except for the sensation of drowning.

We revisited the scene of this adventure a summer or two later. Pausing on our way up to a climb, we sat in the hut’s shade, sipping our Pocari Sweats, and looked on as Japan's most expensive wall took shape. Every few minutes, the helicopter would stagger in from a nearby rubble field, a boulder swaying from its load sling. Then the pilot would ease his straining craft into a hover and carefully juggle the latest building-block into place.

Cost what it might, the new barrier would come in cheaper than rebuilding the hut. This chalet-like lodge sits at the focus of the Karesawa cirque, right in the centre of the Japan Northern Alps – an insalubrious place to be in mid-winter. More than once, the building has been demolished by avalanches that hit with the force of a shinkansen. Watching the new defences rise higher boulder by boulder, we realised we'd been lucky.

Yet these are far from being the deadliest snowslides in Japan. Top contenders for that title might be the airborne powder chutes that haunt the precipitous Kurobe River gorge. In February 1936, one of these swooped through the darkness onto a construction site at Udo-dani. A 70-ton steel bridge was blown off its supports, landing two hundred metres away.

Two years later, in the early morning of 27 December 1938, a powder avalanche unfurled silently down the steep walls of Shiai-dani, another building site for the Kurobe hydroelectric project. It flattened a four-storey barracks, killing more than eighty workmen in their sleep. Fragments and bodies were hurled up to six hundred metres through the air.

In local dialect, these Kurobe avalanches are called "hou", a name that captures their foam-like character. More air than snow, they blast obstacles rather than bulldoze them – only shattered trees or buildings betray their passing. Eerily little in the way of snowdrifts is left behind.

Many years after the Shiai-dani accident, a group of researchers went back into this valley in mid-winter. Warily, I imagine, they placed instruments in a known avalanche track. From these, the savants deduced that the front of a large "hou" can travel at 200 kilometres an hour, with some internal waves moving at twice that speed. One slide left an icy track behind it, but the snow it piled up below was hardly knee-deep.

If “hou” practise a kind of snow ninjutsu, wet slides are the yokozuna of the avalanche world. Also known as “soko-nadare” (base avalanches), these clear out a snow gully to the ground, ripping out trees and rocks as they pass. A soko-nadare is described by Suzuki Bokushi (1770-1842) in his Snow Country Tales:-

A man from Uonuma set out on an errand on a warm March day and didn’t come back. When his family raised the alarm, the villagers went out to look for him. At a nearby pass, they found a huge wall of snow blocking the road. Perplexed as to where they should start digging, they hesitated until an old man suggested a novel expedient. Taking several younger men with him, he went to the nearest village, borrowed some roosters, and brought them back. Then he scattered feed over the snowbank and let the roosters wander about as they wished, pecking at it. One of the roosters suddenly rose up, stretched its wings, and crowed, whereupon the others all flocked together and began crowing at the same place. The old man turned to the younger men holding shovels and said, “That’s where he is! Start digging!” And everyone dug at once. Digging deeper they suddenly came across a patch of snow dyed red with blood. Digging still deeper, they found the body, with one arm and the head ripped off. Next they found the arm but not the head. Finally, after enlarging the hole and digging here and there in the wall of snow, the head, too, was found. Buried all this time in snow, the poor fellow looked as if alive. At this sight, the wife, who had been standing nearby with her children the whole time, grasped her husband’s severed head and held it in her arms, while the children threw themselves over their father’s body, crying and lamenting. (Summarised from Snow Country Tales.)

Uonuma, in today’s Niigata prefecture, is on the Japan Sea Coast. This is – or used to be – one of the snowiest regions in the world. Every winter, from December onwards, the low-pressure zones come trucking in from arctic Siberia. After soaking up moisture from the sea, they dump it in massive snowdrifts on the mountainsides. Accumulations of up to twelve metres have been recorded on Tateyama, a nearby Meizan.

In the mountains of Echigo, spring avalanches gouge deep furrows that show up on aerial photos as comb-like patterns streaming out leewards from the ridgelines. One June, we went to inspect a snow-gully in this region. After an all-night drive from Tokyo, we ported our skis through a beechwood, with the tips catching on every branch. Coming out from under the forest canopy, we stepped onto the snow and snapped our boots into the bindings. Grey and hard as cement, the snow was pitted with sun-cups filled with grit and leafmould.

Higher up, we had to weave our way between boulders and torn-off tree-branches. This had clearly been a lively place during the spring snowmelt. And even now, living up to its name of Ishikurobi-sawa (Stone Tumbling Gully), it tossed a few boulders down at us as the afternoon sun started to warm the upper slopes.

Reaching the summit over a last snow-stripe, we looked out over the rolling peaks of the Iide massif. From here, we could see that the ridge-tops bounding our gully were sharp-edged and ragged. This too is the work of the avalanches that scour down them in spring, says Koaze Takashi, a geographer. By contrast, the ridges on the Pacific side of Japan are rounded and easier to travel.

Snow shapes these mountains. It carves out distinctive, straight-sided avalanche troughs on steep faces – as seen on Echigo-Komagatake (below) – and it leaves strange hollows in the ground that even the academicians find difficult to explain. Snow also dictates what plants can grow and where – creeping pine on wind-blasted ridges, the rowan (nanakamado) in the sheltered zone under cornices.

Indeed, snow has taken over where Japan's vanished glaciers left off. Ten thousand years ago, the Great Snow Valley of Shirouma was one of the largest glaciers on Honshu. Even today, the permanent snow lies so deep that its lower layers have compacted into ice. If it flowed, this Daisekkei would still be a glacier. As it is, the avalanches rule. Folk who insist on camping here in winter should sleep with pocket-knife in hand, ready to cut their way out of a buried tent.

Karesawa used to hold a glacier too, though a smaller one than Shirouma’s. By the same token, its avalanches pack that much less punch. After picking ourselves up from the one that hit us that Golden Week, we met with a zone of quicksand powder, so fluffy and bottomless that we had to swim our way across. Not a good place to get buried. Later, we passed by Byōbu, its clifftops lost in cloud, and watched as avalanche after avalanche crashed down its gullies. Already the Northern Alps had instilled in us a deep respect for snow.

References

A study on high-speed avalanches in the Kurobe, by H Shimizu et al (1980).

Snow Country Tales: Life in the other Japan (北越雪譜) by Suzuki Bokushi, translated by Jeffrey Hunter with Rose Lesser (1986).

Geomorphological Features of Avalanche Furrows in Heavy Snow Region in Japan, by T Sekiguchi et al (2005).

Geomorphic processes at a snowpatch hollow on Gassan volcano, northern Japan, by Y Kariya (2002).

Yama wo yomu by T Koaze, Professor of Geography at Meiji University. Black-and-white photo of avalanche gully on Echigo-Komagatake is from this book.

Cautionary tales

Avalanched in the Shirouma Daisekkei by i-cjw

Half-dead in Hakuba: how I survived an avalanche in Japan, by Seth Lightcap

The author of alpinism

2011-11-21T21:40:00.026+01:00

How modern mountaineering in Japan was called into existence by a nature writer who never climbed a mountain.

In 1894, the country was a powder keg. The explosive potential lay in a wild profusion of mountains to climb, a rising class of energetic young men with money to burn, and new railways that could carry the men to the mountains. In short, Japan was primed for the outbreak of modern mountaineering. Except that, so far, nobody had thought of becoming a mountaineer.

Strange to say, this volatile mixture was touched off by a writer who probably never climbed a mountain in his life. As for the match he used to light the blue touchpaper, it was a treatise that went by the less than incendiary title of "Theory of the Japanese Landscape" (Nihon Fūkeiron). Yet, within a few years, it was this book that inspired Japan's first attempt at modern mountain exploration.

At a young age, Shiga Shigetaka (1863-1927) was sent by his samurai-class guardians - his father had died when he was six - to a naval preparatory school. This was less to prepare him for a naval career than to give him a head start in the English language - a skill that would clearly come in useful when dealing with the foreigners who were both threat and inspiration for Meiji Japan.

In 1880, Shiga moved on to the Sapporo Agricultural College, the forerunner of today's Hokkaidō University. The college had been founded with American help and classes were taught in English up to 1882. While polishing his language proficiency, Shiga steeped himself in contemporary ideas. Darwin became a strong influence on his own thinking.

Sapporo graduates were trained to become the nation's elite - "Boys be ambitious!" they were told by the college's founder, William Smith Clark. Alas, the jobs on offer when they graduated didn't necessarily match up to expectations. Shiga became a botany teacher at a junior high school in Nagano. This job imploded, as did the prospect of any further employment nearby, when in a fit of frustration he insulted the prefectural governor.

Shiga's big break came in 1886, when he persuaded the Imperial Navy to let him join a training cruise to the South Pacific. Actually, the Navy turned him down at first, only relenting when Shiga reminded them how the British navy had invited Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle. (This parallel must have meant something to Shiga; when he later discovered that an HMS Beagle had been sold to Japan, he tracked down the ship. Salvaging a small piece of timber, he installed it in a place of honour in his tea-house in Yokohama.)

If the Navy had taken a bet on Shiga, it was swiftly rewarded. Within a few weeks after landing back in Japan, the writer published Nanyō Jiji, a best-selling account of his voyage on board the screw sloop Tsukuba. For Shiga, it had been a formative journey: the ship had visited the Caroline Islands, Fiji, Samoa, Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand - all either colonised by western powers or otherwise under their sway.

Colonialism was not all bad. Shiga was impressed by the British administration in Australia, and again by the ethos of hard work and sacrifice that he sensed in New Zealand. At the same time, he was horrified by the plight of the native peoples. The Darwinistic implications were clear: backward cultures would be subjugated by those from more advanced civilisations.

After his meeting with a Maori chief, Wi Tako, Shiga wrote: "Alas! Japan could become another New Zealand. As I look up at the autumn skies of these Southern Seas, I fear the threat to my home country far away. Having witnessed such cultural and racial oppression in New Zealand, I - as a son of the new Japan - must take immediate action to make my people aware of this possibly happening back home." (Nanyō Jiji)

Back home, Shiga became the editor of Nihonjin, a magazine established in 1888 to restore national self-confidence. In the very first issues, Shiga launched on the theme that he would later develop in Nihon Fūkeiron - the relationship of the Japanese people with the land of Japan. In the second edition, he wrote:-

The influence of all environmental factors of Japan - her climate and her weather conditions, her temperature and humidity, the nature of her soil, the configuration of her land and water, her animal and plant life and her landscape, as well as the interaction of all these factors, the habits and customs, the experiences, the history and development of thousands of years - the totality of these factors has gradually, imperceptibly, developed in the Japanese race inhabiting this environment a unique kokusui (national essence).

Landscape into kokusui: that pretty much sums up the essence of Nihon Fūkeiron. The theme is fully worked out in Shiga's masterpiece. Take, for example, this description of pine trees in the mountains:-

Standing against fierce winds, they distinguish themselves from other trees. What a graceful picture they present . Their trunks, branches, twigs and leaves defy all gusts of wind. Even after other feeble trees wither, they still remain alive. If they happen to be cut by an axe, they fall to the ground triumphantly, in a manner no other trees can display. Thus, Japanese pine trees typify the characteristics of our fellow countrymen. (Nihon Fūkeiron)

According to Shiga, such pine trees exemplify "tettō" - unspoiled wilderness scenery - one of the three qualities that distinguish Japan’s landscapes. The other two characteristics are "shōsha" (elegance), best exemplified by the autumnal beauty of Japan's maples, and "bi" (beauty), as seen in the nightingales and blossoms of spring.

Shiga grounds his aesthetics in geographical fact: Japan owes its magnificent forests and flora to its enormous climatic variation, from sub-tropical to sub-arctic; its high humidity imbues the landscape with a special hue; heavy rainfall sculpts its landforms into intriguing crags and gorges; and, above all, the country has volcanoes.

Shiga was lucky with his timing, getting Nihon Fūkeiron to press just after the start of Japan's war with China. Readers were in the right mood to be compared to storm-defying pine trees. Within eight years, Nihon Fūkeiron was reprinted fifteen times. So many copies rolled off the presses that you can still easily and cheaply pick up early editions in the bookstores of Kanda.

Among Shiga's audience was a 23 year-old bank clerk and aspirant writer in Yokohama. Kojima Usui read Nihon Fūkeiron again and again, "trusting the book as if it was the scripture of natural beauty". What especially captured his attention was the appendix to the book, curiously entitled "Tozan no kifū wo kōsaku subeshi" (Cultivate the mountaineering spirit). And, within that appendix, one passage transfixed him:

Start out; ascending about eight hours from the village of Shimashima, you will reach the hut on the Tokugō pass at about 1,500 metres in altitude; from there, in about three leagues, you will find the Miyagawa hut, which you can regard as the foot of the mountain proper; from Miyagawa, climb six leagues or seven hours, and you will reach the summit; for the first three of these hours, you will follow a fast-flowing river that cuts through granite walls; mountains made of granite rise skywards one above the other; as you leave the river, the mountains become still more precipitous, the view more and more impressive, the granite presenting its mysterious forms as if it were a huge landscape painting; as you continue, you will step onto snow, and sometimes you will see ptarmigans, bears, and mountain goats (kamoshika); if you want to know the real nature of granite mountains, then you must by all means climb Yarigatake.

It matters little that Shiga probably cribbed much of this appendix from the English-language Handbook for Travellers in Central and Northern Japan, published by Ernest Satow and A G S Hawes a decade or so earlier. Nor that the Japanese author had scant personal knowledge of mountain-climbing. For the effect on Kojima was electric; on reading the passage about Yari, as he later recorded, he felt "as if his heart and soul had been blown away".

Getting to the mountain took a little longer: his parents were opposed, accurate maps didn't exist and - most vexing of all for the prototype salaryman-alpinist - he could take barely a fortnight's annual leave from his bank. Nevertheless, after one false start, Kojima reached Yari's summit in 1902, together with his friend Okano Kinjirō, an oil company employee.

It was only on their way to the mountain that the pair learned that they would not be making a first ascent. Government surveyors had beaten them to the summit by a few months, leaving behind a trigonometric marker post (above). Still, Kojima felt that the climb was worth writing up and, the following year, his account appeared in instalments in the Bunko magazine.

Arguably, Yarigatake Tankenki (Exploring Yarigatake) was Japan's first work of modern mountaineering literature. Or perhaps Japan's first work of modern mountaineering literature in Japanese. For, when he published it, Kojima was still completely unaware that an English mountaineering missionary had preceded him to the summit of Yari eleven years earlier.

Walter Weston had written up his climb in Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps, published in London in 1896. But the book was hardly known in Japan at that time - it wasn't until later that it was translated.

So it was only by chance, in the summer of 1903, that Okano Kinjirō, the Standard Oil man, saw a copy of Weston's book at a colleague's house and learned of the author's climbing activities in the previous decade. Then he discovered that, in the meantime, Weston had returned to Japan and was now living close by, in Yokohama.

An invitation to tea with the Englishman soon followed. Weston showed Kojima and Okano an alpenstock and other pieces of equipment, as well as several issues of the Alpine Journal, the year book of Britain's long-established Alpine Club. Okano was much taken with the kit; for Kojima, however, it was the idea of a club that took hold. Two years later, in late 1905, he and a small group of friends formed their own "Mountain Club" - known at first simply as the "Sangaku-kai" after its model.

One of the earliest acts of the new Japan Alpine Club was to elect Walter Weston as its first honorary member and vice chairman (right in picture) and Shiga Shigetaka (left in picture) as its second. Yet, by Kojima's own account, the priority could well have been reversed. As far as he was concerned, the birthplace of the Sangaku-kai was Yarigatake. “Thanks to that climb,” he continued, “I got to know Weston, from whom I learned that there were alpine clubs all over the world. Before that, nobody had ever suggested to me the idea of a club. But, as to why I climbed Yari in the first place, that was because I’d been inspired by a book – none other than that of the late Shiga Shigetaka-sensei. We are all obliged to this great instigator.”

References

The biographical information about Shiga Shigetaka above comes mainly from Masako Gavin's full-length biography, The Forgotten Enlightener: Shiga Shigetaka.

Additional detail on Nihon Fūkeiron comes from Kären Wigen's article on Discovering the Japanese Alps: Meiji Mountaineering and the Quest for Geographical Enlightenment (The Journal of Japanese studies, Volume 31, Number 1, Winter 2005).

The quotation from Nihonjin magazine is via the chapter on Shiga in Julia Adeney Thomas's book, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (2002)

The account of how Kojima came to climb Yari, meet Walter Weston and found the Japan Alpine Club is mainly from Nobuko Fujioka's article, Vision or Creation? Kojima Usui and the Literary Landscape of the Japanese Alps (Comparative Literature Studies, Vol 39, no 4, 2002).

The closing quotation from Kojima Usui is from his essay on the foundation of the Japanese Alpine Club (山岳会の成立まで)

And Project Hyakumeizan is indebted to the Sensei for the translation of Shiga's (or perhaps Satow's or Hawes's) instructions on how to climb Yari.

All photos copyright of Yama to Keikoku illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering (目で見る日本登山史 by 川崎吉光、山と渓谷社).

Images and ink (11)

2011-11-16T21:21:00.005+01:00

Image: Above the clouds, woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi (1928)

Ink: Fuji, a poem by Kusano Shinpei, translated by Leith Morton:

A snowslide on Fuji swallowed the lives of 15 students in a matter of seconds
This mountain unlike any other in Japan.
Fuji does not believe that a column of monks is too heavy.
Nor that a mountain observatory is too noisy.
Sometimes clouds furry like mufflers wind round and round Fuji.
Sometimes classic pince-nez clouds float close by.
In the sea of trees even snow-grouse have multiplied.
The Osawa landslide must have carved out a huge mass of mountain.
That too does not bother Fuji.
Leaving everything to humanity and physics.
Before long it may yet poke out again a tongue of fire.
That too is left to nature.
Fuji is there.
Fuji simply exists.
Heaven overhead always.

The wolf and the wild boar

2011-11-11T19:30:00.008+01:00

An ecological parable from the beech forests of northern Japan

Reading Brett Walker's book on the Japanese wolf led me to the case of another vanished beast. You won’t find any wild boar in Japan’s snowy Tohoku region today. With their short legs and their need to dig up fodder from the forest floor, the animals can’t live through winters where deep snow lies for seventy days or more.

In the past, those northern winters must have been even colder and snowier. Yet records from the Edo period show that wild boar once roamed as far north as Aomori, right at the top of Tohoku. In fact, so many of them were raiding farmers’crops around Hachinoe in 1749 that they caused a famine during which 3,000 people starved to death.

Despite all efforts to wipe them out, wild boar continued to thrive in northern Japan until the nineteenth century. Then, at some point in Meiji times (1868-1912), they went into decline. The last Tohoku boar was hunted down in 1907. This was just two years after the demise of Japan’s last wolf.

Was there some link between the fates of wolf and boar? The question had to go unanswered until the 1990s, when ecologists in Poland made studies of the country’s Carpathian mountains. This region resembles Tohoku in its rolling beech woods, cold winters, and deep snow cover.

Lynx, wolves and wild boar still roam the Polish forests. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that the wild boar often furnish lunch for the wolves. So much so, that when the wolf population grows, the number of boar shrinks, and vice versa.

What was less expected is that the wolf returns this favour. During the winter months, the boar can't dig through the snow and frozen ground to get fodder. So how do they survive? Seemingly, by foraging on the leftovers from wolf and lynx kills.

That might explain how the wild boar of Tohoku endured the long winters. It also suggests why they died out in the north country. Traditionally, the boar’s disappearance was explained by swine cholera, a disease brought into the country with imported pigs when Meiji Japanese acquired a taste for tonkatsu.

Disease can't be the full story, as wild boar have survived in warmer parts of Japan. In Tohoku, however, the boar suffered a double whammy. First, they lost their winter food supply when the wolf went extinct –then the absence of their main predator meant that sick or weak wild boar continued to spread the swine cholera unchecked.

The secret liaison of wolf and boar is just one of the web of dependencies that makes up a forest. Pull on one thread, such cases suggest, and the ecosystem may unravel somewhere completely unexpected. What hidden connection will those northern woods next reveal?

References

Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka?, Volume 103 in the Taiyo Bessatsu: Nihon no Kokoro series (Heibonsha, 1998) - chapter on the Japanese wolf

Picture of wild boar from Wikipedia

And see Sapphire Sky for an update on the urban wild boars of Kobe ...

Images and ink (10)

2011-11-10T20:51:00.005+01:00

Image: Peaceful Rishiri, woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi (1938)

Text: On Rishiri, from Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964):

I'll never forget the starkly beautiful form of Rishiri, silhouetted against the evening sky. Seen from the neighbouring island of Rebun, it rose up across the shimmering sea, not as a facsimile of Fuji, to which it is sometimes likened, but as a jagged rock, steeped in gold by the rays of the setting sun The whole island seems to surge upwards into its central peak of 1,700-odd metres. ... This ideal mountain floating on a shimmering sea can only be Rishiri.

Good kama, bad kama (3)

2011-11-05T13:04:00.027+01:00

The Kitakama concluded: scaling the final chimney in the footsteps of alpine pioneers

We granted ourselves a ten-minute lunch break on the greenwood col. No more, because the afternoon clouds were already boiling up from nearby ridges. Scrambling to our feet, we addressed ourselves again to the Kitakama. No soft lead-in was offered or taken. Rising abruptly from the col, Pinnacle 8 was a fifty-degree slope of leafmould and stony tilth. Security, if any, was found by gripping the whitened roots of the creeping pine, some of which broke off in our hands.

If we’d hoped to see Yari after topping this rise, we were disappointed. Instead, the view was filled by the triangular bulk of the Doppyō, a peak in its own right. Evading its in-your-face challenge, we took to aery traverses on the west side, some on sound rock and some on rubble-strewn ledges that tilted downwards over impressive spaces. In one place, huge blocks were poised over the path like some Temple of Doom device in an Indiana Jones film.

Yet the rock looked almost sound when compared with the horror show of Sulphur Ridge, which reared its spiny length along the other side of the Senjo valley. In the heyday of post-war alpinism, people used to traverse those serrated towers of Digestive Biscuit, but we felt no desire to emulate them. That would certainly be a ridge too far.

Donald had just disappeared round the side of a small peaklet when I felt the rock tremble; a muffled thud sounded from somewhere far beneath. Before I could panic, Donald's head reappeared over the ridge. Not to worry, he’d just trundled a large boulder into the snow gully below.

This incident reminded us to keep our heads switched on. Like any great alpine climb, the Kitakama demands ceaseless vigilance; the exposure is continuous and the route's remoteness gives it a special atmosphere of isolation and menace. Rescue, if any, will be a long time coming. In those days, there was said to be only one civilian helicopter pilot in Japan who was qualified for alpine rescues.

