A meizanologist's diary (128)

14 March (continued): The trees are shedding the morning's hoarfrost, loosing little snowslides that trickle down the gullies. Even on the way down, there’s a hint of nordwand to Ishizuchi’s headwall and it’s a relief to crampon my way out of its blue shadows onto the sunny col below.

 

Waiting there is a signboard, its characters faded in the sunlight. It’s ironic how such memorials have sprung up all over the Hyakumeizan mountains, even though their author always said he preferred his peaks without them.

This one, though, is going to kick off a cross-cultural encounter of a most unexpected kind. It tells me that modern mountaineering started in Shikoku when a teacher by the name of Kitagawa Jun’ichirō took charge of the Matsuyama High School’s “travel club” in 1923. In those Taishō times, such clubs often did more mountaineering than travelling – perhaps they were so called to ease the minds of students’ parents.

Kitagawa Jun'ichiro on a mountain.
Frontispiece from Shikoku Arupusu.

Two years later, Kitagawa-sensei put out a book. He called it Shikoku Arupusu – the Shikoku Alps. And his timing was perfect. Nineteen twenty-five marked the apogee of Taishō democracy: it was the year that all men (over 25) got the vote, not just wealthy ones. So innovations were all the rage just then.

A decade and a half before, Kojima Usui, the Japanese Alpine Club's founder, had paved the way. Urged by his bookseller to find a grabby title for a collection of essays, he called them the Nihon Arupusu – perhaps taking his cue from English friends. But the alpine brevet, he felt, should be awarded only to the tallest ranges of central Honshū.

It didn’t take long for this consensus to crack. And this from within the ranks of the Japanese Alpine Club itself. According to Katō Yoshiki writing in the March edition of Gakujin – I’d recently scored myself a copy at the Sensei’s local supermarket – it was two JAC members who named the “Etchū Alps” when writing up a traverse of these Niigata mountains in a 1911 issue of their club’s journal.

After that, everybody started appropriating the Alps. Quite soon, people were talking about the Yamato Alps (the Ōmine mountains), the Tohoku Alps (mainly the Asahi range, but also Iide and Zao), and the Kyūshū Alps (mainly the Kujū Mountains, but also Aso). By the 1930s, Katō Buntarō, best known for his solo winter climbs, was promoting the “Hyōgo Alps”.

With all this agitprop going on, even the rumpled terrain across the bay from Tokyo got itself aggrandised into the “Kamakura Alps. So it’s no surprise to learn from Katō’s article that Kitagawa wasn’t the first to appropriate the Alps for Shikoku. An earlier reference came from the haiku poet, journalist, calligrapher, art critic, noh dancer and mountaineer Kawahigashi Hekigotō in 1915. But he was deploring the alpinizing trend, not puffing it…

Back on Ishizuchi-san, I remember there’s a mid-afternoon bus to catch and snap a photo of the didactic signboard to look at later. Naruhodo, I murmur to myself, after resuming the descent, so Kitagawa-sensei was one of those punters who wanted to big up their local mountains by rebranding them as Alps...

It’s lucky that there are next to no bears in these mountains, as I’m going to have to push it a bit if I’m going to jump on that mid-afternoon bus. As for Kitagawa's thinking, I’m soon going to find out that I couldn’t be more wrong.

The snow starts to melt into a muddy slush below the Chūgū shrine. Back in the cable car, I catch my breath and watch the slanting ridgelines rise into the sky as the cabin starts down. A whiff of that alpine vibe returns – for what could be more Grindelwald-esque than looking out at the mountains from a swaying gondola…

Waiting for the bus along with the Osaka architect – again, we’re going to be the only two passengers – I’m wondering what Kitagawa-sensei would have made of the ropeway. It started up in 1968, just four years before he passed into the next life. And, when I do finally get hold of his book a week or so later (it has to be kuro-neko'd from Shikoku, of course), it turns out that he's written a stinging put-down for day-trippers and peak-baggers like ourselves:

I believe there are two Ishizuchi mountains. One is the Ishizuchi of mountaineering proper and the other is a kind of youth centre that the social affairs teachers take their charges up. This latter one is the peak where you climb three sets of chains, and where there is a shrine on top for the mountain’s god. If Ishizuchi’s true essence were limited to this minuscule sliver, then it wouldn’t have anything special to offer, and hence mountaineers would no longer find it worth climbing…

When it comes to school teachers, the adjective inspirational tends to be overused. But Kitagawa-sensei must have earned it – decades after his death, it was a grateful former student who arranged for his Shikoku book to be reprinted. In an afterword, the student wrote that:

[Kitagawa-sensei] engaged in heartfelt discussions of literature and philosophy with impressionable young people, criss-crossed the then completely unexplored mountains of Shikoku, and introduced them to others … In his classes, almost every week, he would talk about mountains, and endlessly discuss human nature through the works of Goethe, Schiller, Ippen and Chikamatsu. Having become addicted to mountains after an overnight trip to Ishizumiyama, I used to lose all track of time walking in the mountains and conversing with him. For us, mountain climbing was where we deepened our reflections on nature and humanity …

A deep reverence for the mountains reverberates through the sensei's book. One chapter focuses on summits that can be climbed within sight of Matsuyama. There’s a lengthy write-up of Ishizuchi-san and its history, of course. Then come accounts of traversing the “Shikoku Alps” and the “Five Mountains of Uwajima” in Kitagawa’s native prefecture of Ehime.

