A meizanologist's diary (85)

20 November: less than an hour after starting from the Kamoshika taxi’s drop zone at Kōbara (God’s Field), I reach Sobo-san’s fifth station – this is curious, as on my way up through the factory plantations I don’t recall seeing any first, second, third or fourth stations, such as would befit a self-respecting Meizan with a tradition of pilgrimages. But now the trees are starting to look more like a natural forest, and it’s time to take a break.

As magic potion to Obelix the Gaul, so Kirin’s Fire One Day Black bottled coffee is to the caffeine-starved hiker. After sinking half of my supply, I set off through the forest with renewed vigour – which is offset by the need to take note of the various signboards educating me about the trees. 

Just above the fifth station, the glossy pink trunk of a camellia-bearing himeshara (Stewartia monadelpha) shows that we are still low down the mountain, climatically speaking.

Soon the path is so deeply mulched in fallen maple leaves (six different varieties, a helpful signboard says), to say nothing of the fallout from the zelkova (keyaki) and oaks (mizunara), that I have to keep looking for the red tapes tied onto branches to stay on track. This mixture of trees is characteristic of Sobo-san’s “intermediate-temperate deciduous broad-leaved forest”, as defined by Oita University's Professor Suzuki Tokihiro.

Gaining a ridge, we enter a conifer grove, probably of tsuga (Japanese hemlock). A rock outcrop forces the path to zigzag, and a signboard warns hikers about the “zeppeki” (sheer cliff). The language seems a bit overdone but, then again, Bre’er Ben over on Meizan Memories warns that a hiker slipped on one of Sobo’s normal routes on a winter day and died of exposure before anyone found him. So have a bit of extra care here, friends.

As the morning light starts to graze the nearby ridges, we reach the beechwoods – this must be above 1,100 metres now, as the cool-loving trees won’t grow any lower in these southern climes. Then the trees thin out as the path leads into a clearing surveyed by a solitary red-bibbed jizō on its far side. Judging by the expansive view, this must be See-the-Country Pass or Kunimi-tōge (1,480 metres). Two or three other hikers are taking a break here.

I push onwards into a low-ceilinged wood, its stunted and twisted trees suggesting that we’ve moved up into yet another climatic zone. Frost pillars glitter in the slanting sunlight, and a shaded gully still harbours a patch of early-season snow. 

My, so far south, and there seems to be more snow here than on Mt Fuji right now.

I follow two lady hikers onto the bare summit. “Yabeh!” (bad!) says the one with orange-tinted hair as she takes in the view. Bad is right: the air is so crystalline today that it would be criminal to neglect the panorama that opens up on all sides.

Fukada Kyūya had similar luck with the weather: “Under a cloudless sky,” the Hyakumeizan author wrote, “I spent a happy hour in the warm sun counting off all the mountains around. There to the west was Aso, the skirts of its outer bastions stretching off towards Kujū-san, these vast fields extending almost as far as the eye could see. And standing at the corners of this space, like the legs of a tripod, were Aso, Kujū and Sobo.”

Taking a leaf from Fukada’s book, I document the views with my weatherbeaten Nikon. We can actually see from one side of Kyushu to the other today. 

The summit shrine too deserves attention. It looks centuries older than the wooden fanes that typically adorn a Japanese mountaintop. Unlike them, it consists of stone slabs, roughly clenched together. There’s no knowing how many centuries it has stood there, but the guidebook says that the god enshrined there is mentioned in the eighth-century Shoku Nihongi. This must be a Meizan with a very lengthy tradition.

If so, why does Sobo-san have such an effete name – it means “grandmother’s peak” – when its dragon-manifesting guardian deity is so obviously masculine? The question is raised in the booklet accompanying my Yama to Kōgen map. One thesis, it says, is that “Sobo” is a corruption of an older name – “Sohori-no-yama” – which in turn derived from a Korean term meaning “place with a god”. If so, the mountain’s name would be kith and kin to that of modern-day Seoul.

I sit down behind a boulder out of the wind while I munch on one of the Sensei’s sweet potatoes, wash it down with the rest of the Fire One Day Black, and consult the map. It’s not yet eleven o’clock: too early to go down yet. Fukada had the right idea: he traversed Sobo-san, went down to the old mining village of Obira “enjoying on the way a splendid view of Sobo’s east flank, a corrie-like valley walled in by cliffs that rise out of dense primeval forest.” 