Right now, though, it was thirst rather than the scenery that was getting to us. Somehow, in the excitement of our river-crossing a few hours before, we’d omitted to refill our water bottles. This was a mistake; the ridge proved to be as dry as Prohibition. Meanwhile, the sun, the heat, and the cracking pace set by Donald had the sweat rolling down our foreheads.

By Peak 15, we were assailed by the Foaming Tankard Syndrome, a syndrome that prevents its victims thinking of anything else. Finding an unexpected patch of flat ground – this must have been Yari-daira, a favoured bivvy site for winter and spring ascensionists – we took a break. My water bottle was long since empty, but Donald shared the last drops of water from his own. Such gestures live for ever in a mountaineer’s memory.

At 3.45, Yari's shadowy north face loomed above us. Fortunately, the climbing proved less formidable than it looked. We scrambled up the left arête until it steepened, then side-stepped rightwards into a commodious chimney that wafted us to the summit.

Maybe I don’t remember that right, because the mountaineering missionary Walter Weston, who pioneered this route in 1912, was of a different opinion. He called it the hardest and most interesting climbing he’d ever done in Japan - excepting only his Ho'o-zan feat. (Weston's party too trundled a boulder that “splintered itself as it ricocheted from point to point and then fell into and down the couloir in a thousand fragments”.) Watch out for this stuff.

As Weston and Nemoto Seizo, his guide, traversed in from the south side of Yari to reach this climb, they didn’t make the first ascent of the Kitakama. That honour fell to rival teams from Waseda and Gakushūin universities who raced each other up the ridge on a July day in 1922. This was the year after Maki Yuko made his epoch-making first ascent of the Eiger’s Mittelegi ridge; suddenly, in Japan, long alpine ridges were all the rage.

We finished our own ascent some time after 4pm, popping up on the summit beside two artisans who were busy bedding in a new shrine. After half an hour’s relaxation amid the drifting afternoon clouds, we made our way down the mountain’s south side to the hut where a be-dreadlocked student from Cambridge brought us foaming cans of Asahi. All we had to repay this kindness was a solitary packet of cashew nuts. Although, of course, it had come all the way up the Kitakama.

References

Walter Weston, The Playground of the Far East, Chapter VIII, The Northern Alps Revisited - New Faces of Old Friends

日本のクラシック　ルート３、槍ヶ岳　北鎌尾根、山と渓谷　１９９３／６月号

And, for the Kitakama ridge in a more modern idiom, see CJW's account of his recent solo ascent.

Good kama, bad kama (2)

2011-10-31T19:14:00.034+01:00

The Kitakama ridge continued: unknowingly, we take a break on a col that was the scene of a famous mountain tragedy ...

Perched on the roots of a mountain birch, we ate our cheese butties and looked down on the wooded col. The dappled sunlight filtered through the trees, suggesting to us a sylvan idyll - until we noticed, scattered among the weeds, the rusting tins, empty gas cartridges, and shreds of tent fabric that hinted at desperate struggles against the elements. This col, we surmised, could be a happening place.

Indeed it can. In the summer of 1949, a search party moved south from here, scanning the snow for tell-tale clues just like the ones in front of us. Soon they found an abandoned cooking pot, then a shovel and a glove. Acting on this evidence, another group struggled up the trackless valley to the west of the Kitakama. And there they discovered the bodies of the two climbers, still huddled in the melting snowbank of their last bivouac.

Matsunami Akira was born in 1922 at Sendai, in the same year that the Kitakama ridge was first climbed. He made a name for himself as a mountaineer before graduating from middle school, even soloing a route on the fearsome cliffs of Tanigawa's Ichinokura-sawa. Because it was convenient for the Northern Alps, he applied to Matsumoto's elite high school, but was detained on Hodaka by a snowstorm on the day of the entrance examination.

That forced a change of plan. Moving to Tokyo, he joined the famous Tosho-keiryūkai club and passed the entrance exam for Tokyo Agricultural University, already a hotbed of mountaineering activity.

Now began the heyday of Matsunami's career. While some top climbers specialise in a particular cliff or region, he was everywhere, putting up new routes on Tanigawa, on Yatsugatake and in the Southern Japan Alps. The first winter ascent of No 1 Ridge (topo below) in Takidani in February 1939 was a milestone in the advancement of Japan's alpine climbing standards.

When the war came, he was drafted into the army for two years, being demobilised in 1946. Those were hungry and bleak years in Japan's burned-out cities. They didn't quench Matsunami's spirit. In July 1948, he made the first ascent of Kitadake Buttress's Central Ridge (Chuo-ryō), a climb that most mountaineers still prefer to admire from a safe distance.

Around the same time, he conceived his boldest plan yet. With just one companion, Arimoto Katsumi, he would traverse the highest mountains of the Japan Northern Alps from end to end, in mid-winter. They would start by climbing the Kitakama, cross the narrow and exposed Dai-Kiretto, and scale the heights of Oku-Hodaka before descending at the foot of the Yake-dake volcano.

As if the route's length and technical difficulties were not enough, Matsunami and Arimoto decided to do without pre-placed dumps of food and fuel. Nor would they call on support parties, as was common practice for winter expeditions. That meant they'd have to carry twenty days' food and fuel on their own backs, as well as all their climbing and camping gear.

The weather was against them from the start. Matsunami went into the mountains ahead of Arimoto, planning to lift one load of supplies to the ridgeline before his friend joined him. While he was camping on the Kitakama, a day of unseasonable heavy rain soaked his tent. Then the temperature plummeted, freezing the canvas into an icy block.

When Arimoto came up to Yumata, the climbers decided to leave the tent behind; it was now too heavy to carry. Instead, they would dig snowholes or huddle under a flysheet ("zelt"). This was a fateful decision. On December 30, they crossed the suspension bridge at Yumata, heading for the Kitakama. The next day, they made their first bivouac on the ridge, shivering under the flysheet as it was lashed by hail and sleet. It was the worst night out that either had yet experienced.

On New Year's Day, the storm strengthened into a full blizzard, piling a foot of new snow onto an icy crust. Neither crampons nor snowshoes would work in this pother, but the pair made it as far as Kitakama col - where we were now sitting - into which they dug a snowhole. Then they did their best to dry out their sodden clothes over the roaring stove, until it started sputtering and misbehaving.

The storm pinned them in their snowhole for the whole of the next day. Until Matsunami could fix the stove, they had to burn petrol in an open can to stay warm and melt snow. Soot blackened the walls of the snowhole, but their clothes stayed sodden. Now they had to decide whether to go on or go down. Just at this critical juncture, the climbers looked out of their snowhole and saw a starry sky. Then Matsunami managed to jury-rig the stove.

Next morning, they went forwards. With Arimoto breaking trail, they made it to the foot of the Doppyō, a large pyramid-shaped peaklet on the ridge, by the evening of 3rd January. As the weather seemed to moderate the following morning, they succeeded in climbing the obstacle only to be caught in a blizzard of renewed ferocity as they came down the other side.

It was on this afternoon, in hindsight, that the jaws of the trap sprang shut. In the snowhole that evening, Arimoto discovered that he had second-degree frostbite to his feet. Later, the gale blew in the door of their shelter, covering the climbers with spindrift and soaking and freezing them anew.

With retreat to the north blocked by the bulk of the Doppyō, the climbers decided to jettison as much gear as possible - these would be the telltale relics found by the search party - and stake their lives on a dash towards Yari. But when they struggled out of the remains of the snowhole into the relentless blizzard, they found the straps of their crampons frozen into a solid tangle.

Without crampons, they were forced to start step-cutting their way along the icy flanks of the ridge. Blinded by the buffeting gusts of spindrift, Arimoto slipped and fell into a gully on the western side of the ridge. As he was too exhausted to climb back, Matsunami went down to join him. Unable to regain the ridge, they forced a way downwards through chest-deep snowdrifts. At 3pm, they dug another snowhole.

On January 6th, the blizzard still raging, Matsunami begins to sense there is no way out. His whole body is freezing; he's at the end of his strength. Arimoto can no longer move. Somehow, he himself could probably get down to Yumata, but that would mean leaving Arimoto alone. He can't do that, so he decides to stay and die. It is six o clock when he makes the decision to die with Arimoto, he records.

"Mother," he writes in his diary, scribbling with a pencil stub gripped in frost-bitten fingers, "thank you for your love - I'm about to join my father. We can't do anything more. Please forgive me. Ask Inoue-san to fix everything." He writes to Inoue, and puts in a note to other friends too: "Arakawa-san - sorry I couldn't return the sleeping bag."

And then: "We die, we dissolve into water, we flow into the sea, we feed the fish, then we become some body again; we just borrow our shape and go round for ever. Matsunami." He stops writing and wraps the diary in a waterproof pouch, and that is where the search party finds it, next to his camera, six months later.

We allowed ourselves ten minutes on that greenwood col. Then Donald nodded at the cumulus clouds that were starting to boil off nearby ridges: "We'd better get a move on," he said. I bolted down the remains of my cheese butty, got to my feet and swung the faded army-green pack to my shoulders. Yes, we'd better get going. We knew little of the Kitakama's illustrious history, but the scattered gear in front of us told its own story. We didn't want to spend the night out on this ridge.

(Continued)

References

Main source for the account of Matsunami Akira's last bivouac is his diary, which is reprinted with other of his mountain writings in "Fūsetsu no Bibāgu" (風雪のビバーグ Snowstorm Bivouac), a Japanese mountaineering classic. The book also contains an account of the search parties sent out after Matsunami and Arimoto were reported missing.

Photo of Matsunami above is copyright of this blog. Photo of Matsunami and Arimoto together on the Kitakama expedition is copyright of Yama to Keikoku illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering (目で見る日本登山史 by 川崎吉光、山と渓谷社). This photo was recovered from Matsunami's camera, after the accident. Aerial photos of Yari-ga-take and the Kitakama ridge are copyright of Ohmori Kohichiro from Kusatsu Kita-Arupusu (Japan Northern Alps from the Air).

Good kama, bad kama (1)

2011-10-24T21:34:00.023+02:00

Getting to the foot of the irresistible ridge takes longer than expected...

Skiving off work early on Friday, we sprinted through Shinjuku station on a sweltering summer's afternoon. If we missed the 2pm Azusa express, we'd probably not finish our climb in time to park our black office shoes under our respective desks on Monday morning.

The day before, we'd run our plan by Etsuko, who worked for a foreign bank's operations department when not climbing tough routes in Tanigawa. She hadn't been positive: "Friend of mine fell off it in spring - never found the body. I think you should go for something easier," she said, looking vaguely intimidatory as she stood there, arms folded, in her blue office suit.

Since Donald and I had only recently arrived in Tokyo, we sought Etsuko's advice for most of our alpine projects. And, like as not, ignored it. What deafened our ears to the voice of good sense this time was the encomium we'd found in the Climbing Guide to Japanese Mountains Volume VII: "With its illustrious history, the Kitakama Ridge of Yarigatake is a classic alpine route that calls into play every aspect of mountaineering skill."  

That irresistible write-up propelled us first to Shinano Ohmachi, the Big Town in the highlands of Shinshu. Alighting there from the train, we just had time to threw down a katsu-donburi before taking a taxi up into a river valley as far as the second of three dams. We started walking at dusk, up the sloping face of the third dam, and then along a wooded valley. Above its velvet-black walls, the Milky Way luminously marshalled us forwards.

The stars shone steadily, undimmed by haze, as bats flitted in and out of our head-torch beams like night fighters. The weather would be good tomorrow. After three hours, we reached the Seiran-sō hut at Yumata for a late-night beer and a dip in the onsen. The sulphurous waters eased our muscles while steeping us in a vaguely Mephistolean scent. Fortunately, it was too dark to see our ridge looming up to the south.

Next morning, we woke at four and set out at five. From the map, we reckoned we'd deal with the approach to our ridge in about two hours. We reckoned without "friction", as infantry tacticians might call it. The path southwards, overgrown with waist-high panda grass, hinted at what lay in store. Few seemed to pass this way.  

And with good reason. The path led to a derelict suspension bridge that careened towards the rushing waters of the Amagami river. That took us into a deep gorge, which we traversed warily, now boulder-hopping just above the water, now crab-crawling worrisomely across washouts where the old trail had crumbled away. At one point, we teetered over a scarp-face on half-collapsed wooden catwalks.  

The river has to be re-crossed just before the Deai, a meeting of streams. But the bridge marked on our sketch-map had quite vanished. With misgivings, we inspected the waist-deep torrent of meltwater and judged it worthy of our rope - the only time we would use it. After Donald had fixed a sling around a tree, I launched myself into the current like a high-speed drogue on the end of a log-line. The bracingly cold water surged up to my neck before I got across, gasping, to the other side.

Five or so hours after leaving the Seiran-sō, we squelched our way out of the shadowy gorge - taking our boots off for the river crossing had been out of the question - and emerged into a green amphitheatre, bounded to the east by the green walls of our ridge, still flecked with snow. At our feet, the mid-morning sun reverberated from a dazzling flood-plain of white boulders.   

Only now could we appreciate the scale of this ridge - we'd taken five hours just to bush-whack along its base, covering perhaps one-third of its five-kilometre length. And we hadn't yet gained much height towards that serrated ridgeline at 3,000 metres. We glanced anxiously at our watches; at least, the day was still young.

  Our sketch-map showed that we should climb the gully opposite the ruins of a hut. But the encroaching woods had covered all traces of this lodge, leaving us without a clue as to the right gully. Unfazed, Donald took a compass fix off the spike of Yari, which now rose diffidently above the riotous press of trees, and proclaimed that we stood more or less in the right spot.  

And he was right: walking over to the base of the ridge, we spotted a cairn, half-hidden in the weeds. A rugged scramble ensued, over boulders and the occasional dry waterfall. 11.30am saw us to the ridge-line, which at this point (between pinnacles P7 and P8) is still wooded. The weather was still perfect and the gully had yielded up to Donald a Goretex bivvy bag, fortunately without its former occupant.  

More abandoned kit littered the small patch of level ground on the col. Clearly this was a happening kind of place in the snow season. I was about to sit down for a bite of lunch when Donald raised his hand. "Let's move out of the sh*t zone first," he said.

(Continued)

The lost wolves of Japan

2011-10-14T20:13:00.012+02:00

A history of Japan's wolves packs some hard-hitting ecological lessons

Excuse me while I howl. I’ve been reading Brett Walker’s book on “The Lost Wolves of Japan” and it’s a sorry tale. Japan’s last wolf was killed by hunters near Washikaguchi, in the eastern Yoshino mountains, in January 1905. A monument marks the spot.

For much of Japan's history, wolf and human had rubbed along well enough. Wolves rarely attacked people, and people tended to hunt them only when lupine depredations got out of hand. (It seems that Japanese wolves had a special weakness for fresh horse.)

Indeed, the wolf was often seen as a kind of guardian spirit. Up near Morioka, in the North Country, when farmers encountered a wolf, they’d ask “O lord wolf, what do you say? How about chasing the deer from our fields?" Elsewhere, at shrines dedicated to a wolf-spirit known as the Large-Mouthed Pure God, his help was invoked to keep the fields clear of deer and other pests. The Ainu elevated the wolf to an even higher place in their pantheon. Their wolf-deity, Horkew Kamuy, is the hero of a resurrection myth.

The live-and-let-live attitude to wolves ended in the eighteenth century, when a devastating rabies epidemic spread through Japan. Infected wolves turned into ferocious killers; some even came down into the villages to attack people. (In Kaga, it is recorded, the animals acquired a particular taste for young serving wenches.) Village councils and feudal authorities took the matter in hand, organising mass hunts to deal with the menace.

In Hokkaido, the story was different. When modern ranches were set up in the 1870s to raise cattle and horses, wolves threatened their profitability. In one case, the Niikappu ranch lost 90 foals to wolves within a week. Why were those Hokkaido wolves so aggressive? Perhaps because they were hungry. The woodland deer on which they would normally feed had been decimated by severe winters and also by human predation – canneries had recently been set up in Hokkaido to export venison.

Whatever the reason, the ranchers responded without mercy. Taking their cue from American advisors, they set out traps laced with strychnine and even dynamite. An effective bounty scheme was set up: a wolf pelt or set of feet was worth seven yen. Wolves appear to have been extirpated in Hokkaido before they succumbed in Honshu.

A century later, many of Japan’s mountain regions are overrun with deer. Overgrazing has stripped hills that just twenty years ago were still lushly vegetated. If wolves still existed, they certainly wouldn’t go hungry.

Do they still exist? From time to time, hikers or foresters report that they’ve seen large dog-like creatures running through the woods. A few years ago, writes Professor Walker in his epilogue, members of a wildlife protection committee played recordings of howling Canadian wolves in the woods of eastern Yoshino - in the hope of luring out any survivors. But the forest remained silent.

References

Brett L. Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan, University of Washington Press, 2008.

This post is (misleadingly) tagged as a review, but it can't in this space do justice to the depth and range of Professor Walker's book - which also delves into the evolutionary history of the Japanese wolf; investigates the question whether, in fact, there were two species of wolf or wolf-like creature roaming the backwoods; and compares various theories about the wolf's extinction.

Et in Arcadia Cs-137

2011-10-11T21:25:00.015+02:00

Famous mountains fall victim to the taint of the Fukushima reactor accidents

In those days, on the way back to Tokyo, we'd pull off the Kan-etsu Expressway at the Tanigawa Parking Area, just after the long tunnel. Then we'd slew the weatherbeaten Subaru to a halt next to the public fountain, and fill every water bottle we had.

We might think twice about doing that now. The big city's tap water probably hasn't improved, but it may contain less radioactive caesium than do the mountain streams. That, at least, is my guess after looking at the "heat maps" of radioactive contamination recently published by Japan's science and technology ministry.

These charts show that the mountain ranges around the Kanto plain have generally soaked up more radioactivity - specifically the caesium 134 and 137 isotopes - than the low ground. Rain falls more heavily in the hills, washing out more of the plume that emanated from the derelict Fukushima reactors.

Quite a few "famous peaks of Japan" stand within the scope of the ministry's survey. What would Fukada Kyūya have made of this modern-day threat to his mountains?

There's no way of knowing, of course, as the Hyakumeizan author died (on a mountain hike) on March 21, 1971. This was just five days before the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant officially went into service. It's as if one era ended and another began in that far-off month forty years ago.

References

Many thanks to Wes for pointing out the relevant post in Michael Cucek's estimable current affairs blog, Shisaku. An article on the science ministry's survey can also be found in the Japan Times, which is also the source of the map shown here.

Japan Times articles:-

Okutama cesium level seen spiking

Effect of contaminated soil on food chain sparks fears

Economist article:-

Hot spots and blind spots

New York Times article:-

Radioactive hotspots in Tokyo point to wider problems

Images and ink (9)

2011-08-19T19:06:00.007+02:00

Mikurigaike (tateyama), a photo by sunnybeauty on Flickr.

Text: On Mikurigaike, from Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964):

Above Jigoku-dani is Mikuri-ga-ike, a lake with waters of an exquisitely deep blue. Naturally, we cannot pass by without sampling its legends. There was once a monk who took a swim here, unheeding of the people who tried to stop him. On the first attempt, he bathed with a dagger clenched between his teeth and emerged unscathed. Then, letting down his guard, he went back into the water unarmed. He swam around the pool once, twice, and then on his third round he was dragged down into the depths never to reappear. This episode gives the lake its name, which means 'Thrice Round Pond'.

Many thanks to Sunnybeauty for allowing Project Hyakumeizan to use this sunnybeautiful image.

The traditions of Tairappyō

2011-08-11T21:06:00.028+02:00

Sawa boots and straw sandals compared in a stream-climbing of Sasa-ana-zawa in the mountains of Echigō

The kompa broke out at midnight. We'd driven up through Karafuru, a hot spring town where the last yukata-clad revellers were staggering back to their ryokan, weaving between the plumes of steam that came venting up from gratings in the street. Our friends had arrived before us, their tents already pitched beside the river. When we showed up, Kirins were cracked open; a kompa was customary whenever Workman Alpinists from Tokyo met up with the Gunma crowd.

Lack of sleep notwithstanding, we struggled out of our sleeping bags before 5am; timekeeping was good when our patron from Gunma, a Himalayan veteran, was around. An hour’s walk along a woodland track took us further up the river valley. The sawa-climbing started gently; after a hot summer, there wasn't much water and we made our way easily over beds of dry pebbles.

When the valley narrowed down into a gorge, hiking boots were changed for wading shoes. That is, six of us pulled on modern nylon wading boots with brillo-pad soles, while Kuriffu-san, our guest, tied traditional straw sandals onto the kind of toed ankle-boot favoured by old-style Japanese builders.

Straw sandals, known as waraji, were the staple footwear of mountaineers during Japan’s Golden Age of alpine exploration. Even Walter Weston tried them out. But that was a century ago. By 1964, the Hyakumeizan author Fukada Kyūya was referring to "mountaineers of the old school like myself, who go climbing in straw sandals and leggings". Even then, straw sandals smacked of the past.

Still, somebody has to uphold tradition, and who better than Kuriffu-san, a Bristol-nadeshiko from the West of England and an expert on traditional Japanese dress. I did wonder, though, how the straw soles would cope when we got to steeper ground. At 8.30am, underneath a white rock like a castle, we roped up for our first waterfall. At first sight, the straw sandals seemed to be coping well. Maybe there was something to these old-fangled ways.

As it happened, I never saw how Kuriffu-san dealt with the second waterfall. That's because, just then, I was clinging desperately to some weeds on the gorge's sidewall. Everyone else was making their way up the rope, which the leader had fixed, securing themselves by a sliding prusik knot. This is a suspect technique – the knot can slide down just when it needs to arrest a fall, or jam up just when you need to move higher. Indeed, prusik knots had been behind a couple of recent sawa accidents. Prusiks gave me the creeps.

But soloing on steep, wet grass is even worse. Getting breathlessly to safety, I reminded myself that 'takamaki' – attempts to climb around waterfalls rather than tackle them directly – cause many more accidents than prusik knots. Fortunately, nobody seemed to have seen my weed-pulling foray and we moved on.

Ahead, the flat top of Tairappyō beckoned us on. Strange to say, this was the first time we’d laid eyes on this summit, although we’d ski-climbed it at least once. In winter, the mountain keeps himself shrouded under a cloud-cap woven from the moist winds blowing in from the Japan Sea; even on a fine day, spicules of snow keep drifting down, like diamond dust, from those woolly clouds. In this summer heat, it was hard to believe we were on the same mountain.

The centrepiece of Sasa-ana-zawa is a fifty-metre stretch of waterworn slabs that lead, like a royal road, directly up Tairappyō's eastern slopes. These we climbed on pure friction, splashing in and out of thin sheets of fast-flowing water. Straw sandals seemed to perform just as well as modern brillo-pad soles.

After the slabs came the bamboo grass from which the sawa takes its name. For an hour or so, we "rowed the sasa", pushing our way through its thickets of dust-laden and razor-edged leaves. Filthier than before, we emerged gratefully onto the ridge. When sawa shoes were changed for hiking boots, Kuriffu-san hurled her worn-out straw sandals back into the sasa. Several more pairs of waraji could be seen rotting in the grass around us: Sasa-ana-zawa, it seems, is popular among sawa-climbing traditionalists.

Setting off homewards along the ridge, we wound our way between rhododendron bushes. The flowers were long gone at this season. Instead, the pampas grass waved tall beside the path. There was more than a breath of autumn in the air.

Behind the curve

2011-08-03T21:29:00.017+02:00

Savants have sought to explain the secret of Mt Fuji's subtly concave slopes for more than a century. Now they're getting close

It was the curve that captivated him – the line that falls, steeply at first, from Mt Fuji’s shoulders, then at an ever-shallower angle until, at Omiya, it blends softly into the horizontal. So elegant was this line, he speculated, that it might have inspired the elegant curvatures of Japan’s house roofs and castle walls. Merely to admire this mysterious curve wouldn't do, though. As a Victorian scientist, he had to explain it.

John Milne had joined the staff of the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo in 1876. He’d already packed several geological expeditions into his 26 years, including forays to Sinai and Newfoundland. Even his journey to Japan was an adventure; to avoid a long sea voyage, he travelled from England via Russia, riding part of the way on a dog-sled across the Siberian snows.

As one of 3,000 or so ‘o-yatoi’ or foreign technical experts hired by the Meiji government, the young professor’s duties were to teach mining, architecture, metallurgy and chemistry. Today, Milne is remembered as a founder of seismology. During his two decades in Japan, he invented an improved seismograph and later helped set up the first global network for monitoring earthquakes.

He also toured the archipelago, inspecting its volcanoes. Their regular forms contrasted with the “very rough” volcanoes he’d seen in Iceland. Just two years after landing in Japan, he’d acquainted himself with “Fusiyama, 12,365 feet near Yokohama; Ganjosan, 7,000 feet near Morioka, Chokaisan, 6,000 feet, between Niigata and Akita, Iwakisan, 5,000 feet, near Awomori; and Kumagatake, 2,700 feet, near Hakodate”.

Now Milne was ready to start his analysis, which he published in the 1878 edition of the Geological Magazine. All the above mountains, he wrote, appear conical at first sight. Looking closer, though, “we see this upper cone expanding and sweeping outward, forming a graceful curve”.

This curve, he reasoned, could arise in two ways. Either it formed at the start of the volcano's life, from the way its ash and lava were thrown out. Or it developed later, through "denudation" by wind and rain. But which of these factors created the elegant profiles of Japanese volcanoes?

Milne doesn’t waste many pages of the Geological Magazine before delivering a crisp judgment: “This being the case, I think we are justified in regarding mountains, similar to those about which I am now writing, as having a form mainly due to the simple piling up of material and not as cones which have been subsequently modified by a number of secondary causes, such as are advocated in treatises on Physical Geology and Volcanos.”

Two pieces of evidence lead him to this conclusion. First, his volcanic profiles – they form logarithmic curves, he believes – are so similar that they must have a common cause. Secondly, the slope angles are close to what theory would predict “for the stability of a self-supporting mass of loose materials”.

A lesser scientist might have regarded the case as proven. But Milne continued to think about the curve. And he went to look at more volcanoes, in Yezo and the Kuriles. More data, however, led to less certainty. A year later, he sent the Geological Magazine some “Further notes upon the Form of Volcanos”. The tone is now circumspect: the slopes Milne saw on his recent tour, while “generally logarithmic”, are not absolutely so.

Then he puts his theories about slope stability to the test. This he does by pouring onto the floor first sand, next gravel, and finally a mixture of the two. Sadly, the resulting heaps remain resolutely cone-shaped, betraying scarcely a hint of Fuji-like curvaciousness. "Taking these experiments as a whole," Milne admits, "it will be observed that I did not obtain much evidence in favour of my views."

He revisits the ways in which a volcano might get its curve. A self-supporting heap tends to spread out at its base; large particles roll further down the slope than small ones, creating a shallower slope angle lower on the hill; and there’s always "denudation" to fall back on. Incidentally, he's tried sprinkling water on his piles of experimental sand and gravel, but that too fails to produce the elusive line.

Has he missed something? Another savant, a Mr Mallet, has proposed that a volcano's weight might crush the strata under it, causing the mountain to settle into the ground. That might result in curved slopes. Or – and surely a note of desperation creeps in here – the volcano's core might shrink as it cools, pulling its slopes inwards like a child sucking in its cheeks.

This time, Milne’s conclusion is not even tentative; it is an abdication. “Taken as a whole, these causes are very varied ..,” he writes. “If we examine them singly, we can but barely form an idea as to the nature of their actions, and when we remember that … they act irregularly in their relations to each other, we see that the task of unravelling their complications becomes quite hopeless.”

As if taking this warning to heart, few scholars since Milne’s day have troubled themselves about volcanic curves. Current textbooks, if they raise the question at all, often take the opposite line to Milne’s: "Initially, a pristine volcano will form a pure conical form,” intone Jon Davidson and Shan de Silva in the Encyclopaedia of Volcanoes, “[until] Mass wasting results in a transfer of mass from the upper parts of the edifice to the lower flanks, building out a talus apron. The edifice evolves to a steady-state profile with concave-upward slopes..."

Yet denudation doesn’t do it for everybody. A trio of highly numerate geologists from Oxford and Cornell proposed – this was in 1981 – that "hydraulic resistance to the flow of magma determines the geometrical form of volcanoes". Feeding their equations for the stickiness of lava into a model, they came up with a slope profile that nicely mimics that of Mt Fuji. However, they note, “the theory is not expected to be valid near the summit, where the solution is singular”.

And there the matter rested – an unresolved tussle, if you like, between the Lords of Lava Dynamics and the Maharajahs of Mass Wasting – until the Space Shuttle blew onto the scene. On one of its flights, the vehicle carried a radar that produced accurate three-dimensional profiles of all the landforms a scientist could possibly want to ogle.

Using this data, a group of researchers led by a Hungarian volcanologist named Dávid Karátson took another look at volcanic slope profiles. They started by picking out 19 highly symmetrical stratovolcanoes from around the Pacific rim. All these mountains turned out to have lower slopes that curve in a logarithmic manner, just as Milne had surmised. This the researchers ascribe to “a combination of different volcano-related mass transport processes on the lower flanks”. In other words, denudation and stuff.

But the upper slopes told a different story. Eight of the mountains looked like true cones, with ruler-straight upper skylines – the researchers called these C-type, for conical – while the rest had concave upper slopes. These were termed P-type, for parabolic. Yotei-zan in Hokkaido is a classic C-type volcano, while Mayon in the Philippines is a P-type.

Erosion cannot explain the upper-slope profiles, Karátson & Co believe. Instead, they suspect that the differing "eruption styles" of P- and C-type volcanoes may be responsible. Parabolic slopes form when volcanoes put out more lava than ash. (By what exact mechanism is left unexplained.) Conversely, straight-sided cones result when eruptions are explosive and ash-rich. Just in time for Milne's centenary, it looks as if the mystery of Mt Fuji's curve may be on the way to being solved.

But what happened to Mt Fuji in all this? Regrettably, the top Hyakumeizan didn't make it into Karátson's elite group of 11 "parabolic" volcanoes. Marred by an eighteenth-century flank eruption, its form was deemed too irregular for study. To its admirers, of course, it may be this very irregularity that transforms Mt Fuji into an image of perfection. But that raises a different kind of question altogether…

References

Milne, J (1878): On the Form of Volcanos, Geological Magazine (Decade II), 5: 337-345

Milne, J (1879): Further Notes upon the Form of Volcanos, Geological Magazine (Decade II) (1879), 6: 506-514

Lacey, A, Ockendon, J and Turcotte, D (1981): On the geometrical form of volcanoes, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 54, Issue 1, June

Davidson, J and De Silva, S (1999): Composite Volcanoes: Chapter 43 in The Encyclopedia of Volcanoes, Elsevier

Karátson, D, Favalli, M, Tarquini, S, Fornaciai, A, and Wörner, G (2010): The regular shape of stratovolcanoes: a DEM-based morphometrical approach, Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, 193, 171–181. (And many thanks to Dávid Karátson for explaining some key points about this paper to Project Hyakumeizan.)

Photos: Portrait of John Milne from Wikipedia; photos of Fuji from The Volcanoes of Japan, Part 1, Fujisan by John Milne & W.K. Burton; Collotype Plates by K. Ogawa, ca 1892

High winds

2011-07-22T21:22:00.027+02:00

But are they strong enough to reshape Japanese mountaintops?

The Japan Alps blow away the competition: at 3,000 metres altitude in January, the wind speed averages 21 metres a second – some 75.6 kilometres an hour. That’s more than double the free-stream wind at the same height in the European Alps (10 metres a second) and a third faster than in the Rockies (14 metres a second). None of that would surprise the workman alpinists in the image below, who are skiing through a spring gale at Tsugaike.

The YamaKei guidebook (see References) that quotes these statistics also draws attention to some curiously striped terrain on high mountaintops. It is wind erosion, says the article, that is responsible for these alternating strips of grass and gravel. You can see them at Kisokoma-ga-take (photo below) and Shirouma, among other places.

Whether or not this explanation holds – maybe somebody should go and take another look – nobody would deny that Japanese mountain winds can shift the real estate. Bashō himself testifies to that:-

Blowing the gravel
Off the ground on Mount Asama
An autumn gale

吹き飛ばす石は浅間の野分かな

As if to corroborate the famous haiku poet, I’ve heard stones drone past me at the fifth station of Mt Fuji. It’s hard to explain how pebbles can be flying at speed through the air on these relatively gentle mid-slopes, unless you posit that they were blown far into the sky from the summit regions.

According to the YamaKei authors, the driving force behind Japan’s strong surface winds is the jet stream. Or rather two of them. In winter, the Himalaya often splits the polar jet into northerly and southerly streams – which then flow back together just to the west of Japan, causing atmospheric mayhem.

It’s probably no coincidence that the jet stream was first discovered from a site near Mt Fuji. This is where the meteorologist Ōishi Wasaburō launched his weather balloons in the 1920s. Unfortunately, he chose to publish his observations in Esperanto, ensuring that recognition was slow in coming.

References

Y Tsuno and O Uchida, Chuo Arupusu to Yatsu-ga-take, Kusatsu Tozan Gaido

中央アルプスと八ガ岳―特選10コース (新版・空撮登山ガイド) [単行本]
津野祐次 (著), 内田修 (著)

Hitomaro's sense of sasa

2011-07-19T21:27:00.021+02:00

And how Japanese deer threaten to make a meal of literary sensibilities

Just pages into today's breakfast book, I lit on a verse that halted my coffee-mug in mid-air, twixt table and lips:

The whole mountain is a storm
of rustling leaves
of dwarf bamboo
but I think of my wife
having parted from her

The poet who performed this coffee-mug arrest was Hitomaro (right), mediated through Ian Hideo Levy’s masterly translation of the Man'yōshū. If this eighth-century collection of verses is "Japan's premier anthology of classical poetry" (Levy’s words), then Kakinomoto Hitomaro (c.662-710) is its premier poet.

It was the dwarf bamboo that did it for me, or rather the new perspective on it. As a former workman alpinist, I never suspected the plant had such poetic depths. After all, it is everywhere. Dwarf bamboo, sasa, kumasasa - call it what you will - covers mountainsides all over Japan.

Apparently, there are four main kinds: Sasa kurilensis (chishima-sasa) and Sasa senanensis (kuma-zasa) grow where the winter snow is deep, as on the Japan Sea coast, while Sasa chartacea (sendai-sasa) and Sasa nipponica (miyako-sasa, as seen above) prefer the Pacific side with its shallower snows.

Hitomaro was probably writing about kumazasa (above); he sets his poem in snowy Iwami (today's Shimane Prefecture), his native province. I imagine him standing waist-deep on a slope of bamboo grass, on his way to the capital and looking back regretfully to his home village and the wife he'll never see again.

Senanenis or nipponica, it was all sasa to us. We pushed our way through endless thickets at the top of sawa climbs or bivvied in nests of it. Once – after coming out of the Kurobe gorge at Uozu – we were offered delicious sushi that had been wrapped in sasa leaves for freshness. But never did it occur to us that a storm of rustling bamboo leaves could stand for a world of loss. Until this morning, that is.

Hitomaro's highly refined sense of sasa started me wondering. What part does dwarf bamboo play in that slightly less famous work of literature, the One Hundred Mountains of Japan? Riffling through the pages of Nihon Hyakumeizan, we find sasa all over the map.

Hyakumeizan’s northernmost mention of the ubiquitous plant is in the chapter about Gassan, an extinct volcano in Tohoku. There, the haiku poet Basho is quoted as having made a pioneering bivouac:-

When we reached the summit, we were thoroughly chilled and could hardly breathe. The sun had already set and the moon had come out. Making ourselves a bed of bamboo grass with twigs of bamboo for a pillow, we lay down and waited for the dawn. (Translation: Dorothy Britton)

Now there is another reason for reading the classics: pay attention to Basho’s survival hints and, one day, the sasa may save you from a bad night out.

At the southern end of its range, the plant is mentioned in the very last Hyakumeizan chapter, on Yakushima's Miyanoura-dake. There's also a referencein the one about Odaigahara, a wooded upland in the Kansai:-

Ushi'ishi-ga-hara is a broad meadow covered in dwarf bamboo. Stands of tall trees here and there give it the appearance of a natural park. The place takes its name from a large stone shaped like a sleeping ox in one corner of the field.

If you went there now, though, you'd see less sasa. Much of it, reports a quartet of savants,* has been grazed out by the ever-increasing herds of deer. Let's hope the animals can keep their appetites in bounds. Otherwise, future heirs of Hitomaro may never get to hear the sasa rustle up a storm.

References

Fukada Kyuya: Nihon Hyakumeizan in a forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan

Ian Hideo Levy: The Ten Thousand Leaves: A Translation of Man'yōshū, Japan's Premier Anthology of Classical Poetry: Volume I

*Furusawa Hitomi, Hino Teruaki, Kaneko Shinji, Araki Makoto: Effects of dwarf bamboo (Sasa nipponica) and deer (Cervus nippon centralis) on the chemical properties of soil and microbial biomass in a forest at Ohdaigahara, central Japan. These savants also say there may be as many as 30.9 deer on each square kilometre of the mountain. No wonder the sasa is thinning.

Pictures: Hitomaro from Wikipedia; Sasa pictures from YamaKei guide to Japanese trees.

Screen test

2011-07-12T20:14:00.046+02:00

A long summer's day on a cliff called Byōbu leads to a change in perspective

2.15am, Tokusawa: shooting stars are slipping out of the sky as we leave the campsite. One runs ahead of its trail, falling into the darkness like a glowing coal. Too bad that we can't spare the time to watch; every minute counts if we're going to climb him to the top. In silence, we chase the wavering beams of our headtorches up the valley path.

3.15am, Yokoō: breakfast is a couple of rolls in front of the hut, washed down with canned coffee from a vending machine. It's good that it's still dark, because he can't play mind games with us. In daylight, his profile looming above the trees would start raising questions. As in, is this steep enough for you, punks?

For a time, Byōbu was too steep. To get up that sheer skillet, you'd need artificial climbing techniques. We didn't do aid; therefore we couldn't climb Byōbu. Then, one September weekend, the props were kicked out from under that syllogism; our president and vice-president – that was Sandra – did two routes on Byōbu. The possible had just been redefined on us. I picked up the phone; it was time for action.

3.30: We enter the side valley, then wait quarter of an hour before it's light enough to wade across the stream. It's good that the face is still in shadow: in better light that central buttress would stand aggressively forward - less like an elegant lacquered screen, as its name should imply, than some windowless and totalitarian bastille. Welcome to the Ministry of Truth.

After the stream crossing, it's a half-hour scramble up a rubble chute of pulverised stone. Under one boulder is trapped a fragment of a shattered climbing helmet. I try not to speculate how it got there.

5.30: we're at the foot of the cliff, sorting the gear, just ahead of a trio of climbers from Nagoya. They've bivvied nearby, in a nest of panda grass. That was what Allan and I did last autumn, in our first visit to Byōbu: I remember a harvest moon rising into a field of altocumulus, turning the sky into rippled silver. A bad sign, as it turned out.

5.50: Today, the weather is flawless. In the growing light, I step off a patch of frozen snow onto the rock. A series of avalanche-rounded bulges leads upward; all the handholds have been smashed or smoothed away. Then Ken leads past, tackles an awkward overhang, and finishes the second pitch tethered to a stunted silver birch.

Now we're on T4 - T stands for 'terrace', but it's more like a steep patch of trees clinging to an island on the face. With the ropes draped around our necks, we stumble up it on the trace of a path. This is just the approach: the real climbing hasn't started yet. Yet the woods of Yokoō are already far below; the river has dwindled to a thread; its roar to a distant murmur.

8am: we flake out the twin ropes for the second time so that Ken can start on the first pitch. Route finding will be easy; that corner shows the way, arrowing upwards between granite walls. The climbing is "continuous at the grade", which means, translated from guidebook-speak, that it's hard all the way up.

But Ken is making steady progress. As his brightly clad figure dwindles into the face, I start to appreciate the cliff's scale; he's going to run out almost every centimetre of our fifty-metre ropes. The searchlight glare of an August morning is now flooding the face; I feel the sun scorching the black rubber heels of my rock-shoes as I come up.

When I arrive at the belay, Ken is still ebullient from his lead: "Anywhere else, that would be a climb in itself," he says. But here it's just the first pitch. My turn now: I clip a sling into a bolt above the belay and use it to start a hand-traverse, feet slapped onto holdless granite. Then it's a matter of edging crab-wise along a sketchy ramp, body flattened into the rock. The forest below shrivels into a mere herbarium.

I pull onto a ledge floored with smooth gravel and a soft stratum of cigarette stubs. Shielded by a pinnacle, it's a good perch while we eat another roll, watch the Nagoya three clinging like human flies to the neighbouring skyline, and drink the last of our water. Might as well go light for the next pitch, a near-vertical wall of blank granite, innocent of cracks and holds. In fact, we haven't a hope of getting up it without the handywork of a previous generation of alpinists.

Some 34 years before us, a trio of young Japanese climbers - the leader was 28 - woke from a bivouac on this very ledge and set to work. They'd hauled up heavy sackfuls of ironmongery for the job - starting out with 65 pitons and 38 of the new-fangled expansion bolts. Most important, though, was their attitude; they were out to redefine the possible.

This revolution had started in January 1955, when two rival climbing teams converged on Kita-Dake Buttress in the Southern Alps, vying for the same line. When they met up under the cliff, they decided to join forces. The long winter bivouacs on the face gave them ample time to discuss the state of Japanese alpinism.

How about it, somebody asked, if they formed an elite club. Recruiting only the very best climbers from the leading clubs, they would concentrate on big wall climbs, push grades up to top European standards, and train for new routes in the Alps and Himalaya. They would be Japan's answer to the Groupe de haute montagne, those praetorian guards of French alpinism.

In January 1958, the new group took shape around Okuyama Akira (right), one of the Kita-dake leaders. They decided to call themselves the RCCII, harking back to the original Rock Climbing Club of Kobe, the outfit founded in 1924 by Fujiki Kuzō to pursue technical climbing. Fujiki, who was still around, thought the RCC name was worn out, but it found support from Fukada Kyūya; the Hyakumeizan author always had a soft spot for history.

The RCCII made its first mark in June the same year when they climbed an impossibly overhanging face in Ichinokura-sawa. Using expansion bolts for the first time in Japan, the climbers were able to cross blank areas of rock where traditional pitons couldn't be used.

Then, in April 1959, RCCII member Minami Hakuto (left) and his crew pounded a vertical row of expansion bolts into the very slab that now loomed above us. Altogether, they spent four nights on Byōbu-iwa. Borrowing the name of Minami's home climbing club, they called their line Unryō: "cloud ridge".

Over the next decade, routes like this helped to drag Japanese alpinism - I could imagine it gibbering and squeaking a bit, like myself following one of Ken's bolder leads - out of its III/IV comfort zone into the hard new world of V/VI.

RCCII faded from the scene after Okuyama's death - he took his own life in 1972 to forestall the cancer that was killing him - but not before its members had put up a first Japanese ascent of the Eiger north wall and attempted Everest's south-west face.

Minami, by the way, is still around. And so, it appears, are the very bolts that he drilled into Byōbu three decades ago. From the safety of our luncheon ledge, we are now inspecting these with misgivings; some of Minami's originals appear to have been bashed out of shape by avalanches; most have lost their rings. As makeshift replacements, more recent climbers have threaded the bolt-heads with 3mm shock cord. These so-called hero loops are frayed and faded, but we have to use them or give up the climb.

Ken clips his first étrier into one of these loops - it's his turn to lead again, thank goodness - and he steps up with care. The suspense grows as he gains height: a fall is unthinkable on this crummy protection; the whole rig might unzip. At half height, somebody has installed a modern Petzl bolt - now, at least, the lead climber won't deck out if something comes awry. More daunting still is the place where the bolts stop, forcing the leader to climb free on steep rock before reaching the belay.

At 1pm, we're both standing on a small ledge at the top of the third pitch -in the same place, last autumn, Allan and I looked out at Jōnen and saw the pyramidal peak dissolve into an advancing rain squall. It was time to bail: we reached the ground after three huge abseils at the limit of our ropes. Today, however, the clouds look puffy and innocent. We decide to carry on to the top.

This is where we part company with Minami & Co. Climbing in the spring, they continued to bolt their way straight up, through an overhang. As, in this season, we don't have avalanches to reckon with, we can free-climb - without aid - sideways into a gully, and thence upwards.

That traverse, though . My feet are on a bulge that slopes outward into space. To make the move, I pull outward on this rock flake, an elephant's ear of crumbly granodiorite. As I put my weight on it, the stone emits a creak. The adrenalin charge hits like an electric shock and propels me, skittering on tip-toe, across that plunging slab. It's only when we get into the gully that we realise how cool it's become; the sun is long gone behind the cliff.

The topo doesn't even dignify the gully with a route description - it just indicates the direction to follow with an upward arrow. Yet there are still three or four pitches to climb. Ken is in the lead again when we come up against a huge clod of earth and matted tree-roots blocking the gully. To evade this relic of last winter's avalanches, he goes out on the gully's side-wall and clambers, no holds barred, through a couple of trees.