And on the next day, the Hyakumeizan author and his local guide climbed Katamuki-yama, the rugged ridge rising to the east. This is surely the correct way to appreciate a Meizan, turning it on all sides as you would an antique tea bowl….

For a moment, I consider a recklessly extended one-day hike across the mountains until I run out of daylight. Two voices war within my soul: you’ve got a head-torch whispers Mubō-kun, perhaps fired up by an overdose of One Day Black, and surely the weather’s going to hold – that is, if we tune out the lenticular cloud that’s just materialised over Katamuki-yama. Hey, objects Captain Majime, you told the efficient and courteous Kamoshika taxi driver you’d be back at Kōbara by 3.15 pm…

Captain Majime and Mubō-kun negotiate a compromise. I will drop down the peak’s southern side, just to take a look you understand. Curiously, no helpful sign identifies the way to go, and I have to check the direction with another hiker. 

The path heads down a rake of loose stones, and I soon find myself above another zeppeki. This one is for real, and I’m happy to grab the fixed nylon ropes while clambering down it.

Then a series of ladders plumb the depths of a shady gully. At last we reach the ridge below. The path that leads southwards is less trodden than the trade route up from Kōbara. It’s clear that I’m not going to get very far today if the taxi rendezvous is to be respected. So, reaching a viewpoint above the trees, I turn to look back at Sobo-san.

From this side, the mountain has changed its character as profoundly as any Jekyll and Hyde. Instead of the modestly angled parkland that greets climbers from the north, a rocky fist of volcanic rock punches upwards from the brushwood. And the peak seems to frown as cloud shadows start drifting across it. Now it really is time to turn back.

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19 November: as time travel isn’t specifically excluded by the terms and conditions of a Japan Rail Pass, I use mine to board the present-day Sakura 555 super-express. As you would expect, the Shinkansen hums at a near-relativistic speed down to Kyushu. Time starts to dilate at Kokura where we change to a battered blue Sonic limited express for the run down the coast. Deprived of onboard wifi, passengers have to look out of the windows.

Sonic at full tilt, courtesy of JR Kyushu

At every rural station we pass, the grass grows longer and longer on the abandoned platforms. And now the afternoon light is lengthening too. When the overhead electricity wires run out at Oita, I take to a one-man diesel railcar for the journey inland, along with scores of schoolchildren who just want to nod off into their anime-themed sports bags.

There’s one last glimpse of a Fuji-like peak against the sunset glow – could that be tomorrow’s mountain? – and then we’re heading into Kyushu’s darkest interior. There is no street lighting here because there are no streets to light.

Night has fallen by the time we arrive in Bungo-Taketa, a town that seems to hover somewhere in early Shōwa. Streetlights are sparse because nobody is on the street at 6 pm; there are no convenience stores, and the town’s only supermarket closed an hour ago. If you wanted to buy food for your hike tomorrow, then your chances would be Slim or None. 

Fortunately, in her estimable Hyakumeizan blog, Emma Goto warns of just this eventuality – thanks for the heads-up, Emma – and my ragged but capacious bergen already holds enough rations to get by with. At the same time, it’s heart-warming to know that places still exist that lie beyond Seven-Eleven’s supply chain. Long may they do so.

Glancing at the map over supper at the Marufuku restaurant – to be commended for its finger-lickin’ good chicken cuisine – I see that the Fuji-shaped peak which looked so handsome against the sunset isn’t even in the same massif as tomorrow’s mountain. I must have been looking at Yufu-dake. Goodness, I haven’t a clue about this region. Am I still in present-day Japan?

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Meteorologist Wada Yuji
Image courtesy of Wikipedia

16 November: we’ve been summoned to Tokyo, on the early morning Kagayaki, by Wada Yūji (1859–1918). Not in person, of course, given those dates, but to take in an exhibition dedicated to him and his boss, the eminent Meiji-era meteorologist, Nakamura Kiyo’o (1855–1930).

We’re interested in these weathermen because both – but especially Wada – played a key part in the story of Nonaka Itaru and Chiyoko. This was the husband-and-wife team who survived more than two months in a small hut atop Mt Fuji in the winter of 1895 making weather measurements to within an inch of their lives. And had it not been for Wada's timely intervention, they would have burned through that last inch too.