4pm has ticked by when we scramble up the last grassy slabs into a low wood. We unrig our last belay, to a pine tree, and stuff the ropes into our sacks. The Nagoya trio have topped out; we hear their voices above. Now what? Ken finds the escape route, up an earthy rake through the trees.

This takes us, unexpectedly, to the brink of another chasm. Twin gullies, gnawing from either side, have almost severed our cliff from its parent mountain, leaving just a sliver of ground between them. Seemingly, the two sides are joined only by a tangle of creeping pine roots. Stepping onto this knife-edge bridge of dreams, we understand. Byōbu really is a screen; free-standing, frail, hardly less temporary than ourselves.

References

Yama to Keikoku magazine, July 1993, Classic routes of Japan series no 4, Byōbu-iwa, East Face, Unryō Route. (屏風岩東壁　雲稜ルート

Yama to Keikoku illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering (目で見る日本登山史 by 川崎吉光、山と渓谷社)

Web article about the history of RCCII: 第二次ＲＣＣの活動と歴史 by 松浦　剛

The o-yatoi who weighed the earth

2011-06-26T13:43:00.033+02:00

A mid-Meiji encounter of science and religion at the summit of Mt Fuji

On a windy day in early August 1880, the priest called Kinoshita lost his sacerdotal cool. Half an hour ago, a balding foreigner had asked him, through an interpreter, if he could set up his infidel devices in Kinoshita's shrine - the Summit Sanctuary of the Sengen Goddess of Mt Fuji herself.

SUNSET FROM THE SUMMIT OF FUJI -- The Photographer Catches His Shot At the End of a Long Climb, a photo by Okinawa Soba on Flickr.

Unthinkable, fumed Kinoshita, as he sent the interlopers on their way. Yet now the interpreter, this gangling student-type, was coming over to pester him again. Would the estimable priest be so good as to reconsider his decision, the student was asking, because the American sensei wants to weigh the earth.

Thomas Corwin Mendenhall (left) did not come to Japan specifically to weigh the earth. As one of the 3,000 or so 'o-yatoi' or foreign employees of the Meiji government, he'd been invited to teach physics at the newly established Tokyo Imperial University. Arriving in Yokohama on September 21, 1878, he gave his first lecture the very next day, from a podium set up in a venerable Buddhist temple. (The images had been carefully moved aside for the occasion).

Mendenhall attached great weight to the experimental method. Experiments, you could say, were the making of him. Born in 1841, the youngest of five children, he was brought up on a farm in eastern Ohio. It was a young Quaker teacher, teaching through practical demonstration, who started him on the road to science. For instance, during recess, the girls' shawls were used to block out the windows. A pinhole in this screen produced a clear image of children playing outside, projected onto the room's white ceiling.

Money was scarce; the future physicist had to buy his copy of Euclid with a silver dollar he earned by driving a neighbour's cow twenty-five miles to market. The only way he could get a further education was to become a teacher, which he did by taking his teaching certificate at the age of sixteen. From his first job at a primary school, he worked his way up to a professorship at the new Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Ohio State University) in 1873. Then came the invitation to Japan.

Once in Tokyo, Mendenhall built, more or less from scratch, a modern physics laboratory, using equipment sent from friends in America; all his students would be required to do lab work. Some would also accompany him on field trips and take part in research projects.

It is unclear how Mendenhall lit on the idea of measuring the earth's gravity on the summit of Mt Fuji. Perhaps the idea came to him when the "most beautiful mountain in the world" had soared over the sea horizon, as if to welcome him, the day before his ship docked in Yokohama.

As for the apparatus, he'd become interested in measuring gravity by means of pendulums. A fellow o-yatoi, Professor Chaplin, the professor of civil engineering at Todai, lent him an astronomical transit instrument, by which the accuracy of the recording chronometers could be checked. Now all was set.

The scientists and their instruments travelled to the foot of Mt Fuji, by jinrikisha - the railway went only as far as Yokohama. The students had gone ahead to make arrangements. As the Americans arrived in Subashiri at night, it was not until next morning that the great volcanic peak revealed its full splendour. At which, Professor Chaplin turned to Mendenhall and exclaimed, "My God, I don't wonder they worship it."

At 8am, the party started its ascent. One of the "goriki" or porters had to carry the main part of the transit instrument, which weighed 160 pounds, but he still managed to outclimb the two scientists. By mid-afternoon, in the barren wastes of scoria above the treeline, they were struggling. And the summit still looked far away.

Just then, the Americans were overtaken by a band of pilgrims, all dressed in flowing robes of white, their leader urging them on with a small bell. Mendenhall noted that the leader limited each effort to one hundred steps, which he counted in a loud voice. After each advance, the pilgrims fell instantly to the ground, where they rested under their immense straw hats, until called to their feet again by the leader's bell.

PILGRIMS DESCENDING FUJI, a photo by Okinawa Soba on Flickr.

The pilgrims didn't seem to pay much attention to their leader's counting - instead, they timed their paces to their chanting of the mountain votary's prayer - "Rokkon, shōjō" (May our six senses be purified). The scientists fell in with this group, learned their chant, shared their climbing routine, and had their moral support through the rest of that day.

They put up for the night at a hut near the eighth station, where they admired the mountain's conical shadow as it stretched out further and further until the sun finally set. The pilgrims too stayed in this hut, yet all managed a comfortable night.

Next day, the scientists reached the summit. They soon found an adversary that they hadn't reckoned with - the strong wind that prevented them from putting up their tents. And even if somehow the tents could have stayed up, the blustering gusts would have disturbed the instruments too much for useful readings.

What to do? They peered down into the sheltered crater - perhaps three hundred feet deep, by Mendenhall's guess - but the difficulties of getting the instruments down its stone-raked walls looked insurmountable. It was then that they decided to ask the priest in charge of the summit shrine if they could use his main sanctuary as a temporary laboratory.

The scientists' first request was rebuffed - the priest seemed indignant even to be asked. Mendenhall decided to give him half an hour to recover his composure, then resolved to make another trial. This time the scientist explained, through one of the students, that his experiment was intended to compute the weight of the earth.

Signs of interest appeared on the priest's face and soon he agreed to lend his shrine to the scientists for three or four days. In a few hours all was ready: the image of Buddha was respectfully moved to the back of the hut, the pendulums were mounted on stones projecting from the walls, the chronograph was connected with the chronometer and set going, and the transit instrument was deployed near the door, ready to take star sightings.

Mendenhall's experiment drew on an illustrious heritage. It was Isaac Newton, no less, who was the first to hazard a guess at the earth's density. You'll find it in the Principia, Book III, The System of the World, Proposition 10, Theorem 10:

Accordingly, since the ordinary matter of our earth at its surface is about twice as heavy as water, and a little lower down, in mines, is found to be about three or four or even five times heavier than water, it is likely that the total amount of matter in the earth is about five to six times greater than it would be if the whole earth consisted of water, especially since it has already been shown above that the earth is about four times denser than Jupiter.

This was a prescient conjecture. But it still had to be verified in the hard currency of experimental results. The baton was taken up about half a century after Newton's death by Britain's Royal Society, which set up a so-called Committee of Attraction.

In 1774, this body sent Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, to visit a 3,500-foot mountain in Scotland. By measuring how far the mountain attracted a plumb line away from the vertical, the savants would be able to calculate by how much the earth's attraction outweighed, so to speak, that of the mountain.

The Fairy Hill of the Caledonians - Schiehallion, a photo by idg on Flickr.

Schiehallion, the mountain in question, was chosen for the Fuji-like regularity of its conical form. This, it was hoped, would simplify the task of estimating the mountain's density, on which the whole calculation depended. It may be that Schiehallion's form wasn't sufficiently Fuji-like; Maskelyne's result came in one-fifth too low, making the earth rather too light.

It fell to Henry Cavendish, another Committee of Attraction member, to perfect an indoors experiment. This would eliminate the geological guesswork, by measuring the gravitational pull of one lead sphere on another. The apparatus was so sensitive, indeed, that readings had to be taken through a telescope, from outside the sealed-off laboratory.

Published in 1798, Cavendish's paper puts the earth's density at 5.48 times that of water. It was Cavendish too who first wrote of "weighing the earth" - the earth's mass can, of course, be deduced from its density. In this way, he unwittingly coined the phrase that would later win over priest Kinoshita on the summit of Mt Fuji.

Twenty or so years later, another savant caught a slip in Cavendish's arithmetic - the actual result from his apparatus should have been 5.45. Nobody said that weighing the earth was going to be easy.

Mendenhall's experiment drew on work by later British and European scientists who used pendulums to take gravity readings both on the surface and at the bottom of deep mine-shafts. The idea was to find the difference between the two different gravity readings; the pendulum should swing slightly faster in the stronger gravitational field underground than it would on the surface.

Then, knowing the radius of the earth and knowing (or at least guessing) the density of the ground between the surface and the depths of the mine, you could educe the density of the whole earth. The method was pioneered by the British astronomer George Airy, not without tribulation. His first attempt, in 1826, failed after one of the pendulums met with an accident; a second try miscarried when the mine flooded.

The experiment was eventually completed in 1854, Airy's pendulum swinging just over two seconds per day faster below ground than above. After taking the advice of a mineralogist on the density of the overlying rock, Airy concluded that the earth weighed slightly more than six and half times heavier than the equivalent volume of water.

Mendenhall's innovation was to substitute a mountaintop for the mineshaft. Using self-devised pendulums for greater accuracy, he took readings first in Tokyo, then on Fuji, and then in Tokyo again. The mountaintop work was favoured by clear days and starry nights for the transit readings.

When the country below was covered in cloud, the scientists felt as if they were floating on an island in the sky. The pilgrims, apparently undisturbed, kept filing up to the shrine to make their obeisances and throw copper coins in at the door. One of the students collected up these offerings and took them to the priest.

When it came to estimating the volcano's density, Mendenhall went one better than Airy; he polled five different geologists and averaged their opinions. If Mt Fuji were 2.12 times denser than water - the mean estimate of the geologists - then the earth's density would be 5.51, Mendenhall calculated.

Announced the following year in a lecture "on pendulum experiments on the summit of Fujiyama", this result came within a hair of the currently accepted value.

SAILING INTO FUJI, a photo by Okinawa Soba on Flickr.

The following summer, the Mendenhalls sailed for home, catching a final glimpse of Mt Fuji from the ship's rail. Successful as the gravity experiments had been, the professor saw his students as his principal legacy. "Always fond of teaching," he wrote later, "I cannot but look back upon my three years with these well-mannered, good tempered, ambitious, and intellectually strong men as being ... the pleasantest and best of all my professional years."

The ambitious young men bore out their promise. One, Kikuchi Dairoku, went on to become a minister of education and, briefly, the first president of RIKEN, Japan's government-sponsored science research institute. Another, Tanakadate Aikitsu (standing, second from right in photo), made important discoveries in geophysics.

Quite probably it was Tanakadate (left), a north-country samurai, who handled the delicate negotiations with the priest of Mt Fuji's summit shrine. If so, he made a good impression. Just before the scientists left the mountaintop - a dense fog had rolled in, spoiling the view - Mendenhall sought out the priest who had made his experiment possible.

The professor wanted to express his gratitude with a generous sum of money but the priest refused all reward; it was an honour, he said, to have been able to help in the solution of such an interesting problem. Since then, wrote Mendenhall in his memoirs, "I have always taken much pleasure in naming this liberal-minded Japanese, named Kinoshita, who allowed me to transform a holy shrine of almost the oldest of religions into a laboratory of science and to substitute for his sacred images the most recent devices for the measurement of time."

Science and religion often came to blows in the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet, for a few days in August 1880 atop Mt Fuji, they achieved an amicable and productive cooperation.

References

Crew, Henry, Biographical memoir of Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, National Academy of Sciences, 1934

Dickey, John S, On the rocks: earth science for everyone, 1996.

Hughes, David W, The mean density of the earth, Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 1.2006 - and many thanks to Professor Hughes for kindly providing an explanation of how the Airy experiment worked.

Mendenhall, T C (Jr.) (1989) American Scientist in Early Meiji Japan: The Autobiographical Notes of Thomas C. Mendenhall

Mendenhall, T C, On pendulum experiments on the summit of Fujiyama for the purpose of ascertaining the force of gravity at that point, Abstract of lecture read October 20th, 1881

Manifesto of a solo mountaineer

2011-06-14T20:37:00.038+02:00

In March 1933, a chance encounter in the snowbound Northern Alps prompted Japan's most famous "Alleingänger" to set down his philosophy in writing - and also, possibly, to start questioning it.

"You know, mate, you're living on borrowed time." Sitting in the mouth of a rocky bivouac cave, the leader of the climbing group doesn't mince his words. He's talking to a lone mountaineer outside in the snow, who, a few minutes ago, showed up from nowhere. Solo mountaineering doesn’t get a lot of support in early Shōwa Japan, not even among fellow alpinists.

The loner gives a slight nod but doesn't otherwise respond to the other's prophecy. He is, of course, Katō Buntarō, whose winter expeditions have attracted quite a bit of publicity. On one occasion, when he went missing for a day or two in the mountains, he's created newspaper headlines. And he was bringing another solo exploit to a close when he happened across Nakamura and his crew, up here in Yokoō-dani, and dropped in for a chat.

Until now, Katō hadn't felt the need to justify himself, but the bluntness of Nakamura’s address has struck home. Back in Kobe, he's prompted to write a kind of rationale. The resulting essay, On solo mountaineering (単独行について), is a glimpse into Katō's hard-driving spirit. It is a manifesto for solo mountaineering.

An "Alleingänger", says Katō, using the German word, is one who favours the avalanche- and stonefall-raked routes shunned by others, one who scorns to follow in the dust of another's trail, and boldly tackles one impossible line after another.

There's all the difference in the world between these solo alpinists and folk who just go hiking by themselves. Yet both types start out the same way; they are urged on by a love of nature and they have shy, self-willed personalities. That is, they are too shy to ask experts to take them climbing and too self-willed to burden themselves with companions who might slow them down.

This is not quite the full story, though. Soloing is more than just climbing without a companion: "If mountaineering is about gaining knowledge and hence solace from nature, then surely the most knowledge and the highest degree of solace is gained from solo mountaineering." If you have a partner with you, you sometimes forget to look at the mountains. But, when you climb alone, "no stick or stone can fail to captivate your heart".

Or perhaps it’s a contest with nature. If mountaineering is "doing battle with nature and prevailing, then surely the battle and the solace thereafter are that much more intense when you are alone, counting on nobody but yourself."

Soloing is not for everybody, Katō warns. Only mountaineers who actively want to solo are qualified to do so; to solo in a state of self-doubt is a crime. "If you solo because you know it's right for you, then you can make progress without agonising about it. If you're weak, you'll be tormented; crushed. The strong will grow stronger and flourish. So, soloists, be strong!"

We can be fairly certain that few or none of these arguments were rehearsed outside the bivouac cave on that March day in 1933; Katō was the taciturn type. Propped against the low-slung branch of a mountain birch tree, he kept his thoughts to himself. And Nakamura wouldn't have listened anyway: "There's no way I'd go into the mountains solo," he insisted.

But is it possible that Katō took Nakamura's advice to heart? When, three years later, he set off into a January snowstorm to traverse the north ridge of Yari, he was with a climbing partner. That was the last time anybody saw Katō and Yoshida alive; some time later, the bodies were found in the valley below, still roped together.

In his last year, Katō had changed his stance on solo mountaineering. With a partner, you could climb harder routes. And beyond the winter Japan Alps shimmered the eternal snows of the Himalaya …

References

Right now, Katō Buntarō is enjoying a renewed lease of fame. That is due to the manga Kokou no Hito (孤高の人) about “Mori Buntaro”, a character loosely based on the hero of Nitta Jirō’s novel of the same title. The novel, in turn, elaborates on the life of the real Kato Buntaro. The manga's popularity brings quite a bit of traffic to this blog – specifically to the post Life and death on Japan’s Matterhorn. What Katō himself had to say about solo mountaineering, you’ll find in the full text of his essay On solo mountaineering (単独行について).

Images and ink (8)

2011-06-10T20:41:00.009+02:00

Image: Hodaka-dake in June by Ōshita Tōjiro (1870-1911)

Text: On Hodaka-dake, from Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964):

As Kōda Rohan wrote: "Beyond the broad declivity in front of us rose up a noble and lofty range, manly in aspect, inspiring both awe and joy. Caught unawares, I was moved almost to tears. A reckless urge to reach out for the mountain took hold of me. For a moment, it was hard to say whether I held the mountain in my gaze or the mountain held me in his."

Related posts: Hodaka in winter and North ridge boogie

Journey to the centre of Mt Fuji

2011-06-03T18:55:00.004+02:00

Discovering the crater in the company of a Heian-era literary scholar

The Warthogs came skimming up the slope, chasing their shadows over the snow. We leaned on our ice-axes, glad of an excuse to pause, and watched as the jets half-rolled into a ballistic arc over the mountaintop.

Craning upwards, the pilots must have seen Mt Fuji float, upside down, over their heads. It was clearly a good day for inspecting the crater. When we reached the summit shrine, all frosted up with rime-ice, I let slip my plan to Yamada-san. “Make it quick, then” he said. Our leader didn’t like solo excursions and November days are short.

A short distance under the radar station, I found what I was looking for – a ramp of snow that led smoothly down into the crater. No sign of ice or treacherous windslab. Cautiously at first, then with growing confidence in the Styrofoam snow that squeaked under my crampons, I made my descent.

The crater first floated into human ken during the ninth century. The earliest mention is in a Record of Mt Fuji (富士山記) by Miyako no Yoshika (834-879), an official at the Heian court and a scholar of classical literature. This is what he says:-

Mt Fuji takes its name from that of the district. Its deity is the Great God Asama. As for its height, it rises so far above the clouds that nobody knows how high it is.

The summit is flat and about a league across. It is sunken in the middle, in shape like a rice-steaming pot (koshiki). At the bottom of this pot, there is a mysterious lake and in the middle of the lake, a large rock. The rock is strangely shaped, just like a crouching tiger. Vapour rises incessantly from the crater. The lake’s colour is a pure and deep blue.

If one looks into the crater, it’s as if the water is seething. Looking at the mountain from afar, one often sees smoke and flames too. The summit pond is ringed with bamboo, which is a lush green and pliable. The snow never melts in spring or summer.

At the bottom of the ramp, I took stock. It was calm down here, sheltered from the gusts of snow blowing around the crater rim. There was no sign of a bamboo grove; just a sheet of rippled snow sloping down to a large black rock sitting at the crater’s lowest point.

If there was once a lake here, who came up to see it? According to Miyako no Yoshika, the mountain had only been climbed once, by En-no-gyōja. But this semi-legendary mystic and mage lived more than two centuries before Yoshika. In his own day, the chronicler says, “People can climb the mountain to its middle level, but it’s impossible to go further because of the ash which is always slipping downwards.”

Yet the Record of Mt Fuji has the ring of an eyewitness account. Crater lakes are found in many of Japan's volcanoes, though they tend to be short-lived. If anybody did go up Mt Fuji in Yoshika’s lifetime, he first had to brave the bear-haunted and trackless forests. Above the trees, tumbling rocks and slip-sliding ash would await him, the unsteady ground steaming with fumaroles and racked by earth-tremors.

The attempt would have been hazardous. Around the turn of the ninth century, something prodded the Great God Asama into a renewed frenzy. Bursting from the summit region in 800-802, the ash clouds of the Enryaku eruption turned day into night. Debris raked the seaward slopes, cutting the main highway to the eastern provinces.

A smaller eruption in 826 was merely a prelude to the great Jōgan event. In 864-865, red-hot lava flows torched the forests on Fuji’s northern flanks before rolling down into Se-no-umi, broiling its fish and cutting the lake in two.

Faced with this onslaught, the authorities offered the Great God Asama a more commodious shrine (in what is now Fujinomiya). This may have been early in the ninth century. Then, in 859, they promoted him to the senior grade of the third court rank. And when that didn’t placate him, they censured the governor of Kai for neglecting the proper rituals and demanded an apology on the god’s behalf.

In hindsight, the officials might have claimed a partial success. Although Mt Fuji rumbled on for another two hundred years, it never again erupted on the same scale. And, soon after the Jōgan eruption, it showed quite another side to its personality, as Miyako no Yoshika records:-

On November 5th, in the 17th year of Jōgan (876), the officials and people were celebrating a festival in accordance with an ancient rite when, as the day wore on towards noon, the sky cleared wonderfully. Looking up towards the mountain, they saw how two beautiful maidens robed in white danced above the summit, seemingly a span or more above it. Several local people witnessed this; a very old man passed on the tale.

Today, it was snow-devils that the wind was chasing around the crater rim. The winter sunlight set the ochres and terracotta of the rock walls aglow, as if freshly scorched by the volcano’s fires. It was hard to believe, as the savants insist, that Fuji’s central crater fell silent more than two thousand years ago. All the recent outbursts have issued from vents on the sides of the mountain, including those big eruptions in Yoshika’s day. Indeed, a flank eruption is chronicled in his Record of Mt Fuji:

At the eastern foot of Mt Fuji is a small mountain, which the local people call the new mountain. Originally this was flat ground, but in March of the 21st year of Enryaku (803) black smoke and steam came churning up and, after ten days, the new mountain was formed. Probably a god created it.

Up on the crater rim, Yamada-san would now be examining his altimeter watch. Feeling like an Apollo astronaut on the last moon mission – too much to see in too little time – I moved over to the black rock. Its anthracite facets were so dark, amid the snow-glare, that they seemed to suck the noonday light into themselves. What was this stuff…?

Pottering about in this crater a century ago, the mountaineering missionary Walter Weston had to ask himself a similar question:-

On the flat bottom we found great masses of newly fallen rock, and in a crevice of one of these a curious white substance embedded. Our friend described this as a great marvel – nothing less, indeed, than “petrified snow!” Possibly it was really some sort of gypsum, or even chloride of ammonia, which is sometimes found in the cooler part of volcanic fissures and fumaroles.

Perhaps Fuji does from time to time put out a crystal or two, together with its effusions of ash and lava. That would make sense of another enigmatic passage in Miyako no Yoshika’s account:

This must be a place where hermits and wizards disport themselves. As I’ve heard, during the Shōwa era (834-848), pearls and jewels rolled down from the mountain, each jewel with a little hole through it. These were probably beautiful gems that once adorned the reed screen of a hermit’s cell.

On the crater floor, I looked round for a souvenir – a beautiful gem would do nicely – but the ground was metres deep in snow. No matter, now it really was time to go.

References

A tentative translation from modern Japanese of the full text of Fujisan-ki. The chronicle was originally written in kanbun. It first appears in the Honchō-monzui, an anthology compiled in the mid-11th century.

Fujisan to Nihonjin, edited by Seikyūsha editors, Seikyūsha 2002

Mt. Fuji: The Wellspring of Our Faith and Arts, Shogakukan, 2009.

Playground of the Far East, by Walter Weston (1918)

Aerial picture of summit by courtesy of JTB; Miyako no Yoshika and Warthog from Wikipedia; detail of flying apsara courtesy of 日本の美をめぐる, No. 11.

Images and ink (7)

2011-06-01T18:46:00.007+02:00

Image: Morning over Tsurugi-san, woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi (1926)

Text: On Tsurugi-dake, from Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964):

Yes, as its name suggests, Tsurugi has all the sharpness and rigour of a sword. ... Defended by its iron citadels and snowy moats, the summit was long held to be inaccessible. According to legend, this was the mountain where Kōbō Daishi wore out a thousand pairs of straw sandals in vain attempts to scale it...

Related posts: The tiltyard of alpinism and Tales of the Genjiro

Meizan from outer space

2011-05-25T21:04:00.044+02:00

A new candidate for the “Mt Fuji of Mars” is proposed. And why stop there… ?

Sumimasen: a few posts ago, I did something ill-considered. It was reckless to designate Mons Olympus, the largest volcano on the Red Planet, as "the Mt Fuji of Mars" (火星富士). For even the briefest glance shows that the Martian mountain (below) looks nothing like Mt Fuji. It isn’t even the same kind of volcano.

And, if you do seek a Mars-Fuji, there are better choices. Take Zephyria Tholus, for instance, an “unusually symmetrical cone located in the Aeolis region of Mars … with a flat-floored summit crater”.

As you’d expect from this description, Zephyria is likely to be a stratovolcano. That is certainly the conclusion of Emily Lewis and James Head, two savants from Brown University who analysed the radar data from NASA’s Mars Orbiter.

Just like the real Mt Fuji, the Martian cone (above) has slightly concave upper slopes and its edifice is “dissected” by two huge erosion gullies. Even the height is Fuji-like: about 3,000 metres today and perhaps as tall as 3,900 metres in the past.

Like Fuji’s, the summit crater plunges about 200 metres deep. However – and this is where the comparison does get a bit stretched – Zephyria’s cauldron is about eight or nine times wider than the Japanese one. Also, its summit slopes are only about half as steep as Fuji’s.

All in all, Zephyria would look squatter than Fuji. That, say Lewis and Head, is only to be expected of Martian volcanoes – the low gravity and thin atmosphere allow eruptive debris to fly further, resulting in a more spread-out edifice. You see, Mars is a foreign planet; they do things differently there.

Yet proposing Zephyria as Mars-Fuji shouldn’t be too controversial. It only extends the Japanese custom of awarding the “Fuji” suffix to any mountain that looks remotely conical. Thus, there is hardly a Japanese prefecture without its own Fuji, from one end of the archipelago to the other: Rishiri-Fuji, Ezo-Fuji, Tsugaru-Fuji …

The point about all these honorary Mt Fujis is that they share the elegance of their original. In short they are “Meizan”. The word is Japanese, but it can apply to any mountain of note, anywhere. When they relabelled Mt Rainier (below) as “Tacoma-Fuji”, homesick émigrés from Japan implicitly recognised that.

So did Fukada Kyūya, the maven of Meizan. Encouraged by the success of his One Hundred Mountains in Japan (Nihon Hyakumeizan), he was busy compiling a Sekai no Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of the World) when he died in 1971.

But why stop with the world? As Lewis and Head show, other planets have Meizan too. Indeed, there should be more than enough for a One Hundred Mountains of the Solar System (太陽系の百名山). Now which would they be, I wonder.... ?

References

Emily M. Stewart and James W. Head, Ancient Martian volcanoes in the Aeolis Region: New evidence from MOLA data, Journal of Geophysical Research, 2001

Wikipedia: Mons Olympus

Pictures: Olympus Mons: detail of painting by Gordon Legg, based on a mosaic of black-and-white Viking Orbiter images; Mt Rainier and Mt Fuji (Wikipedia)

Mettre ski!

2011-05-20T19:21:00.023+02:00

How an army officer from Bratislava became the father of skiing in Japan

Niigata’s ski resorts were haunted last winter by a cartoon effigy in a yellow uniform and shako. This, the blurb said, was "Lerch-san". A century ago, his original brought downhill techniques to the region. Later, this earned him a mention in Nihon Hyakumeizan as “the father of skiing in Japan”.

Theodor Edler Von Lerch was born in Bratislava, then called Pressburg, on August 21, 1869. The son of a colonel, he joined the Austro-Hungarian army and took up his first commission in Prague, in 1891. A turn-of-the-century posting to Innsbruck was fateful: it was in this mountain-girt city that he signed up for skiing lessons from the pioneer, Mathias Zdarsky (below).

It was a good time for a young officer to learn ski-running. The explorer Fridtjof Nansen had popularised the art in his 1891 book, "The first crossing of Greenland". Picking up the hint, the Austro-Hungarian army set up its first ski-patrols only a few years later. By 1910, it was making its own skis too.

Soon it was the Austrians who were writing the book. In 1897 Georg Bilgeri, a lieutenant in the Tyrolian Rifles, published his “Anleitung für den Gebrauch von Schneeschuhen und Schneereifen”. Bilgeri advocated the use of two ski-poles instead of the single one wielded by Zdarsky, another step towards modern skiing.

In 1910, Major von Lerch (above) was invited to visit Japan as an exchange officer. This posting was not unusual for its time. Japan’s victories against China (1895) and Russia (1905) had burnished its military prestige. Not only did its army and navy have all the latest kit; they had actually used it in recent campaigns. Officers from Europe's armies flocked to Japan, with orders to observe and report back.

For their part, the Japanese looked to profit from the Austrians. A decade before, the infamous Death March on Mt Hakkoda had shown the need for better winter training. Through Japan’s military attaché in Vienna, officers of the Imperial Army had heard of von Lerch’s prowess. So it was that, a few months after arriving in Yokohama, von Lerch boarded a train to Takada in the snowy Joetsu region.

In his luggage were two pairs of alpine skis that he'd brought with him from Europe. These were not the first skis in Japan. Colonel Horiuchi Bunjiro, who welcomed von Lerch to Takada, already had a pair – but his were of the Nansen-vintage Nordic (free-heel) type. Fine for crossing open country, not so good for carving down steep slopes.

Von Lerch’s skis had bindings that held the heel firmly, for downhill skiing. The army's arsenal in Tokyo was ordered to retro-engineer them and, within two weeks, the first ten pairs of Japanese-made alpine skis arrived in Takada.

Now the training could begin. On the first day, Horiuchi asked how steep a slope could be tackled on the new gear. Von Lerch demonstrated and, after arriving fluently at the bottom of the hill, elicited a resounding “Banzai” from the onlookers. Thus, on a January day in 1911, was inaugurated the art of alpine skiing in Japan.

Reserved for the regiment's officers, the first ski-training course took place three or four times a week. Von Lerch instructed in French, with Staff Captain Yamaguchi interpreting him into Japanese. The frequent order “Mettre ski!” soon earned the Austrian the nickname of “Monseigneur mettre-ski”. Progress was rapid: the first ski-tour, on nearby Nambuyama (1,700 metres), took place on February 12, 1911.

Japan was ready for skiing. Exactly a week after the Nambuyama tour, the country’s first ski club for civilians was founded, with von Lerch and Field Marshal Nogi Maresuke as honorary members. The opening ceremony was attended by Japanese princes as well as the minister of education. By the following year, the club had attracted 6,000 members.

Von Lerch was a good diplomat: he was a frequent guest of the local divisional commander, Lieutenant-General Nagaoka Gaishi. In April 1911, he also found time to inspect Mt Fuji. The moving spirit behind this trip was Egon von Kratzer, an Austrian businessman living in Yokohama. Von Kratzer had been skiing in Japan since 1909, and had already made two ski attempts on Mt Fuji. This time, the two Austrians made it as far as the mountain’s eighth station, at about 3,600 metres, where the increasingly icy conditions stopped them.

SUNSET CLOUDS AT THE BASE OF FUJI -- A Beat-Up "Copy Print" Photo Saved from an Earthquake, a photo by Okinawa Soba on Flickr.

Skiing down to the base, the pair were greeted by a reporter from the Asahi newspaper. Von Lerch also sent a report to Marshal Nogi, who took up his ink-brush and replied in a fearsomely classical idiom:

崚曾富嶽聳千秋
赫灼朝暉照八洲
休説區區風物美
地靈人傑是神州

As Fuji, towering for a thousand ages,
Shines over the country aglow in the rising sun
So far above the praise of trivial things rises
This mighty nation, the spirit-filled Land of the Gods

After the snow melted, von Lerch joined a route march from the Japan Sea to the Pacific. In November, he observed the Imperial manoeuvres in Kyushu, taking in Nagasaki, Miyajima, Hiroshima, and Osaka on the way back to Tokyo.

In February 1912, Lieutenant-Colonel von Lerch – another promotion had come through – reported to the garrison town of Asahikawa. Even by central Hokkaido standards, it was a cold winter. Ski-training took place in temperatures of minus 12–15°C. At night, it could fall to minus 30°C.

The high point of this posting was a ski-ascent of Yōtei-zan (or Shiribeshi-yama), a Fuji-like stratovolcano of 1,893 metres to the south of Sapporo. This time, nine colleagues from the 7th Division came with von Lerch, as well as a journalist from the Otaru newspaper. The party climbed to the fifth station on skis, then continued on foot to the crater rim.

By now, they were climbing in cloud and driving snow, causing them to miss the highest point. It was extremely cold; some of the party suffered frostbite, but all got down safely. Morally speaking, if not technically, the group achieved the mountain's first ski ascent.

By September, von Lerch was back in Tokyo. On the 13th, he witnessed the funeral of Emperor Meiji, which was closely followed by those of General Nogi and his wife. At the end of the month, he left Japan for ever, travelling back to Europe by way of Korea, Manchuria and India.

The Belle Époque was over. Now a full colonel, von Lerch started the war as chief of the 17th Army Corps general staff, first in Galicia and then at Isonzo on the southern front. In 1917, he took command of a mountain brigade in Albania. He gained a reputation as a good leader, who was careful of his soldiers’ lives. His last posting brought him to Flanders just a month or so before the Armistice.

Major-General von Lerch was pensioned off in 1919 and got married in 1922, in time to become the father of two daughters. During his retirement, he gave lectures and wrote up his travels, especially the Japan years. Old friends dropped by: Yamaguchi, who'd once interpreted his ski commands, visited him in Vienna in 1922. He also kept in touch with Nagaoka Gaishi, who'd moved into politics, until the latter's death in 1933. Von Lerch died in Vienna on Christmas Eve in 1945.

In Japan, the father of skiing is remembered by a museum at Takada, a permanent exhibition in the Asahikawa garrison museum, and two bronze statues, one in Takada and another at Asahikawa airport. And once in a while, as they snap into their Silvretta or their Diamir bindings, ski mountaineers or elite winter warfare troops might give him a thought too. Mettre ski!

References

Most of this post has been adapted and summarised from the magisterial account of von Lerch’s career on the official Austrian army website: Generalmajor Theodor Edler von Lerch: Wie der Alpine Schilauf nach Japan kam, by Brigadier Dr. Harald Pöcher.

Additional details of the Mt Fuji and Yōtei-zan ski tours, and the historical photos, are from 目で見る日本登山史, 山と溪谷社 (編集) (Yama-to-Keikoku-sha: Illustrated History of Japanese Mountaineering)

Theodor von Lerch’s account of his life in Japan has been published in Japanese (but is out of print there), but never in his native German or English. This is too bad. Perhaps somebody should do something about this.

Centennial article about von Lerch by Bill Ross, editor of Outdoor Japan

Envoy

“The landmark peak [Shiribeshi-yama] … was not attempted again in winter until 1912 (Meiji 45) when Theodor von Lerch, the father of skiing in Japan, set off for the peak on skis. However, he did not reach the top. After several more attempts, the summit was finally attained five years later by a party that changed its skis for crampons at the sixth station.”

(Nihon Hyakumeizan, Chapter 9, Shiribeshi-yama)

Hanameizan in Tohoku

2011-05-16T18:42:00.011+02:00

Fellow blogger Hanameizan is famous for taking his dog up all One Hundred Mountains a few years ago.

Recently, he has spent several weekends helping to clean up flood-damaged homes in Ishinomaki, one of the cities hardest hit by the tidal wave in March.

The foreign press continues to report diligently on Japan, but it is Hanameizan's report that brings home the realities of life in the disaster zone. I hope that many people will read this article.

Reference
Tsunami: a report by Hanameizan

Another mountain (3)

2011-05-14T10:52:00.026+02:00

Fuji in the cold season continued: the first mid-winter ascent was made by a young samurai-meteorologist who wanted to build a weather observatory on the summit

“I had already essayed Mt Fuji in summer but, to achieve my stated aims, I now felt it necessary to inspect the condition of the summit by making a mid-winter ascent. Having so determined, I left Tokyo on foot on January 2, Meiji 28 (1895).” Thus begins Nonaka Itaru’s account of his mid-winter climbs, the mountain’s first ever, which he later described in his Guide to Mt Fuji (富士案内).

On January 3, the day after leaving Tokyo, he reaches Tarobo, at 1,400 metres on Fuji’s Gotenba route. He decides to stay in the hut used by summer pilgrims, because he won’t be able to find firewood further up. The night is cold; he leaves the hut at 3.30am and soon finds that this is a different mountain – the terrain looks unfamiliar under snow and he keeps losing the trail.

At 4am, he’s at the second station, where he takes out his thermometer: the mercury’s already five degrees below the zero mark. An hour later, he allows himself his first rest and makes two unwelcome discoveries: the rice-cakes in his pocket are frozen, so he has to eat bread.

Much more serious is the state of the snow – it’s frozen as hard as glass, and ridged up into sharp edges like knives – sharp enough to cut his lip when he breaks off a bit to taste. Now is the time to put on his nailed boots or perhaps attach a nailed leather sole to his winter boots – a primitive substitute for crampons.

Then he rams down the fireman’s hook that he’s pressed into service as an ice-axe – it barely marks the iron-hard glaze – and carefully planting one foot at a time, makes his way up the steepening slope. “One mis-step here,” he notes, “and you wouldn’t stop until the snow runs out.”

At 6am, he’s at the third station and it’s minus 7.5°C. He’s warm, almost too warm, in his six layers of clothing, and he tries to take some off. That proves to be a mistake. Hastily, he puts his outer layers back on. Now the rays of the rising sun are starting to glint dazzlingly off the snow and he dons a pair of blue-tinted spectacles.

The ice is so hard now that it’s difficult to get the iron-tipped fire hook to bite – or to pull it free when it does. Then, disaster strikes: a few steps below the fifth station, the shaft of his makeshift axe breaks. He tries replacing the head of the fire-hook with a knife, but it won’t support his weight.

Worse still, some of the nails in his bootsoles are bending under the strain. In the lee of a hut, he gazes up at the summit – still so far above – and decides he must go down. It’s 10 minutes past 10.

Most accidents happen on descent, they say. Half way between the fourth and third stations, he slips and tumbles several hundred feet down the merciless ice before, by a miracle, fetching up against the snow-covered roof of a hut. By another miracle, he’s more or less unhurt.

Picking himself up, he continues the long march down to Gotemba. He's no longer thinking about the ice in cool, detached scientific terms: now it is quite simply “the enemy”. As he walks, he muses on the weapons he’ll bring to bear on it next time round. The blood of a Chikuzen samurai is up; he’ll be back.

Return match
On the evening of February 15, 1895, he returns to the broken-down hut at Tarobo. Fuji’s upper slopes were hidden in cloud as he walked in from Gotemba and now the wind picks up to a gale, shaking the hut. Rain pours through the leaky roof and quenches the fire. To keep warm, Nonaka improvises a stove from an empty oil-can. Despite these distractions, he manages to record the temperature every hour. The hut is left as soon as the rain stops, at 6:30am the next morning.

The rain and wind – perhaps this is the “haru ichiban” – have melted the snow for quite a distance above Tarobo. It’s much warmer than last time. This is a mixed blessing: when he reaches the snowline, he plunges through an icy crust into deep slush at every step. He’s forced to rest after every twenty paces. The broken crust is so sharp-edged that he’s afraid of cutting his legs on it. At 8am, progress slows to a rest every ten paces.

He’s sorely tempted to give up. But there’s a lot riding on this expedition: to pursue his vocation as a meteorologist, he’s dropped out of preparatory studies for a medical career, against his father’s wishes. He’s already 27; he’s married, he has a two year-old daughter, he has to make a name for himself in his chosen field, and soon.

It’s an exciting time in this new science: a Frenchman has just invented the "isobar" and meteorologists have recently started drawing up so-called synoptic charts of air pressure measured at ground stations. But to fully understand - and predict - the weather, you would also need to plot the pressure of the air at high altitudes. That’s why observatories have recently been built on top of Mt Blanc, Ben Nevis (below) and other mountains abroad. But no observatory as high as Mt Fuji has been manned all the year round.

Nonaka hopes to borrow the instruments for his weather station from Japan’s Central Meteorological Observatory. He’s won the support of Wada Yuji, head of the Observatory’s weather forecasting division. Wada-sensei has recently returned from the Paris Observatory, a centre of meteorological expertise.

The French government started to take weather forecasting seriously after a freak storm tore through its ships during the Crimean war. Wada will be aware how useful accurate forecasts would be for Japan’s own navy - which, at this very moment, is moving in for a final reckoning with the Chinese fleet at Weihaiwei.

Seen this way, Nonaka’s mission is one of national significance. And to fulfil it, he first has to prove that Fuji can be climbed and survived in winter. Right now, however, it’s a less exalted thought that urges him on. That is, if he turns back, he’ll have to wade through that vile ice-crust again. So he keeps going up.

Somewhere above the second station, he passes a torrent of meltwater, a rare sight on Fuji. The temperature is still a few degrees above zero. But the snow is starting to firm up; hope is restored. He grants himself a few minutes rest and gazes down at the clouds covering the Hakone mountains.

Now is the time to tighten the laces on his leather climbing boots – the soles of which he’s studded, this time, with ten nails apiece. Towards 9am, he’s climbing into a blue sky and a freshening wind; little snow-devils are whirling down the slope towards him. Ice crystals sparkle like miniature prisms from the snow, a beautiful sight. By the seventh station, the temperature has fallen to minus 10.5°C and he’s attacking the hard ice with his “tsuruhashi”, a workman’s long-handled pick-axe. This time he will prevail.

One last steep gully through the summit crags, and he’s arrived. It’s just before 1pm and the temperature is 18.2°C below zero. Hastily, he takes shelter in the lee of a rock in order to eat his bread and meat. After lunch, he goes up to the rim and inspects the crater walls with his telescope.

It’s too bad that he has no camera with him because his eyes are the first to see the crater of Mt Fuji in mid-winter. Huge icicles depend from the russet and ochre walls of lava opposite him.

The scenery is as novel as, say, the high arctic ice floes that Dr Fridtjof Nansen is, right at this moment, inspecting from the deck of the Fram under the pale green light of the aurora. You might say that 1895 is a vintage year for extreme scientific exploration. Unlike Nansen, though, Nonaka is on his own. He’s soloing Mt Fuji because the budget doesn’t include money for a “goriki” or guide. He’ll pay for the construction of the summit hut (below) out of his own pocket.

The lack of a camera doesn’t stop Nonaka making careful observations. The snow at the rim is no more than two feet deep, he estimates. That’s important for his plans to build a hut. The wind-blasted rocks of Ken-ga-mine, the highest crag, are bare of snow. So is a patch of ground near the place that the pilgrims used to call Sai-no-kawara, the Buddhist limbo for the souls of children. The ash here is warmed by Fuji’s last flush of volcanic heat; in summer, you could heat up your flask of sake or even a bathful of water here.

He’d like to walk round the crater but the wind is strengthening from the southwest and the weather is turning. At 1.15pm, he starts down, carefully retracing the steps he cut on the way up. Somewhere above the second station, he descends into cloud. Following the line of the meltwater gully, he picks his way down to Tarobo.

Then he picks up the pace, all but running down the long road to Gotemba. If he can catch the 5.20pm train, he can get back to Tokyo sooner; Chiyoko and his baby daughter Sonoko are waiting for him. He makes the station with six minutes to spare.

Ninety-odd years after Nonaka's successful winter climb, I stopped by a half-buried hut to review the weather. Underfoot, the glazed snow had given way to hard blue ice, as translucent as the frozen waterfalls on Ben Nevis. No chance of an ice-axe arrest if you fell on this. One mis-step, and you wouldn’t stop until the snow runs out.

The wind was as fierce as ever, but I couldn’t see any more snow-devils coming. A shadow swept over the snow; a cloud had blotted out the sun. I hadn’t climbed into it; the cloud had just materialised out of the blue sky. Shreds of vapour flitted past, magically touching my jacket and hair with frost.

Now the fleeting cloud was leaving rime-ice on my glasses; when I took them off to scrape them clear, the icy fog started to freeze my eyelids shut. One way or another, I would be going down – in control or out of it. I opted for the former style.

Late in the afternoon, I was retracing my steps over the banked-out mule track when the north wind whipped the fog away. High above, the summit streamed its banner cloud far out into the sky.

Another mountain (2)

2011-05-06T19:20:00.019+02:00

Continued: climbing Mt Fuji in mid-winter has a long and eventful history. Few succeed on the first attempt...

The snow-devils started somewhere above the seventh station. Every few minutes, I’d see one lift from the windward crest and come spinning down the slope. I’d have a moment to plant the stubby axe in the snow and brace my crampons before the wild hassle of wind and spindrift hit. Then I’d make as much height as I could before the next one rose, like a malevolent djinn, from its lair on the skyline.

The relevant chapter in The Handbook for Climbing Mt Fuji, is entitled “The Prevention against Gust and Slip”. It contains a diagram that shows how the prevailing winds break on the leading edge of Fuji’s western face before accelerating to hurricane force – as experienced by Orde-Lees – on the rounded slopes of the Fujinomiya flank.

After that, mayhem breaks loose. Giving up on laminar flow, the gale breaks into eddies, back-draughts, and rotors that assail Fuji's eastern side from all directions. On one occasion, the wild turbulence shredded an airliner that ventured too close. It was in this zone of aerodynamic anarchy, high on the Yoshida route, that I now found myself.

A spring storm, probably the warm “Haru ichiban”, hit Fuji on the night before the antarctic veteran Orde-Lees and H W Frost made their second attempt, back in 1921. But it blew out at dawn, leaving the intrepid duo to make a lengthy but uneventful climb. They topped out at 7pm on February 12th. A journalist wrote up the expedition as "The dream of ages”, implying that Orde-Lees and Frost were the first to make this winter ascent.