From Yotsuya Station, we walk over to the Tokyo University of Science, where the museum is housed in a fine replica of a Meiji-era building. Nakamura Kiyo’o was the institution's second president, taking office in 1896, one year after he was appointed head of the Central Meteorological Observatory, the forerunner of today’s meteorological agency. 

It’s good that we have just taken a restorative cup of coffee at the station because we are about to get a masterclass on the art of scientific networking in mid-Meiji Japan.

It turns out that both Nakamura and Wada were students of Thomas Mendenhall (1841–1924), who came to Japan in 1878 to teach physics at Tokyo University – there they are in the commemorative class photograph below, taken probably in the same year. And both accompanied Mendenhall to Mt Fuji in the summer of 1880, when he conducted his famous gravity experiment from the summit of Japan’s highest mountain in order to “weigh the earth”.

Thomas Mendenhall and his students in Tokyo, c. 1878 (?)
Nakamura and Wada are sitting to Mendenhall's left
(Image courtesy of Thomas C. Mendenhall II via Wikipedia)

In 1895, a young dropout from pre-medical school, as Nonaka Itaru then was, visited Nakamura and Wada to discuss a preposterous scheme to overwinter on the summit of Mt Fuji. The meteorologists would probably have dismissed this madcap proposal out of hand, had not the meeting been orchestrated by the distinguished scientist Terao Hisashi (1855-1923), another of the “Mendenhall boys” and the science university’s first president. As it happened, both Terao and Nonaka were from samurai families in the old province of Chikuzen. 

So, instead of showing Nonaka Itaru the door, Wada suggested that his stay on Mt Fuji would be more productive if he took a full year’s worth of weather observations. And he further offered to lend him the instruments he would need.

From then onwards, the project was prosecuted with typical mid-Meiji verve. Itaru spent the summer building a hut, Wada helped him instal the instruments, and in October Nonaka reclimbed the mountain to start his observations. Soon afterwards, Chiyoko came up to join him, suspecting that her husband wouldn’t be able to manage on his own (where do women get these ideas, I wonder). Then things started to go horribly wrong, as detailed elsewhere on this blog …

Poster for the exhibition at the Tokyo University of Science

In the afternoon, we attend a meeting of the Fuyō Nikki no Kai. This is an association dedicated to researching the background to Nonaka Chiyoko’s eponymous “Journal of the Lotus”, which she started writing just weeks after she and her husband were rescued from their summit hut. They had in fact been carried down the mountain in a blizzard by an impromptu team of porters led by Wada Yūji himself. By now the fate of the Nonakas was so much a matter of public interest that the meteorologist later wrote a report on this episode for his ultimate superior, the Minister of Education, Marquis Saionji Kinmochi (1849-1940). 

After that, the story as often told – including here on this blog – takes a sombre turn. Itaru was never able to realise his dream of building a bigger and better weather station, perhaps because Wada was posted to Korea in 1899, depriving him of a mentor and a network. And Chiyoko died in her early fifties during the flu epidemic of 1922. But today’s meeting reminds us of Mark Twain’s jibe: “In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.”

Nonaka Itaru's storehouse built on the crater rim in 1912.
(Image source: historical report by the Mt Fuji Weather Station)

What prompts this thought is an official report which turns out to contain a rare photo of a storehouse that Nonaka Itaru commissioned to be built on Mt Fuji’s crater rim in 1912, more than a decade after he and his wife were dramatically rescued from their cramped and blizzard-wracked summit hut. The new storehouse was set up at Higashi Yasugawara, on the south-eastern side of the crater, exactly where Nonaka had once proposed to build a new and larger hut.

Three years previously, he’d built a spacious villa at Takigahara, a village at Mt. Fuji’s foot, so that future summit parties could use it as a staging post or even as an observatory when simultaneous readings were required at both the top and the foot of the mountain.

So it looks as if Itaru had both the ambition and the means to plot a return to the summit. Nor had he entirely lost contact with Wada – a photo we saw at the morning’s exhibition purports to show the two men together at a “7.5” station hut on Mt Fuji in 1912, the very same year that Nonaka built his summit storehouse.

In the end, though, it was the professionals of Japan’s meteorological service who built a more-or-less permanent weather station on the summit of Mt Fuji. Yet, when they did so, the meteorologists paid Itaru the compliment of adopting the wind-deflecting design of his storehouse for their own building. They also made use of Itaru’s storehouse itself. And they continued to treat him as an honoured guest in their new summit station. 

The full story is sometimes more complicated and nuanced than the storytellers would like to make it….