In fact, people had been tackling Fuji in winter for decades, although not always with happy results. The Austrian minister in Tokyo, Count Wydenbruck had a go in February 1897, for which he specially imported "a wonderful pair of top-boots". After these got wet in the snow, low on the mountain, the guides dried them out too close to the fire, drastically shrinking them. Thus ended in fiasco what was probably the first winter attempt on Fuji by a foreigner.

Intriguingly, Frederick Cook is also said to have made an out-of-season attempt on Fuji. This was in November 1915. Today, the explorer is famous mainly for his falsified claims to have reached the summit of Mt McKinley and the North Pole. Whatever his success on Mt Fuji, Cook was too late to bag the first gaijin ascent of Fuji in winter.

This honour probably falls to Francis Lowe and a Mr. G. Guelta, member of the Italian Alpine Club. The pair summited from the Gotemba side on February 1, 1901, not without sacrifice. One member of the party – it isn’t specified which one – was so badly frostbitten in both feet that he was lucky to avoid amputations.

Better documented is the multinational expedition of the so-called “Fuji Winter Ascent Corps” in 1905. Together with goriki (porters) and three policemen, the party set out with forty-three persons – including two foreigners, a Spaniard and a “Miss Sturzenegger” from Switzerland – four rear-guards, five messenger pigeons and a dog.

Starting at Takigahara on the Gotenba route on January 6 at 2am, the climbing members reached the third station at 9am. At the fifth station, Miss Sturzenegger, who was 58 at the time, succumbed to mountain sickness and had to stay behind. The pigeons too were let go here. They all flew safely back to Tokyo on the same day.

Then a blizzard started. Two climbers only reached the seventh station before giving up. Chastened by the experience, 11 of the younger members – all Japanese – formed a “death-determined party” and went back to the mountain three days later. Leaving Tarobo at midnight, they reached the summit just over 12 hours later. "The hilarious victors united in vigorous banzais," it is reported, "and a bomb with a detailed statement was planted in memory of our achievement."

It is significant that the “Fuji Winter Ascent Corps” was seen off from Tokyo by Nonaka Chiyoko, the president of the Konohana-kai, a society of women Fuji climbers, and welcomed to Gotemba by her husband, Itaru. Mounted on a white horse, Mr Nonaka led the group to their base camp, at Takigahara. For these patrons were, of course, the very Nonakas (above image) who had spent a chilly few months on the summit of Mt Fuji a decade previously.

Nonaka Itaru, a meteorologist, built a small weather station atop Mt Fuji in the summer of 1895. Mountain weather stations were then in vogue: an international meteorological conference in Rome in 1879 had called for their construction worldwide.

One was inaugurated on the Säntis, a Swiss mountain, in 1882 and another on the summit ice-cap of Mt Blanc (see image below) in 1893. But nobody had yet collected round-the-year data from an altitude as great as Mt Fuji’s. Thus Nonaka’s venture was intended to put Japan in the forefront of atmospheric research.

How Nonaka took up residence in the cramped hut in September 1895, how Chiyoko came up to visit him in October and refused to leave, how the couple struggled to keep up their weather observations – every two hours, night and day – in the face of sickness and ferocious blizzards, and how, finally, they were rescued in the nick of time at the end of December, after 82 days on the summit – this story is well known; Nitta Jiro even turned it into a novel.

Before the hut could be built, however, Nonaka had to find out if it would be possible to survive on the summit in winter. There were no statistics to guide him, nobody to ask, because the mountain had never been climbed in mid-winter. Nor could he look to any winter climbing expertise or gear in Japan – the Japan Alpine Club would not be founded for another decade. Nevertheless, Nonaka set out to climb the mountain – solo – in January 1895. We take up this story in the next post …

Another mountain (1)

2011-05-03T19:00:00.016+02:00

Getting to know Japan's top volcano in mid-winter season.

The truth should have hit as soon as the friendly truck driver dropped me at the end of the Subaru Line road. From the fifth station in late January, Mt Fuji was an alabaster ramp driving into a steel-blue sky – nothing hinted at the elegant cone seen from afar. Still I didn't get it, though.

The ice-shards should have been a warning too, as my crampon points sent them tinkling away down the slope. I wasn't even on the climbing path yet, just the mule-track that leads to it. There were no mules or tourists now, of course; the road was banked out with hard-glazed snow.

I’d been here a few months before. Foreign students don’t have cash to spare, so I’d passed on the ¥2,000 bus-ride up to the fifth station. Instead, I’d walked up from Fuji-Yoshida, through solemn woods of cryptomeria. After the fifth station, the trees and the clouds fell away below. A few more hours, on a trail zig-zagging upwards over burnt-red cinders, saw me to the crater rim.

Today, the trail had vanished. And the huts I’d seen last autumn were buried to their eaves. Not snowed but iced in, as if engulfed by miniature glaciers. A wind started to buffet as I climbed away from the shelter of the parking lot’s avalanche barriers. Now the message was sinking in.

This was not the summer Fuji with its vending machines dispensing exorbitantly expensive cans of Coca-Cola on the summit, nor yet the autumn Fuji, where I’d bivvied comfortably at 3,000 metres on a dry wooden bench outside a shuttered hut. This was another mountain.

Those who adventure themselves here would do well to consult the Handbook for Climbing Mt. Fuji (富士登山ハンドブック). “Every winter,” it warns, “a number of mountaineers lose their balance in sudden gusts of wind and slide away on the hard snow to their deaths.”

In the days when the summit radar station was operating, four men were lost in such accidents: Nagata Ridge on the Gotemba route is named for one of them. Sometimes the ice was so slick, their guides used to say, that you could see your face in it.

Then there’s the cold. According to the Handbook, daily minimum temperatures never rise above minus 20°C until March. As for the wind, it has been known to exceed 300 kilometres an hour. It’s true that this figure was reached only momentarily, during a September typhoon, but no tropical storm can match the winter gales for sheer relentlessness. In January and February, they can average 60 kph for days at a time.

Many have kowtowed to that wind. For Lieutenant-Commander Thomas Orde-Lees, the moment of truth came fifty-eight years, almost to the day, before my attempt. Not a man to be put off by mere blizzards, Orde-Lees had accompanied Shackleton on his disastrous Trans-Antarctic Expedition.

After surviving the forced sojourn on Elephant Island, he joined the Balloon Corps on the Western Front. By the war's end, he was an officer in the Royal Flying Corps, where he became an enthusiastic advocate for parachutes. This experience brought him to Japan, as an advisor to the nascent Imperial air arm at Kasumi-ga-ura.

It was there that he conceived a mid-winter attempt on Fuji. A trial run, solo, in mid-December 1921, was “dead easy”; hardly any snow lay on the mountain. That emboldened him. With a companion, Orde-Lees set out from Tarobo, the first station on the Gotemba Route, at 7am on January 28, 1922. Lacking skis and snowshoes – they wore knee-high "gum-boots" – the climbers floundered through deep snowdrifts for hours.

A violent hurricane blew up when they came level with the top of the Hoeizan crater, “forcing them to cling on to the icy surface roped together, afraid to move more than a few yards in a whole hour for fear of being whisked off the mountainside”. They backed off, returning to Gotemba in mid-afternoon, after 20 hours continuously moving.

Nursing three frost-bitten fingers and, no doubt, a modicum of chagrin, Orde-Lees wrote that the day had been “rich in experiences”. Then he set out to learn from them. The kit for the next attempt would include snow shoes, crampons, a sledge cobbled together from a crashed aeroplane, and “excellent ice-axes purchased from Mimatsu at ¥8 apiece”.

I was quite proud of my own ice-axe. It was a stubby little ice-climbing number that I'd bought after my solitary week of winter mountain experience – an ice course the previous spring on Scotland’s Ben Nevis (altitude, 1,344 metres). And so, when I saw a lone mountaineer, muffled up in a face-mask and snow-goggles, carefully descending the slope towards me, this was the implement that I brandished in greeting.

Our courtesies were brief; it was too cold to waste words. The lone mountaineer seemed surprised to find a lone foreigner half-way up Mt Fuji on the last day of January. He glanced at my kit, reading it as one would a CV. The sturdy Grivel 2F crampons, solidly clamped to a pair of plastic Koflach double-boots, appeared to pass muster. But the axe did not: "Too short," was the verdict. "You’d better turn round now," he added, before going on his way.

The lone mountaineer was right, of course. The axe was far too abbreviated to be much use as a prop or brake. Also, it was already getting too late to make a serious summit attempt. And yet ... that white ramp still beckoned; now elegant tendrils of spindrift were unfurling into that impossibly ultraviolet sky. What was it like up there? There was only one way to find out; surely it wouldn’t hurt to go a bit further …

(To be continued)

The Hyakumeizan man

2011-04-21T21:02:00.018+02:00

How a writer’s personal choice of peaks became the One Hundred Mountains of Japan

If you open a hiking map to any of Japan's mountain ranges, you'll see a select few peaks marked as "Nihon Hyakumeizan" - members of the One Hundred Mountains of Japan. Yet this list has no official standing. Instead it represents the personal choice of a writer who, half a century ago, published a series of short magazine articles about his favourite peaks. Later, the articles were gathered into a book.

In the afterword to his book, the Hyakumeizan author Fukada Kyūya writes that mountains form the very bedrock of the Japanese soul: "A mountain watches over the home village of most Japanese people. Tall or short, near or far, some mountain watches over our native village like a tutelary deity."

Fukada's own native mountain was Hakusan, the snowy peak that dominates the Kaga plain on Honshū's Japan Sea coast. He was born in its shadow, at Daishōji on March 11, 1903, the son of a local printer. Hakusan was also the first high mountain that he climbed. He scaled the 2,702-metre peak in his third year at Fukui Middle School, only to be caught in a thunderstorm so violent that he had to throw away the metal clip from the top of his straw rainhat.

After dropping out of Tokyo University, Fukada made a name for himself as an author of short stories. Around the same time, he met the woman who would become his first wife, the writer Kitabatake Miyo. Like Kitabatake, the heroine of the novel that made his name was from Tohoku.

Fukada kept climbing mountains too; the Japan Alpine Club elected him a member in his early thirties. Unfortunately, Kitabatake could never share in these activities; by now, she was virtually immobilised by tuberculosis of the spine. In those days, Fukada and Kitabatake were living in Kamakura; they were often seen out for a walk together, Fukada carrying his wife on his back.

When the war came, the army posted Fukada to China. The draft helped to defer a personal crisis. Shortly before his military service, he had started an affair with a girlfriend from his college days. Kitabatake had soon found out. And now the girlfriend was pregnant.

After being repatriated to Japan, Fukada returned to Daishōji. Times were hard; he had no job, there was a young family to support and, to cap it all, magazine articles alleged that his pre-war novels were more Kitabatake's work than his own. After the scandal broke, Fukada turned his back on fiction. From now on, he wrote mainly about mountains. And he was prolific; he had to be – money was always short in the Fukada household.

The articles that became the definitive Nihon Hyakumeizan were first published in Yama to Kogen, a mountaineering journal, between 1959 and 1963. After readers voted them the best in the magazine, the essays came out in book form in 1964 and immediately won a prestigious literary award.

Fukada was not the first to draw up a list of notable mountains. Another magazine, Gakujin, had previously polled its readers for a list of one hundred popular Japanese peaks. But Fukada's approach was different; he consulted his own taste in selecting mountains with the most character, history and "extraordinary distinctiveness". He would only consider a mountain for his list if he had climbed it. Height was a secondary consideration; ideally, a "Meizan" should be more than 1,500 metres high, but two in the list - Tsukuba and Kaimon-dake - fall below that level.

"Ultimately, the Hyakumeizan are a personal choice and I make no claims for them beyond that," wrote Fukada in the afterword to his best-selling book. And, he added, "if the book is reprinted, I may well change a mountain or two". For good or ill, it is too late for that now. Fukada died of a brain haemorrhage on a mountain hike in 1971. Meanwhile, his list of mountains has been enshrined in hiking maps, a raft of spin-off books, and even a TV mini-series.

Why has Fukada's book become a classic? One answer can be found in his essay on Ontake, a sacred stratovolcano. "The mountain's inexhaustible treasury of riches is like some endless storybook with its pages uncut. As one follows the rambling plot along, one is always looking forward to reading more. Every page yields things never found in other books. Ontake is that kind of mountain."

Nihon Hyakumeizan is that kind of book.

References

This sketch of Fukada Kyūya's life is posted here with the kind permission of Kateigaho International magazine, which published a slightly shorter version in its Spring/Summer 2011 edition. The source is (mainly) Hyakumeizan no Hito by Tazawa Takuya (TBS Britannica, 2003), the only full-length biography of Fukada Kyūya.

Photos: by courtesy of illustrated Nihon Hyakumeizan, Asahi Journal Series, issue no 1, January 2008.

Related post: a visit to the Fukada Kyūya museum

Excellent summary of Fukada's life and works in Japanese 日本百名山について by 　松浦　剛

A pilgrimage to Fusiyama

2011-04-15T21:07:00.033+02:00

Accompanying Queen Victoria’s envoy to Japan on the first-ever ascent of Mt Fuji by foreigners

Tozenji, Yeddo, 1860: A year after he arrived, he’s finally managed an audience with the “Tycoon” – that was in August – but the feudal authorities are still trying to stop him climbing Fusiyama. The excuses are legion: the country is unsettled, or fissures might swallow up the incautious traveller. Also, they hint, the trip is beneath his dignity – no “Daimio” would go there, perhaps because “too many of the greasy mob must unavoidably come in close contact”. It seems that only the lower classes climb Fusiyama.

Yet he’s determined to make this “pilgrimage”, as he calls it. Not just because he needs a break – though, God knows, he's earned one, after a year poised uneasily between the recalcitrant authorities and his greedy or violent compatriots, the sort who give British merchants a bad name. No, the official aim is to assert his right, as the Queen's envoy to Japan, to travel freely under the treaty terms.

At last, he gets his way, although the regular climbing season is over. On September 4th, Rutherford Alcock starts out from Kanagawa with seven British companions, not counting his terrier Toby. But the party is somewhat larger; the authorities have sent along three or four "yaconins" (officials) and an "ometsky", or spy. These all have bearers and attendants, so that a cortège of at least a hundred persons and more than thirty horses straggles out behind him. The horses are as recalcitrant as the authorities.

At first, he keeps a weather eye open for “lonins”. These undisciplined swordsmen – "bravoes" he calls them – are always aggressive and often drunk. This year, they've made several attacks on foreigners. In January, unknown assailants cut down his own interpreter in front of the legation. The hapless man was brought indoors on a shutter, bleeding to death in Alcock’s sight. There is good reason to be wary. But today no sign of trouble presents itself. The pleasant scenery induces a holiday mood.

On the second day, they come to the Saki river near “Foodisawa”. The dignitaries are carried over on short platforms borne by six men. The job is “tolerably lucrative” – the crossing costs the party eleven itziboos, about 15 English shillings. It has its drawbacks, though. If an accident should happen, the bearers might as well drown with their passengers. Alcock approves the principle: if applied to the British railways, it would surely improve their safety.

At Odawara, the whole town turns out to watch them pass - men, women, and children, clothed and nude, dogs, poultry, and cats. How, he wonders, will the party get through the crowd? The guides, however, are "perfectly unembarrassed" - one of them waves a fan and commands "Shitanirio" and, as if by magic, all the onlookers open a way and drop to their knees.

The mountains of “Hakoni” now rise in front of them. The road, a fine avenue of gravel, runs through fertile plains and valleys, where millet, buckwheat, and rice promise a rich harvest. The bucolic scenery prompts Alcock to wonder at this land “so happy in the contented character and simple habits of its people – yet so strangely governed by unwritten laws". How can they be so happy?

The horses stumble on the boulder-strewn road that climbs towards the pass of Hakoni. But this is a paradise for young John Veitch, the visiting horticulturalist – he is busy scribbling in his notebook how the wild hydrangea covers the roadside banks with its lilac, blue and white flower clusters. Above, forests of Pinus densiflora mingle with graceful stands of bamboo and cryptomeria.

Alcock likes to have men of science around him. He was a doctor before he was a diplomat. In a sense, it was rheumatic fever that brought him to Japan. After catching the disease on a military expedition to Portugal, he lost the use of his thumbs and had to give up his career as a surgeon. He came to China as a consul in 1844, and was appointed to Japan in 1859.

At “Yomotz”, they pass through a little hamlet clustered round some hot saline springs. One of the younger Englishmen takes a dip and emerges red as a lobster. Alcock wonders if the custom of communal bathing is conducive to political stability, by giving men and women a forum to vent their opinions in a harmless and congenial setting …

His musings are interrupted by the sudden onset of an evening shower, which forces the party to take refuge in a good “honjen”. Alcock is charmed by these “houses of entertainment”, or inns where the Tycoon’s officers put up for the night.

The host’s effusive welcome, the miniature gardens in the courtyards, the spacious kitchen, the bathrooms, “models of cleanliness, such as rarely met with out of England”, all these things delight him. On second thoughts, the bathrooms are actually cleaner than English ones – in all these respects, “the Japanese are in a condition to give lessons to Europe”.

It is at Yomotz that Lieutenant Robinson of the Indian Navy, another member of Alcock’s entourage, proceeds to boil his thermometer, “to the infinite astonishment of some native attendants”. By measuring the boiling point, he is able to calculate the height of the lake at 6,250 feet.

Next day, under a blue sky, the entourage starts out towards Missima and Yosiwara. That evening, a deputation of three shaven monks arrives at their lodgings with an invitation from the “Superior of Omio” to stay at their temple. They take up the invitation, after waiting out a typhoon at Yosiwara, and are welcomed warmly at Omio. The hospitable and considerate Superior has even improvised seats for his European guests.

Wandering around the temple gardens, young Veitch spots a variegated specimen of Thujopsis dolabrata, a silvery pine tree described by Carl Peter Thunberg, the doctor and botanist who came to Japan in the 1770s. A few coins change hands and the tree is packed up for despatch to the Royal Gardens at Kew. Later, Alcock finds out that the tree is not at all rare. He could have picked one up by the roadside in Kanagawa.

Soaring over Omio is the mountain they’ve come so far to climb. Soon after daybreak, the horses are saddled up and three martial-looking priests, “yoboos”, are appointed as guides, together with a few strong “yamabooshe” to carry the railway rugs and two days’ supply of coffee, rice and biscuits.

At first, the way lies through fields of corn. Then comes a belt of high rank grass, which gives way to a maze-like wood. If the path seems overgrown – they have to scramble over a fallen tree – that’s because the feudal authorities have shunted them onto the Murayama route, the oldest way up Mt Fuji and now one of the least used. The less the foreigners come into contact with native pilgrims, the better.

Just before they enter the forest, Alcock hears a lark, the first he’s encountered in Japan. The interpreter says there are “millions” of them here. Before long, young Veitch discovers a fir tree hitherto unknown to science – although it is perfectly familiar to their guides as tora-momi or shirabiso. The botanist takes the liberty of naming it for himself: Abies veitchii.

Callow as he is, Veitch has the wit to name another tree for his patron: Abies alcoquiana. It will be described in the Minister’s forthcoming book as “A noble tree, discovered in 1860, during Mr. Alcock’s trip to Mount Fusiyama and named in honour of that gentleman. It grows at from 6,000 to 7,000 feet elevation … where it attains a height of 90 to 100 feet.”

As they climb higher, beech and birch take the place of oak and pine. In the afternoon, the party emerges from the forest onto open slopes of lava and scoriae and, some while later, they put up at a shelter, which is little more than a crudely roofed cavity dug out of the slope.

At sunset, they look down on the clouds sailing far beneath their feet. Beyond the sea of vapour float the summits of the Hakoni range. Then they are plagued all night by the “occupants” that the pilgrims have left behind. When merciful daylight comes, they fortify themselves for the summit ascent with a cup of hot coffee and a biscuit. It is September 11th (by the new calendar).

The first station is reached within an hour, but each step afterwards becomes more arduous. The loose ashes prevent firm footing and add greatly to the fatigue, while the rarified air perceptibly affects the breathing. By the fourth station, the party is straggling at long intervals and Alcock is feeling his fifty-odd years. He is near the end of his strength before the last step places him on the topmost stone and enables him to look down into the yawning crater.

The Englishmen celebrate their arrival on the summit with a twenty-one gun salute from their pocket pistols, after which they sing the national anthem, and toast the Queen’s health with a bumper of champagne. Although Alcock allegedly leads the salute himself, there’s not a trace of these demonstrations in his own account of the climb.

Probably he’s paying attention to the reaction of the guides and yaconins. He’s aware that Fuji is a sacred and symbolic mountain. Also that Englishmen abroad are often regarded as overbearing and arrogant. In China, he’s seen how the groundwork has been laid for generations of enmity between two great nations, and he doesn't want the same to happen in Japan. First, do no harm is the rule of this doctor-turned-diplomat.

Lieutenant Robinson boils his thermometer again. It tells him that Fuji is 14,177 feet high. Then he shoots the sun with his sextant, finding that the latitude of their lunch-spot on the crater rim is 35°21' N and the longitude 138° 42' E. He also records the air temperature and the magnetic declination. An exact fellow is this Lieutenant Robinson, although not always accurate.

After making their way down the mountain, they stay again at the hospitable temple of Omio. On the 13th, they almost come to grief in a late-evening river crossing. It is rather nervous work, this river crossing.

The next day, with beautiful weather, they ride onwards into the “district of Idzoo”. Snug little hamlets nestle among the persimmon and orange trees, surrounded by fields of waving rice, or plots of tobacco and cotton. The hydrangeas here are pink, he notices.

Again, Alcock finds himself at a loss to explain why the people are so cheerful, but he trusts his eyes: “it is impossible to traverse these well-cultivated valleys, and mark the happy, contented, and well-to-do-looking populations … and believe we see a land entirely tyrant-ridden and impoverished by exactions. On the contrary, the impression is … that Europe cannot show a happier or better-fed peasantry…”

They put up at the “principal bathing establishment” at Atami, where they plan to take a holiday. The village is almost too quiet. Alas, the stay is marred by an accident: Alcock’s terrier, Toby, strays over a geyser just as it erupts and is scalded to death: “One must have led the isolated life of a Foreign Minister in Japan to realise the blank which the loss even of an attached dog creates.” Poor Toby! The minister is touched and consoled by the sympathy he receives from his hosts and retainers.

At the end of September, they make their way home along the “Tocado, or Imperial Road”. Progress is slow; seventeen miles is reckoned to be a normal day’s journey. “This is not a country in which men of this generation may ever hope for the luxury of express trains, nor is time, apparently, estimated as a valuable commodity,” fumes Alcock after yet another hold-up. (If only he could see the Tocado now.)