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11 November: looking for a short excursion on the way home, we settle on Echizen Kabuto (1,319.6m), near the famous dinosaur museum at Katsuyama. This too is a bit of a cheat: until the snow comes, you can drive up to a pass on the Fukui/Kanazawa prefectural border, shrinking the number of vertical metres between the car and the summit of this helmet-shaped mountain.

And, for now, the snow shows no signs of coming. The world has already heard that, when the first snows of autumn fell on Mt Fuji just five days ago, this was the latest such snowfall since records began 130 years ago. A few days later, NHK also announced the first snow on Hakusan, but only a dustbin-sized telephoto lens or the eye of faith could detect any sign of it today, at least on this western side of our supposedly white mountain. It must have melted almost as soon as it touched the ground.

As for Echizen Kabuto, we set off up a steep slope and run straight into a patch of cognitive dissonance. The slanting light and the yellowing leaves say autumn, but our sweaty shirts, not to mention the flies hovering in the clearings, are more like late summer. Only a few years ago, we climbed this mountain on snowshoes in April; now we push our way through tunnels of tropical green.

By the time we emerge from the beech trees on the summit ridge, fair-weather cumulus clouds are drifting overhead. We find places to sit and start munching our Seven-Eleven fare. There’s no need to pull any more clothing out of our packs: we’re quite warm enough as it is.

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10 November: on the upper reaches of the Hakusan National Park’s White Road, the locals are soaking up the early morning sun. You can tell by their weary expressions that they don’t hold with the likes of us. 

One keeps guard while his mate looks after the kids. Two others, grooming each other, ignore us completely. As far as they’re concerned, we’re the Motorists from Mura-Hachibu City.

As the locals seem to have sussed, today is a bit of a cheat. The Sensei's friend, Alpinist A. has driven us deftly up a series of hairpin bends and through daringly cantilevered snow-galleries to the toll road’s highest point, at 1,450 metres. 

People sporting the latest MontBell and North Face styles throng the Sanpō-iwa carpark. This is everybody’s last chance to sample the heights of the Hakusan range without actually walking in the long way – as we were warned at the gate, the toll road closes for the winter at 5pm this evening. 

From here it’s only a few hundred metres on foot up to the ridge leading to Myōhō-zan (1,776m), our objective. The mountain’s name translates as Peak of the Subtle Law (妙法山), a Buddhist vibe that it shares with quite a few other peaks in the Hakusan range. Indeed, an urn containing a sutra scroll was once found on its summit, no doubt buried there by a monk determined to preserve the sacred script until the Buddha should return at the end of days.

A not-so-subtle law of late-season hiking is to bring spikes when the path is icy. November has been so warm in the lowlands that we’ve forgotten what might happen if the first light snowfall melts in the sun and then refreezes on a clear night. The water seeps on the path above the carpark have all congealed into smears of hard blue ice. One man is even carrying an ice-axe, although it is unclear how he plans to use it without any accompanying crampons.

As we have neither axe nor crampons, we apply the wisdom of the Slavic proverb: “The church is near, the tavern is far; the road is icy, so I will walk carefully.” After twenty minutes or so of edgy progress, we come up onto a ridge top and spy out the landscape.

Over there to the southwest are the triple peaks of Hakusan, lightly dusted with new snow. A fresh breeze blows from them, threatening us with a bank of tumbling clouds. Our ridge winds towards the main mountain, into which it merges somewhere beyond Myōhō-zan. It looks like an impressively long way over there.

After a slug of water we address ourselves to the first dip in the ridge. In the gaps between peaklets, the path runs across an eroded “kiretto” with some authentically alpine exposure to the east side. At least the snow has remained unfrozen up here and we can crunch through it without fear of skidding off into the abyss.

Although the wind continues to bluster, the sky overhead remains blue. Some kind of foehn effect seems to hold back the tumbling clouds to the south, melting them away before they can pass overhead. 

But the minutes keep ticking away towards our turnback time, and we soon realise that we’re not going to reach Myōhō-zan. Our leader is now wading through the occasional patch of untracked snow; nobody else has made it this far, it seems.

We call it a day at Mōsen Daira, a marshy clearing named for the insect-eating sundew plants (モウセンゴケ) that grow there. A small bronze Jizō presides over the sunny glade, and we perch ourselves on logs to eat lunch nearby, sheltered from the wind by the surrounding grove of firs (Abies mariesii, オオシラビソ). 