Soon, though, he is rapt by the bustle and spectacle of the great road. What a pageant is provided by this Tocado – the yaconin ploughing his way through the early morning snow shower – autumn has come early – the strolling musicians ...

.... the blind man passing by while a peasant girl watches to make sure he comes to no harm, the fishermen with their bamboo tridents, the female ostler, a picture of zeal, who is hurrying with well-poised body and a pail of water to refresh the horses’ mouths.

And so ends the pilgrimage to Fusiyama, at Kanagawa in the courtyard of the Tozenji, the temple lent by the authorities to the British delegation as their official residence. Watch out for the horses – they are all vicious brutes! A narrow escape: that jade has just left his hoof-print on the Minister’s saddle-cloth; six inches further forward and it might have broken his thigh.

Alcock dismounts and gets himself to safety as quickly as a Minister’s dignity will allow. As he catches his breath, he glimpses the horse-keeper and his servant bowing their farewell to each other. Their elaborate courtesy far surpasses anything he or we could attempt in the same line.

And then, if it must be so, saionara …

References

The main source and much of the wording for this account is in Rutherford Alcock’s memoir, The Capital of the Tycoon: A Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in Japan, London, 1863. The original edition had coloured prints, but not (alas) the 1960 reprinted edition on which this post is based.

The twenty-one gun salute atop Mt Fuji and the fact that the authorities sent Alcock’s party via the Murayama route are attested in references such as “The Cult of Mt. Fuji and the History of the Faith”, an essay by Shungen Kiyokumo, Makoto Horiuchi and Toru Horiuchi in Mt. Fuji: The Wellspring of Our Faith and Arts, Shogakukan, 2009.

Fiction and fact

2011-04-12T21:14:00.022+02:00

Re-reading a 1970s science-fiction story after the disaster in Tohoku. And a call to action

Japan Sinks is a novel by Sakyo Komatsu, a yokozuna of Japanese science fiction. Back in February, I ordered a copy of the English version from Amazon, meaning to write a blog post about Japan’s mountain geology. But the book arrived in April, a month after the Tohoku earthquake and tidal wave. A different post is called for.

Komatsu’s novel was first published in 1973, when big earthquakes were a distant memory for most Japanese. The story opens when a fishing boat anchors for the night in the lee of a small island, south of Japan. The next morning, the fisherman find themselves adrift in an empty ocean; the island has vanished overnight.

The Meteorological Agency sends a deep-sea submersible to investigate; its crew find evidence of a titanic geological disturbance. Then a series of earthquakes and eruptions leads an elite group of scientists to conclude that Japan is about to sink – and this within the next year. The authorities start to plan the immediate evacuation of 110 million people …

Like Jules Verne at his best, the science that underpins Sakyo Komatsu’s fantasy is solid. (The novel took nine years to write, partly because Komatsu’s editor insisted that he got every detail right.) Sometimes the writer even scoops the scientists. As when Onodera, the novel’s hero, takes his submersible 24,000 feet down into the abyssal gloom of the Japan Trench and sees broad ruts patterning the sea floor:

They ranged from fifteen feet in width to twenty or more. They extended east and west beyond the limits of the submarine’s field of vision. Something had caused the sea floor to shift. Some force of unimaginable power.

It wasn’t until 1995 that a real-life submersible called Shinkai (Deep Sea) 6500 descended into the Japan Trench and discovered strikingly similar cracks – which the savants now attribute to the tensional forces racking the sea floor as it is pulled into the subduction zone under Japan.

Geological verisimilitude wasn’t the main reason why Japan Sinks became a best-seller that begot two films. The novel raises some interesting cultural questions, even if its galloping tempo doesn’t allow time to answer them. And there are some handsome tributes to the national character:

“The Japanese relief organizations – government officials, soldiers, civilians alike – have been performing with incredible courage. I’ve seen situations where even veteran Marines would have held back but these people rushed fearlessly ahead …you might say they’re all soldiers at heart. Why, even the supposedly weaker younger generation has fitted right in.”

Komatsu puts this speech into the mouth of a hard-bitten brigadier-general of the US Marines. The American soldiers are working side by side with the Japanese forces (as they are now in Tohoku) while the country is being evacuated by a fleet of ships and aircraft.

Hyakumeizan fans will note the scene where Onodera, now flying in a rescue helicopter, spots a group of stragglers on Takazuma (Famous Mountain no.35). As the area is supposed to have been evacuated, Onodera is enraged at the hikers’ folly:-

“What the hell did you people have in mind? Did you have any idea what was going on?” he asked.

“Yes, we did,” said a youth with high cheekbones in a weary voice. “Our parents and everybody else tried to talk us out of it. But we love mountain climbing. It’s what we live for. If these beautiful Japan Alps are going to disappear from the face of the earth, we wanted to bid a last farewell to them. What’s so bad about that?”

This is the bit that Komatsu may not have got quite right. Today’s real-life mountaineers are behaving differently. Instead of planning mountain trips for their Golden Week break at the end of this month, many are volunteering – from all over Japan – to help clear up the wreckage in Tohoku and look after the homeless.

Mountaineers living outside Japan might find it a stretch to join them. But it’s always possible to volunteer one’s wallet for the Japan Red Cross. I trust that Workmen Alpinists everywhere will do what they can.

References

Sakyo Komatsu, Japan Sinks, translated by Michael Gallagher – in the (abridged) Kodansha edition reprinted after the 1995 Kobe earthquake. This version has a note from the author that concludes: “In a world where the barriers between nations are steadily being brought down, it is my hope that Japan Sinks will be seen, not as a story concerning Japan alone, but as a message about the global environment that the peoples of the world all share.”

Photos of Shinkai 6500 by courtesy of JAMSTEC

Images and ink (6)

2011-03-10T21:00:00.001+01:00

Image: Mt Fuji from Miho, woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi (1935)

Text: On Mt Fuji, from Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964):

It is extraordinary that such a mountain should have erupted from our small island country. Kojima Usui, whose pen was untiring on the subject of Fuji, had this to say: "The arc described from the contour of the summit shrine, some ten thousand feet above sea level, down to Ōmiya, at the foot of the main route up the mountain – this arc, slanting, somewhat steeply yet always in an easy, serene, almost carefree way, across a flawless sky – this gigantic line is, except for the sea horizon, the mightiest that the eye will ever see in this country."

Measuring Mt Fuji (2)

2011-02-25T18:48:00.001+01:00

Mt Fuji is a true "yokozuna" among island-arc volcanoes

But how high is Mt Fuji really? Not in the arbitrary coinage of feet or metres or shaku, but compared to its peers. Can it be considered a true yokozuna among volcanoes when set beside such hulks as Chimborazo (6,268 metres), whose summit is further from the centre of the Earth than Everest's? Or Ojos del Salado (6,893 metres) on the Chilean-Argentina border, which may be – nobody is quite certain – the world’s tallest volcano?

The comparison might be unfair. While the volcanic giants of the Americas stand on the solid footing of a continental craton, Fuji has to make do with the thin crust of an island arc - where it sustains itself by little more than "hinkaku", the ‘gracefulness’ that Fukada Kyuya attributes to famous mountains.

In fact, it’s hard to find island arc volcanoes that rise much higher than Fuji. Tambora, an Indonesian heavyweight, once soared above 4,000 metres, it is alleged. Alas, it met its Waterloo in 1815, when it blew apart in a massive eruption. The stump is now a thousand metres shorter than Japan’s top mountain.

Then there’s Klyuchevskaya Sopka (4,750 metres), the tallest mountain on Kamchatka and the largest active volcano in the Northern Hemisphere. But – hold it – Kamchatka is not quite pukka as an island arc, being a peninsula joined to the Siberian mainland. Like a sekiwake implicated in a sumo match-fixing scandal, Klyuchevskaya must be disbarred on suspicion of soliciting illicit help from the Russian continental Underworld.

When it comes to its peers on true island arcs, Mt Fuji more than holds its own. It overtops the highest volcanoes in New Zealand and the Philippines by more than a thousand metres. And it stands almost crater-to-crater with Indonesia's tallest volcano, Sumatra's Mt Kerinci (3,800 metres). That close coincidence of heights set Project Hyakumeizan wondering. Is it just chance that the greatest volcanoes of Indonesia and Japan top out at roughly the same altitude? And how high can a volcano grow anyway?

It turns out that few savants have considered this question. One who did was Peter Vogt of the US Naval Oceanographic Office in Washington. Looking at oceanic island volcanoes, such as Hawaii’s, he concluded that their heights were related to the thickness of the crustal plate on which they stood. The thicker the plate, the higher the volcano. Beyond a certain limiting height, the lava no longer has enough pressure to keep erupting from the volcano's summit.

Vogt ended his his 1974 paper with an intriguing speculation about the huge volcanoes discovered on Mars – Olympus Mons (火星富士: the Mt Fuji of Mars), the tallest, is almost three times as high as Everest, even though Mars is a much smaller planet. Such huge mountains, Vogt suggested, would need to be supported by a crust that is two or three times thicker than the Earth's.

If Vogt's hypothesis holds for island-arc volcanoes, it may be that Mt Fuji has already grown as tall as it ever will. After all, it is already more than 700 metres higher than Ontake, the next-loftiest Japanese volcano. Fuji’s most recent activity, from a side-vent in 1707, added nothing to its stature. We’ll have to wait for the next eruption to see if Japan’s top mountain intends to make another bid for that coveted 4,000-metre brevet.

References

Volcano height and plate thickness. Peter R. Vogt, US Naval Oceanographic Office, 1974

Image of Kasei-Fuji (火星富士) by courtesy of Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Measuring Mt Fuji (1)

2011-02-20T16:29:00.001+01:00

As every Japanese schoolchild knows, Fuji is 3,776 metres high. More or less, anyway…

For one glorious hour, Mt Fuji was promoted into the ranks of the world’s 4,000-metre peaks. That was on September 11th, 1860 when Sir Rutherford Alcock, Queen Victoria’s envoy and minister plenipotentiary to the court of the “Tycoon”, made the first ascent by a foreigner. In his retinue was a Lieutenant Robinson who, a few days previously at Hakone, had “set to work, to the infinite astonishment of some native attendants, to boil his thermometer – in other words to ascertain the height of the lake.”

Repeating the trick at the top of Mt Fuji, Lieutenant Robinson came up with a height of 14, 177 feet – some 4,321 metres. He might have saved himself the trouble. As early as 1727 (or the 12th year of Kyoho), a savant by the name of Fukuda had triangulated Fuji’s altitude at 3,895.1 metres.

In 1828, Ninomiya Keisaku – physician, Dutch scholar, medical botanist and student of the German doctor, Philipp Franz von Siebold, – climbed the mountain and, for the first time, estimated its height by measuring the air pressure - whether directly with a barometer or by boiling his thermometer is unknown to this blogger. That gave an altitude of 3,794.5 metres. After Siebold's expulsion from Japan, Ninomiya also brought up Siebold’s daughter, Ine, setting her on course to become Japan’s first woman doctor. But that is another story…

For the method and date, Ninomiya’s estimate was astonishingly close to the mark. Less than 20 metres off, in fact. Almost sixty years later, in the mid-Meiji era, the Japanese army surveyors came up with a figure of 3,778 metres, using modern trigonometric techniques and equipment imported from Europe.

Later, the Army's figure was refined to today’s generally accepted height of 3,776 metres – which, conveniently for historians, came into use in the first year of Showa (1926). This – or, more precisely, 3,775.6 metres – is the height of the triangulation point. A nearby rock makes the actual height of the mountain a shade higher.

Not everybody got swiftly behind the new official altitude. As late as 1943, Dazai Osamu, a literary type, was still referring, in his novel One Hundred Views of Fuji, to "the three-thousand, seven hundred and seventy-eight-metre mountain…”. Or perhaps the writer was ahead of the curve. In 2002, Fuji was re-surveyed using the latest technology. This time, the altitude came out at 3,777.5 metres…

Next: Is Mt Fuji as high as it should be?

References

富士山検定公式テキスト、富士山検定協会　 (December 2006)

Sir Rutherford Alcock, The Capital of the Tycoon: A Narrative of a Three Years Residence in Japan (1863)

Prints: by courtesy of Sir Rutherford Alcock and Google Books

“Mountains that women can climb” (3)

2011-02-09T21:13:00.001+01:00

The story of Japan's mountaineering women concluded: how the ladies' climbing clubs made it to the top

Standing outside the Imperial Palace on a day of torrential rain in mid-1946, the Emperor proclaimed a new constitution. The bland opening of Article 14 – “All of the people are equal under the law …” – barely hinted at the legislative dynamite smouldering within. At a stroke, half of the Emperor’s subjects were newly enfranchised; for the first time, Japanese women could vote.

In the mountains, full enfranchisement took a little longer. The Japan Alpine Club – the country’s oldest – formed a women’s section in 1949. That wasn’t enough for some actual or prospective members, who started forming their own clubs. The most prominent was the Edelweiss Club, founded in 1955 by Sakakura Tokiko (see previous article) – an earlier Club Edelweiss, founded by Kobayashi Shizuko two decades earlier, had been dissolved during the war.

The new clubs helped women break into expedition climbing. In 1955, a group of working women led by Hosokawa Satoko went to the Punjab Himalaya and climbed Deo Tibba (6,001m). Others struck out on their own. In 1957, Kawamori Sachiko took an eight-month sabbatical in Europe and made ascents of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, the first by a Japanese woman.

Women also took part in mixed expeditions. A Waseda University expedition to Kilimanjaro in 1958 included two girls. In 1970, Watanabe Setsuko reached Everest's South Col as a member of an expedition to the southwest face. Increasingly, though, women were organising their own overseas trips. Watanabe Setsuko helped to start that trend in 1968, when she and Ashiya Yoko reached the top of Istor-o-Nal (7,200m) in the Hindu Kush.

In the same year, a Ladies' Climbing Club was founded, specifically to pursue ambitions in the Himalaya. As none of its members had been there, they needed help in finding an objective. And thus it was that a slightly built but intense young woman paid a visit to an ageing author at his modest house in Setagaya.

In their separate ways, both Fukada Kyūya and Tabei Junko had recently made their names – Fukada with his Nihon Hyakumeizan book and Tabei (right in picture above) with a winter climb on the fearsome cliffs of Tanigawa’s Ichinokura-sawa, a first for an all-woman team.

For his part, Fukada had established himself as a Himalaya guru – he’d published two books on the subject and he’d led an expedition to the Jugal Himal in 1958. It was this expertise that Tabei hoped to tap. “Hmm,” mused the writer as he pored over maps and photos with his guest, “Are there any mountains that women can climb by themselves?”

Apparently there were. In 1970, Tabei Junko and Hirakawa Hiroko made the second ascent of Annapurna III, reaching the 7,555-metre summit by a new route. Five years later, Tabei headed for Everest on an all-woman expedition sponsored by Nihon Television and the Yomiuri newspaper.

Snow conditions were dangerous: at Camp II (6,300m), the climbers were avalanched in their tents. A Sherpa dragged Tabei out of the snow by her feet; she had to be revived with oxygen. The team decided to continue with the expedition: “After all, nobody had been killed.” Twelve days later, on May 16, 1975, Tabei Junko became the first woman of any nationality to stand on Everest’s summit.

It would be tempting to leave the story of Japanese lady alpinists just there, on the summit of Everest with Tabei Junko. Tempting, yet specious. Such an account would not give the whole picture. It wouldn't explain, for example, why, all the way up the final slopes of Everest, Tabei was holding an imaginary conversation with a former climbing companion called Sasō Rumie: “Sasō-san, every step hurts but watch me, won’t you – ah, now I can see the Tibetan side.”

“Sasō-san” was the best partner that Tabei had ever climbed with. She’d phoned Tabei out of the blue while she was still working in her mid-twenties at the Japan Association for Physics. “I’d like to climb with you,” said Sasō in her inimitably direct way. They started out on the crumbling lava cliffs of Yatsu-ga-dake before graduating to Tanigawa-dake in winter. That was where the black-and-white photo above was taken, showing Sasō standing to Tabei's left.

It was Sasō and Tabei who made the first all-woman winter ascent of Ichinokura-sawa’s Central Ridge. That was in December 1966. The following autumn, Sasō was again climbing in Ichinokura-sawa when her partner slipped. Sasō reached out to grab her, lost her own balance, and fell to her death. The other woman was saved when her pack caught on a projection.

Eerily similar was the trajectory of Wakayama Miko’s life. One of the most stylish climbers of her generation – she also looked good in a kimono, said her friends – she teamed up with Imai Michiko to climb the north face of the Matterhorn. This feat, achieved in the summer of 1967, was another first for women anywhere. Six years later she returned to the mountain with her husband, on their honeymoon. Something went wrong and they both fell. She was 33.

Sekida Michiko too honed her skills on the hard routes of Tanigawa and the Northern Alps. Starting out as an Edelweiss member, she founded her own club in 1969, to focus on even harder routes. Calling themselves the ‘Ryōsetsu’ group, which might translate as ‘snow-defying’, they were as good as their name. In 1972, they went to the precipitous south side of Denali; three expedition members failed to return. Sekida herself survived, only to perish on the snowy ridge of Nishi-Hodaka four years later.

For all these tragedies, it was a golden age of sorts. From the late 60s to the mid-70s, an elite corps of Japanese lady alpinists had the world - sometimes literally - at its feet. As when they climbed the first 8000er to be scaled by an all-women’s expedition – that was Manaslu in 1974 (summit photo below) – as well as two of the great alpine north faces. They were enfranchised. A century after women had won the freedom of Mt Fuji, mountaineering Valhalla had gone equal-opportunity.

References

Tabei Junko, Everest Mama-san

William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, Random House

目で見る日本登山史, 山と溪谷社 (編集) (Yama-to-Keikoku-sha: Illustrated History of Japanese Mountaineering) - also the source for the black-and-white photos

Hiroko Seiwa and Akio Funahashi, History of Japanese Mountaineering and Women in the Light of their Relations to Religion, Faculty of Education, Kochi University, 1982

The anecdote about Fukada helping Tabei Junko choose a Himalayan mountain to climb comes from an article on Everest climbers, Everest Shomei Futatsu, by Fujishima Koji in the Asahi Shinbun, November 15, 2005 (thanks to the Sensei for this)

Previous posts in this series

Part 1: The story of Tatsu, the first woman to climb Mt Fuji

Part 2: How the Otenba of Taishō pushed out the boundaries

Mutiny on Main Ridge

2011-01-26T18:07:00.000+01:00

A classic snow climb is punctuated with reflections on the rigours and rewards of alpine club power structures

April 29, 4.30am, Sarukura: A small mutiny broke out at dawn. “No way,” said Tim, “will I carry skis up there.” I knew better than to argue with a Kiwi, so we set off from our roadhead bivvy without them. Discipline, I ruminated, seemed to be crumbling in this club.

Half an hour later, Tim’s demurral didn’t look so bad. A giant avalanche had carved a trench down the middle of Shirouma’s Great Snow Valley, leaving sidewalls of frozen snow that rose high over our heads. Negotiating this tank-trap was certainly easier without skis.

Later than planned, we paused for breath under the Main Ridge and I fished the topo from my pocket. The supremely logical and direct line that it showed to Shirouma's summit was somewhat out of kilter with the actual scene – all we could see from here was a medley of snow humps and false crests.

Like the white horse in its name, Shirouma rears almost three kilometers above the floor of the Fossa Magna, the valley that rifts the banana of Honshu in twain. The same forces that raised this mountain also pulverised its rocks, so that its steeper ridges are rarely climbed in summer. Climbers only get a look-in after winter storms lay down generous folds of snow over the scrub, the creeping pine, and the tottering arêtes.

History relates that the Shuryō was first climbed in 1931 by a trio led by an “OB” of Kobe Commercial University. “OB” stands for ‘old boy’, membership in a Japanese university alpine club being for life. As all of Honshu’s high mountains had been climbed in winter by this time, the activists were seeking out “variation routes”. In Shirouma’s Main Ridge, they notched up a full-credit one: from base to summit is 1,400 metres.

The first few of those metres caused our hearts to sink. On this east-facing slope, the early morning sun had already rotted the snow. Post-holing knee-deep, we ploughed a trench to the ridge-crest. Up there, the snow was firmer and we started making progress.

Absorbed in the twists and turns of our tightrope arête, we hardly noticed the sounds of an altercation. So, when we came up on this scene, we needed a few seconds to size it up. In front, the snow had slipped away from the ridge, revealing matted grass and bushes, and leaving a near-vertical slab of hard snow beyond.

Spreadeagled on this facelet – like some creature of ill repute nailed to a barn – was a youth in the knickerbockers and red shirt of a traditional university climbing club. The noise was coming from his sempai (senior), who was bawling out his charge from a safe stance on the ridge below. Although a lesson in lead climbing appeared to be in progress, its recipient was too gripped to move up or down.

Exchanging glances, Tim and I moved through; the snow-wall looked more difficult than it was. Probably the student climber’s main problem was the angst caused by his senior. We hurried to make ourselves scarce.

Japan’s student alpine clubs (sangakubu) are still structured on a rigid hierarchy that is rooted in the pre-war order, writes Wolfram Manzenreiter, a Viennese sociologist who has taken a scholarly look at power structures within Japan’s climbing scene. That is, he explains, alpine clubs continue to operate on the principle that strong leadership requires complete subordination.

One might ask why the kohai (juniors) put up with this st*ff. “One powerful factor,” Manzenreiter says, “probably was the Japanese folklore model of achievement. The belief that being severe with oneself is a prerequisite for improvement and achievement is certainly a popular belief throughout twentieth-century Japan. The emphasis on perseverance, will power, and mental strength created a particular, irrational image of sport with ample place for struggle, agony and torment, for blood, sweat and tears.”

On occasion, the agony and torment get out of hand. In May 1965, the hiking club (wandervogel) of the Tokyo University of Agriculture (Nōdai) achieved notoriety from what the media called the "wangeru shigoki jiken". During his first mountain trip with the university club, 18-year-old Wada Noboru died of physical exhaustion. Police investigators found that nearly all of the new members who had entered the club that year had suffered injury from heavy physical abuse. They were forced to carry 50-kilo loads, while second-year men were assigned 25 kilos, and the seniors climbed without any load at all.

Any freshmen who showed signs of fatigue or weakness were sworn at or even beaten up by their older comrades. Slaps in the face, kicks with nailed mountain boots, blows on the head with ice axes, and verbal abuse were common. The student leaders and four other members of the club were charged with physical injury resulting from negligence, as was the teacher who had authorised the leaders to drill the rookies. Thus Professor Manzenreiter.

All this happened a long time ago, yet echoes of shigoki still seemed to reverberate on Shirouma. Mercifully, the sempai's rasping tones faded into space as we moved higher. Anyway, we had other stuff to worry about: the warming snow was starting to clog our crampons, so that we had to knock them clear at every step.

We reached a knoll that I recognised from a previous ascent with our own sempai, Yamada-san. On that occasion, we'd been carrying skis – nobody dared to leave them behind – and we'd staggered onto this top and collapsed onto the snow, not even taking off our packs. Now, at least, we could see the summit. It leered at us over a forbidding array of intermediate bulges.

The Shuryō saves the best for last. Two rope-lengths below the summit, the ridge merges into a 45-degree headwall. By now, the sun had already slipped behind the mountain. Taking a breather in its blue shadow, we looked up at the huge cornice, ponderous as a minibus, that hung above our heads.

Tim found a rusty piton and threaded a sling through it. In our club, it seemed, it would be the sempai who was going to lead this pitch. Obediently, I tied into the rope. As I did so, a solo climber came up beside us. He was out training for the Himalaya, he said; the OBs and students of a famous agricultural university’s alpine club were off to Nanga Parbat.

You have to hand it to these guys, I thought – they have big dreams and they carry them out, probably with quite a bit of financial support from the seniors and OBs. We'd also heard about an accident where a ski-mountaineer had disappeared down a gully. A helicopter had searched for days; the bill came to ten million yen, far more than the insurance cover. Whereupon the club members picked up the tab themselves to prevent the man's family being bankrupted.

I started upwards. Like many a north face, the headwall feels steeper than it is. I didn't need to look down to sense the Fossa Magna yawning under the rear-points of my crampons. Then I reached the gap in the cornice and pulled through from shadow into light.

Ramming my axe into the snow, I set up a boot-axe belay for Tim. Below him came into sight the senior and his junior, now roped together like Pozzo and Gobbo in "Waiting for Godot". There was no more shouting; the senpai was out in front. "Climb when ready," I called down to Tim.

Standing around the summit monument, we shook hands with the solo climber. “See you on Tsurugi next week,” he said. It was time to go. Gazing down at the plunging slopes of the Great Snow Valley, we reckoned up the kilometres of ever-softer afternoon slush that separated us from the waiting Subaru. Now we were really going to regret those skis.

References

Wolfram Manzenreiter: Moving mountains: Order and change in a sports world

Great relief

2011-01-11T19:48:00.001+01:00

Is it necessary to make excuses for Japan’s mountains? Not when the terrain is allowed to speak for itself.

Even their greatest fans tend to apologise for them: And so we bade our farewell to the Alps of Japan. They do not, it is true, display the glories of glacier-shrouded peaks, and the scale on which they are built is only two-thirds that of the famous Alps of Switzerland, wrote Walter Weston, the mountaineering missionary.

Is it really necessary to relativise Japan’s mountains? Fukada Kyuya, the Hyakumeizan author, didn’t think so. Mountains were the bedrock of the Japanese soul: “Japan is a mountainous country. Mountains are everywhere,” he wrote.

Well, you can’t argue with that. Of the country’s 47 prefectures, circuits, or major cities, only three – Chiba, Kyoto and Okinawa – lack mountains that rise above 1,000 metres. When it comes to quantity, Japan occupies the high ground.

The high ground is there because Japan sits on the junction of three tectonic plates. Its mountains are still rising fast. Parts of the Japanese Southern Alps gain 5 millimetres a year, which sums to a lofty 5,000 metres every million years – a Mt Blanc and then some. This growth rate leaves the Swiss Alps in the dust – they manage a mere millimetre or so a year – and puts the Japan Alps in the same league as the ranges of Taiwan and New Zealand, which grow at up to 10 or so millimetres a year.

How come, sceptics might ask, that we don’t see any actual Mt Blancs rising above Kofu or Matsumoto? Well, that’s because of the prodigious rates of erosion in those parts, explains Professor Koaze Takashi in his book, Yama wo yomu (Reading mountains). As the chart below shows, Japan’s mountains are being washed into the sea twice as fast as the Himalaya. You could say that erosion plays Godzilla to uplift’s Mothra.

Just as in a Godzilla film, the scenery is considerably reshaped by this struggle. As a result, the Kurobe gorge plunges proportionately deeper and narrower than its equivalents in the European Alps or the Himalaya, says Professor Koaze. The walls of Japanese river ravines may be lower, but they concede nothing in sheerness to the canyons of the greater ranges.

In fact, Walter Weston saw that for himself. After acknowledging their modest height, he continues his farewell to the Japanese Alps as follows: But the picturesqueness of their valleys, and the magnificence of the dark and silent forests that clothe their massive flanks, surpass anything I have met with in European Alpine wanderings.

References

Yama wo yomu by Koaze Takashi, Professor of Geography at Meiji University. Charts from Koaze op cit; cartoon courtesy of Yama to Keikoku magazine.

“Above the clouds”

2010-11-21T10:46:00.001+01:00

In mountaineering too, Japan’s Imperial House sums up the spirit of the age, from Taishō alpinism to the Hyakumeizan boom.

On this December morning, the alpine chill on Kaimon belied the modest altitude. As I brushed through dewy bushes to the summit shrine, a brass plaque affixed to a boulder caught my eye: it told me that the little stratovolcano had recently been visited by personages “from above the clouds”. Apparently, my interest in the One Hundred Mountains was shared by no less than the Crown Prince and Princess of Japan.

The Imperial House looks back on almost a century of mountaineering tradition. Fittingly for an institution that sums up the nation’s aspirations, princes of the realm started climbing when everybody else did – in the reign of Emperor Taishō (1912-1926). It was then that strong economic growth touched off Japan’s first mass mountaineering boom, as city dwellers sought to reconnect with nature.

As if to gratify them, the Army surveyors came out with their new 1:50,000-scale maps of Honshu’s mountains – by 1913, the second year of Taishō’s reign, most of the Japan Alps was covered. The first guidebooks appeared, complete with course times and transport connections. Huts proliferated and, with them, paths. The new trail that led from Kamikōchi to Yarigatake was significant enough for a prince of the realm to open.

After presiding over that ceremony in the summer of 1916, Prince Higashikuni (1887-1990) took the chance to climb Yari (above). Reasons of state may have influenced him. He’d noted how Britain’s Duke of Connaught had taken time out from an official visit to descend the Tenryū River in a sampan – an adventurous excursion. If Japan’s Imperial family did not bestir itself, Higashikuni feared, the first royal ascent of Yari might fall to some foreign blue-blood. A year or so later, the Prince went on to climb Tateyama.

While mountaineering was a duty or a pastime for Higashikuni, it was a passion for Prince Chichibu (1902-1953), the second son of Emperor Taishō. After making several forays to the Hida range, including a visit to Tateyama (above) in the snow season, the "climbing prince" set his sights on the Swiss Alps. In this, he had the ideal aide-de-camp, the alpinist Yuko Maki, who had galvanised Japanese mountaineering circles in 1921 with the first ascent of the Eiger’s Mittelegi ridge.

The Prince’s big chance came at the end of his year at Oxford, where he had taken up residence at Magdalen College. In July 1926, Maki arrived in Grindelwald, underneath the Eiger, to sign up five of the region's best alpine guides. These included Samuel Brawand and Heinrich Fuhrer, who had led the way on Maki’s climbs of, respectively, the Eiger Mittelegi and Canada’s Mt Alberta, another famous first ascent.

In August, the Prince arrived and undertook two training tours in the Bernese Oberland. It was agreed that the guides could address their client as “Herr Prinz”, the German equivalent for “Your Imperial Highness” being too cumbersome in tense alpine situations. Then the party moved on to the giants of the Zermatt area, where they tackled Monte Rosa, the Lyskam, the Matterhorn and the Zinalrothorn. Unfortunately, military duties prevented Brawand from accompanying them to the Valais.

Needless to say, it was the Matterhorn ascent that got the most press attention, even though the Prince’s party also climbed the considerably more difficult Schreckhorn in the Bernese Oberland. The Prince’s feat seemed to lash the journalist from Time magazine into a frenzy. This is how he set the scene:

Years pass when no man can conquer and bestride "The Old Hag of the Alps"—the Matterhorn. Humpbacked, she towers, and her hump is a jagged ridge from which many have slithered down to death. About her hungry lightning tongues lick often, winds howl, and evil legends cluster grim and hoar. Sometimes, when a climbing-hatchet slips and sickening pebbles roll, it seems that the Hag chuckles. . . .

As the Hag kept her peace that day, the party felt confident enough to make a full traverse of the mountain: “Daring,” continued the Time correspondent, “the Prince proceeded straight over the hump (the Italo-Swiss frontier) and prepared to descend by the far more dangerous Italian route, necessitating straight drops by means of Alpine ropes of several hundred feet.”

This was the Prince’s first and last expedition to the high mountains. His studies at Oxford had to be cut short when his father’s illness took a turn for the worse later that year. Back in Japan, heavy responsibilities awaited him as the brother of the new Emperor. The year after his return, he entered the Army’s officer training school and married the daughter of Japan’s ambassador to Washington. Their first summer holiday together was a walking tour in mountainous Gunma Prefecture: “I began to wonder if being walked off one’s feet was another of the requirements of a princess,” wrote Princess Chichibu in her memoir, The Silver Drum.

The Prince took his Army career seriously. Disdaining to exploit his position as a member of the Imperial family, he studied far into the nights during his officer school years and endured his fair share of arduous field exercises. Army service had its compensations, however. In 1934, he was posted to Hirosaki in the extreme north of Honshu as commander of the 31st Infantry Regiment – incidentally, the unit that came unscathed through the infamous “Death March on Mount Hakkoda” incident in 1902 when almost 200 men from the unlucky 5th perished in a blizzard.

Life in the snowy north was congenial: “I do not think we ever had more time to ourselves than in those Hirosaki days,” recollected the Princess. Although there wasn’t much time for the mountains, the couple practised their skiing in the foothills of Mt Sasamori and, when spring came, went picking edible bracken shoots on the slopes of Mt Iwaki. On another occasion, the Prince had to stand for hours on the summit of Iwaki in the rain as the observer of a military exercise.

In the end, these exertions may have been the death of him. The ranks of the Army were rife with tuberculosis and, in 1940, Prince Chichibu was diagnosed with the disease. The following year, the couple moved to a villa near Gotemba, where the country air would be more salubrious than in Tokyo.

The close view of Fuji was also heartening: “Gazing at the mountain from Gotemba, he said he began to see aspects he had never dreamed existed: the way it changed according to the season and even in the space of a single day … It was a mountain you could never tire of observing. Indeed, he told me, there was something awesome and unapproachable about the way it soared, quietly aloof.” (The Silver Drum)

Prince Chichibu died in January 1953 at Kugenuma, still within sight of Mt Fuji. On the lawn of the villa at Gotemba, his likeness in bronze, clad as a mountaineer complete with rucksack, continues to gaze out at the mountain. It is an appropriate tribute: “There is hardly a peak in Japan which he did not scale,” wrote his widow, “from the Japanese Alps to the Chichibu Range, from which he derived his title. Mountains gave him spiritual freedom and peace of mind, and he liked the discipline.”

Half a century later, two more members of the Imperial family are drawing spiritual freedom and peace of mind from the mountains. The present Crown Prince takes in peaks whenever official duties permit – he climbed Uluru on a visit to Australia in his high school days, and he visited the highest peaks in England, Scotland, and Wales during his time at Oxford in the 1980s. The British summits were shrouded in mist, as is proper for these climes.

The Crown Princess-to-be, Owada Masako, also discovered mountains at an early age: there is a photo of her and her twin sisters on a family trip to Shirouma – a mountain that, as Hyakumeizan author Fukada Kyuya remarks, “is a good one for introducing people to the high peaks”. Such experiences were probably infrequent, though, as Masako-sama spent much of her childhood in the foreign capitals to which her diplomat father had been posted.

Are the Crown Prince and Princess now systematically collecting the One Hundred Mountains of Japan? Project Hyakumeizan dares not approach the Imperial Household Agency to ask, but the plaque on Kaimon-dake suggests that the answer might be ‘yes’. Not that the question matters much. Ultimately, as the Hyakumeizan author himself said, the One Hundred Mountains represent no more than a personal selection. And the motives for climbing Japan's mountains go deeper than the dubious pleasure of ticking items off a list. Indeed, a distant ancestor of the Prince captured them perfectly:

Countless are the mountains in Yamato
But perfect is the heavenly hill of Kagu;
When I climb it and survey my realm,
Over the wide plain the smoke-wreaths rise and rise,
Over the wide lake the gulls are on the wing;
A beautiful land it is, the Land of Yamato!

(Emperor Jomei (r.593–641) in the Manyōshu)

References

The Silver Drum: A Japanese Imperial Memoir, by Princess Chichibu (published by Global Oriental)

1000 Poems from the Manyōshu: The Complete Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai Translation

Erinnerungen an Yuko Maki von Samuel Brawand, guide of Grindelwald (PDF)

Historical photos are from 目で見る日本登山史, 山と溪谷社 (編集) (Yama-to-Keikoku-sha: Illustrated History of Japanese Mountaineering) and The Silver Drum; photo of Crown Prince and Princess from YamaKei magazine/Imperial Household Agency.

The last bear

2010-11-09T19:35:00.000+01:00

Will Japan save its black bears or follow Switzerland's sad example?

Bear stories remind me of a faded photograph that hangs in a museum in a remote corner of Switzerland. The carcass lies on the ground, flanked by the hunters who brought it down. Everyone in the village has turned out to witness the spectacle.

Right now, quite a few bear stories are coming in from Japan. On 12 October, a bear attacked a nurse, then holed up in a daycare centre near the town of Katsuyama, Fukui Prefecture. It was shot the next day. On 27 October, a female bear was shot on a patch of waste ground next to a kindergarten at Ono, a nearby town. Her two cubs were captured but died, probably of stress, before they could be released on the mountainside. Another bear was shot near Katsuyama just a few days ago. These are the stories from a single corner of just one of Honshu's 34 prefectures. They are unlikely to be isolated incidents.

It was a hot, dry summer in Japan. The weather may have shrivelled the berries and nuts that the bears live on, driving them down to the valleys. A similar pattern was seen in the hot summer of 2006. That year, 4,251 bears were shot on Honshu, accounting for an estimated one-third or perhaps half of Japan’s entire population of Asian black bears. (The northern island of Hokkaido is home to a different species of bear.)

Nobody in Japan wants to extirpate the bears. They are protected by law, but may be killed if they attack or pose a threat. Unfortunately, people and bears are crossing paths ever more frequently, as unseasonable weather and changing land-use force the animals out of their usual habitats. This is a slow-moving ecological disaster with no easy answers.

It was on 1 September 1904 that Padruot Fried und Jon Sarott Bischoff, the two hunters in the photograph above, brought their quarry down to the Engadine village of Scuol. At that time, of course, they had no idea that they’d just killed Switzerland’s last native bear. How long will it be before this scene is re-enacted in Honshu?

References

Japan's black bears 'face extinction' article from the The Guardian, January 2007

In Japan's managed landscape, a struggle to save the bears: a balanced and well researched overview of the plight of Japan's black bears, by Winifred Bird, October 2009

North ridge boogie

2010-10-24T16:54:00.001+02:00

Taking the slow way to the summit of Mae-Hodaka, Japan Northern Alps

“I had never deliberately kicked a situation into the full-tilt boogie. The other side had always taken care of that readily enough.” (Heaven’s Prisoners, James Lee Burke)

In the orange gloom of the tent, I looked up from the book – Andy’s book, to be precise, but he was asleep. “The full-tilt boogie”: encountered half-way up one of Japan’s highest mountains, the phrase had a resonance. We’d come here to boogie, certainly. But, like most weekend alpinists, we’d rather not have matters escalate to the full-tilt boogie-woogie.

On May Morning, we’d heaved absurdly heavy packs to our shoulders and staggered through the bare groves of Kami-kochi. Awaiting us was a gully choked with avalanche debris. Our Koflach boots slipped off frozen divots or plunged us knee-deep in hidden holes. We meant to take the longest possible route to the summit of Mae-Hodaka, a local 3,000er, hauling with us tent, cooker, sleeping bags, crampons, axe; everything, to adapt a Japanese advertising tagline, for beautiful climbing life.

The object was not, of course, to have fun – not even Type III fun. For this was a “gasshuku”, a Golden Week spring mountaineering training camp. Fittingly, the spur we were climbing was named for Keio, an elite private university with a famous mountaineering club. Back in the 1930s, the Keio lads helped to pioneer full-tilt, expedition-style climbing in Japan. They came this way in mid-winter 1938, hauling a ten-man tent (below) which they pitched with the aid of hewn-off tree branches.

The German and British expeditions of the early 1930s – among them, Nanga Parbat ’32 and Everest ‘33 - had galvanised the student climbers of Japan. Imanishi Kinji and his crew were early off the mark, founding the Academic Alpine Club of Kyoto in 1931 specifically to pursue Himalayan ventures. As a start, they had to master a new set of techniques – setting climbing camps progressively higher up the mountain until the summit was in reach.

The AACK’s first experiment with this “polar method”, as they called it, was a two-week expedition to Mt Fuji over the 1931 year-end. They divided into climbing and support teams, put four camps on the mountain, and spent several days on the frozen and wind-blasted summit. Keio was quick to get in on the act: the following winter, they went to Nishi-Hodaka. Later, they tackled Tsurugi, Yari, and Kita-Hodaka, all in mid-winter. These “gasshuku” had but a single aim: to train for the Himalaya.

In the winter of 1934/35, the Kyoto club made a first winter ascent of the ferociously cold Mt Pekto (above), on the Korean-Chinese border. That was the cue for a whole series of student expeditions to the most frigid corners of the Japanese empire – the Kurile islands, Sakhalin, northeast China, and the high mountains of Taiwan. In the end, it was neither Kyoto nor Keio but the Rikkyo University men who bagged Japan’s first major Himalayan summit, Nanda Kot, in 1936.

Now we were following in the postholes of these expeditionary pioneers. Gasping like Himalayan climbers, we reached a flatter spot on Keio Ridge. “That’ll do,” said our leader – a Keio man – although the clouds had cleared and it was hardly past noon. We were granted a brief pause before the reason for the early stop was revealed: “Now we’ll dig a tent platform here,” said Yamada-san, unpacking his shovel and indicating a spot hull-down, off the ridge.

As every expeditioner should be, our leader was thorough. Instead of merely checking the forecast, he’d phoned the meteorological agency for a personal consultation. Tomorrow’s front, he’d been advised, would stop us climbing and we’d better be well encamped. Thus briefed, we shovelled with a will. By evening, the tent was embedded so deeply into the snowslope that a hurricane couldn’t have shifted it.

We woke on May 2 to a gentle sussuration on the orange flysheet – light snowfall that later turned to the pitter-patter of sleet. We festered in our sleeping bags, snoozing or reading. Around noon, there was a muffled curse from Andy: his sleeping bag had soaked up a puddle that had formed in a corner of the tent.

Next morning, we moved on under a grey sky. Now we were on the main crest, heading for Mae-Hodaka along its north ridge. The way was narrow; the drops on both sides sizeable; we concentrated on our footwork. When we paused, which was often, we looked down a breathtaking sweep of snow into the great glacial scoop of Karesawa. There, like a sprinkling of pixels, a virtual town of multi-coloured tentage had been established by the Golden Week climbing hordes.

Mostly, we boogied, unroped, until brought up short by an icy runnel that led upwards through a vertiginous grove of dake-kamba. This called for some full-tilt cramponing, kicking hard into the grey and rippled ice. Fragments spalled away from the steel points, jostling and tumbling down the gully. Then we were over the big hump in the ridge and climbing down into Go-roku col.

This time, care was called for when digging a platform for our tent, and even more so when shovelling snow into our cooking pot. Go-roku col is, it appears, a popular place. Expeditioners on Everest and Denali know the problem well.

A clear, cold morning on May 4 made for firm, crisp snow. Our crampons bit well into the creaking styrofoam. For an hour, Caspar and I boogied higher on the steepening ridge, now on the left of the crest, now on the right, as rocks and cornices dictated. Yamada and Andy were somewhere ahead. Here and there we made belays of the boot-axe variety, more for practice than from necessity. Once we waited on a shadowed ledge while a traffic jam of climbers cleared itself.

We came to the last tower. I hadn’t expected any difficulties here: in summer, a cleft in the rock is climbed by pressing a boot sole onto each face and so ratcheting oneself higher. That technique doesn’t work so well in crampons, especially when the rock is slathered in a film of glassy ice. I extended a tentative set of front-points, tried to move them higher – until, with a chalk-on-slate screech, the crampon sheared through the ice-film and dropped me back into the snow.

Behind, Caspar was driving his axe deeper into the snow in search of a firmer belay. And well he might. What next? I looked round the side of the ridge; a vertiginous sweep of snow falling hundreds of metres – no hope there. Then it had to be the chimney. Perhaps, with a bit of luck, I could reach that rusty piton, five metres up, without becoming unstuck… Could it be, I wondered, that matters were about to escalate into the full-tilt boogie-woogie? Before the question could be answered, a rope’s end whacked into the snow at my feet. “Thought you might need a bit of help,” Andy called from above.

That evening, we camped for the last time, in a pine grove down in the valley. Yamada-san was cooking; we’d taken it in turns. First course was a seaweed and tuna salad, the fish from a generously sized can. Hmm, I thought, our leader had scraped and teetered his way up that icy chimney weighed down with half a tent and a stock of sundry canned goods too. How did he do that?

I never found out the answer, because courtesy obliged us to entertain our neighbours, two girls from Yokohama. They’d pitched a tent beside their steeds, a brace of fearsomely rugged and mud-spattered Africa Twin trail bikes. Apparently, they worked the elevators in a department store. Always be extra polite to department store lift attendants: you never know what they get up to at weekends.

References

Historical photos and outline history of student "gasshuku" of the 1930s are from 目で見る日本登山史, 山と溪谷社 (編集) (Yama-to-Keikoku-sha: Illustrated History of Japanese Mountaineering)

Envoy

In the Taishō period, Hodaka became the arena for alpine and winter climbing. In the seminary of mountaineering skills formed by its four three-thousanders, the youthful elite of the university mountaineering clubs then in the forefront of mountaineering endeavour vied to open up new routes ... By the outbreak of the second world war, most of Hodaka's ridges, faces, and gullies had been explored. As Matsukata Saburō wrote, "Some nook or corner of the mountain still concealed a narrow ledge, a dance floor for a tengu, defended by sheer precipices on three sides and backed by a cliff, inaccessible to all but the true alpine adept. And, if you could only get there, the edelweiss would be blooming in sheets all around. Those were the kind of day-dreams we indulged in." Yet only a mountain on the sheer scale of Hodaka could harbour dreams like these.

From Nihon Hyakumeizan by Fukada Kyūya - in the (forthcoming) translation as "One Hundred Mountains of Japan"