They look in better shape than a grove of the same trees that we passed about a hundred metres lower down – many of those trees had withered into grey ghosts of their former selves.

The sun keeps shining until we get to our feet to go down. The clouds to the west have merged into a threatening band of gunmetal grey. Now we really do need to get moving…

By evening, we are soaking in the outdoor baths at the Nishiyama Ryokan, founded in the second year of Meiji and now the only hostelry still operating at the Nakamiya hot springs at the foot of the White Road. The springs are said to have been discovered by Monk Taichō (682-767), the mountain mystic who "opened" Hakusan, when he found a wounded white dove bathing its feathers in this remote mountain fastness.

Supper evokes autumn in the mountains as it should be. A salt-baked iwana (mountain char) adorns a ceramic tablet, while delicate slices of wild boar stew gently in an iron kettle over a blue flame that flickers up from something that resembles a Meta tablet. "The mountain's rich and delicious cornucopia is said to be the secret to longevity in the Hakusan area," says the ryokan's website, and we would not disagree.

Our host hovers at the door: in former days, she tells us, bear sashimi too would have been on the menu – her words are confirmed by an ursine pelt that adorns the corridor outside. I nod to the beast as we head to our futons. After all, the bells on our packs have been chiming all day in deference to his relatives. Then we fall asleep to the sound of the rushing stream below. 

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4 November, Nara: the rutting deer may bite, butt, kick or knock you down, or so the signs warn. Lolling in the balmy sunshine, though, the animals look more chilled than most of the tourists.

We’ll need to channel their composure as the queue for the annual Shōsō-in exhibition seems to wrap around the length and breadth of the Nara National Museum. Once inside the exhibition hall, we find it more crowded than we remembered it from previous visits, just like yesterday’s summit.

But, heck, we’re not complaining: it’s only since 1946 that the Imperial Household Agency has allowed commoners like us to gaze and gawp at these exquisite voyagers through time from the palace and temples of the eighth century Tempyō era.

Someone once said that, if you took in twelve Shōsō-in exhibitions, you would see most of what the collection has to offer. Yet each new exhibition somehow confounds that notion, which shouldn’t be surprising, given that the curators have 9,000 items or so to choose from. So, as with yesterday’s white centipedes, there is always something new to see.

True, that screen panel, the one with two deer under a tree, must have been exhibited several times over the years - most recently in 2013, says the catalogue - but it’s well worth another look. It reads like a message from the Empress Kōmyō (701–760) herself. She donated it along with several hundred other items to the Tōdaiji temple after the death of the Emperor in 756 because, as she wrote then, “these objects remind me of the bygone days, and the sight of them causes me bitter grief.” Yet her two deer look out at us serenely, as chilled as their modern counterparts outside.

Gigaku mask of drunken retainer
Image courtesy of Imperial Household Agency

No less famous are the gigaku masks, the silver mirror and the miraculously well-preserved zithern, as Arthur Waley would have called it. These objects recall a court that lived a life of such breathtaking refinement that the outside world almost fades into invisibility.

Zithern from Silla
Image courtesy of Imperial Household Agency

But what is this? Item 23 purports to be a “Three-pronged performance spearhead,” or in other words a ritual sceptre known as a sankosho. ‘Performance’ refers to the fact that this one is made of wood, and thus lighter to heft during temple rituals than a bronze original.

Symbolising a thunderbolt, this sankosho points to the existence of realms altogether wilder than any the courtiers knew. It was a legendary sankosho, presumably of bronze, that helped to find the site of Japan’s most famous mountain temple. When Kōbō Daishi went to China, his ship all but foundered in a storm. Praying for deliverance, the Daishi vowed he would dedicate a new temple to the Kannon if he survived.

On returning to Japan, he threw his sankosho into the air - one can imagine him launching it as one would a small drone - and found that it had landed in Tamba Province, to the north of Kyoto. And when he came to that region, a white deer showed him the way to a valley where he found his ritual sceptre hanging in a tree. After that, the sankosho took off again, this time in the direction of Mt Koya, still the most famous mountain sanctuary in all Japan …

Back in the open air, the Sensei so far forgets herself as to go up to a recumbent deer and pat it on the head. Like all the others in the park, the animal accepts this obeisance without any sign of irritation or even acknowledgement. These deer, they are surely as chilled as the ones in Empress Kōmyō’s screen panel.