Georg Simmel.
(Courtesy Wikipedia)

What follows is more of a surprise. Entitling the chapter simply “Simmel’s Alps”, and with barely a preamble, Kitagawa launches into a translation, or perhaps a recension, of a treatise on mountain aesthetics by the German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel (1858-1918).

As you’d expect, Kitagawa had a solid grasp of German. He’d had to master the language just to enter the elite law faculty of Tokyo University, from which he graduated early in the Taishō era. After that he worked for the Hokkaido government for two years, before returning to Shikoku and becoming a teacher.

So what was he looking for when he started tackling the convoluted prose of the German philosopher? Georg Simmel was no mountaineer, by the way; in fact, he rather disapproved of them – his approach to the Alps was via their aesthetics. His essay on Die Alpen begins by asking why artists even of Hodler's and Segantini's talents struggle to paint mountains convincingly, and ends by explaining how it is that the Alps inspire us. Perhaps it was something like this paragraph from Simmel's disquisition that had caught Kitagawa’s attention:

This is the paradox of the Alps: in the Alps, height is not relative or conditional, but unconditional and absolute. It is the absolute itself, transcending all relativity. Here we find our answer. When we gaze upon the Alps in their most sublime splendour, we find our own interpretation there, beyond the realm of life itself. This is the infinite gift that the Alps bestow on us.

So if other high mountains could bestow the self-same gifts, it must follow that Shikoku too could have its own Alps…

But these glimpses into Kitagawa’s metaphysics are for another day. Back on the mid-afternoon bus, the driver puts on the brakes to let a tardy family of monkeys clear the road. Now we’re grinding our way down the gorge in low gear, and I’m still wondering if it was really legit for Kitagawa to appropriate the Alps like that. I mean, just because everybody else was at that time…

When, all of a sudden, out of the left-hand window, I see another of those didactic signboards. The bus is moving so slowly that there’s even time to read a few sentences. We’re passing the Median Tectonic Line (Chūō Kōzō Sen), the signboard says – the great slip-strike fault that, on its way from eastern Japan through to Kyushu, runs right across the northern foot of Kitagawa’s home mountains.

The MTL: like the alpine Insubric Line, only more so.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

It’s the second naruhodo moment of the day. There’s a similar fault, though mercifully less active than the MTL, that runs across the southern piedmont of our Alps back in Europe. We call it the Insubric Line, but like the MTL it’s the product of colossal tectonic forces. So might it not just be, geophysically speaking, that the Shikoku Alps are the real thing, a truly alpine range of mountains with folds, nappes, overthrusts, the whole geological Bündnerteller…?

As I said, it’s just the two of us on the bus, and the Osaka architect is sitting in front of me. So I have no reason to look over my shoulder but, if I did, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this bald, burly geezer leaning back, in antiquated tweeds or flannels probably, arms folded, and on his face there’d be this told-you-so smile and – hey – wouldn’t that be a mighty wink behind his Taishō-era spectacles?

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14 March: timing is everything when it comes to weather forecasting. While I’m throwing down a cup coffee and a cheese butty for breakfast, the clouds are still oppressing today’s intended peak.

It’s still grey and windy when I get on the bus up to Ishizuchi-san’s cable car station. Although it’s a Saturday, there’s only one other passenger aboard as we leave town. As I find out later, the other o-nobori-san, as they call us hereabouts, is an Osaka architect. He's kitted out with a technical-looking axe and a helmet. Goodness, I hope there'll be no call for those.

The bus wends its way almost at a pilgrim’s pace past the Kurose reservoir. Then we enter a deep gorge, where rafts of rock slant upwards to the south, as if in obeisance to a mighty force. Now the bus is moving almost too fast. On foot, the white-robed pilgrims would have had more time to appreciate this magnificent declivity.

The cable car too is uncrowded. The forecast must have turned people off. Yet the clouds are breaking up as the ancient contraption creaks into life, and we start to glimpse the sea to the north while we gain height.

In a journey of seven and a half minutes, the ropeway covers 1,814 meters and ascends approximately 1,300 meters. As the ropeway rises in elevation, the mountain’s vegetation changes, and the temperature drops—there is an average difference of 7 degrees Celsius between the upper and lower stations.

The ropeway's blurb writers have it right. From the top station, we step back into winter. Some centimetres of fluffy new snow cushion my footfall through the frosted trees. 

A broad path leads up to the shuttered lodges and the shrine at Chūgū Jōju, where a solitary o-nobori-san is paying his respects.

Then it's downhill to a broad connecting ridge, where an orange-barked himeshara (Stewartia monadelpha) lights up the winter woods. 

Long flights of wooden steps lead past a ruined refreshment booth – for the pilgrims, I presume – up to a col, where I emerge blinking into the sunlight. Looking back, I glimpse shreds of cloud drifting away from the eastward peaks.

Yet that view carries less weight than the volcano’s shadowy headwall rearing up ahead. Is this going to be steep or what? 

The snow hardens up as the ground rises, so that I have to kick steps to reach the stone platform of an intermediate shrine building. Here I catch up with all the other o-nobori-sans – everyone is putting on crampons or adjusting their gear with a kind of fastidious meticulosity.

There’s no need to read anybody’s mind – I only have to read my own. Nobody wants to break trail, and that’s why nobody is hurrying unduly with their preparations. Having tightened up my own crampons, with a kind of meticulous fastidiousness, I let three or four people go on ahead before setting out myself.

This ploy fails when the pair of students in front decide to turn back – which may be wise, since they have only chain-spikes on their boots and no poles or ice-axes to steady themselves. That leaves me as second in line behind the leader, who I’m already thinking of as the Sen’in (mountain wizard) as he kicks his way confidently across the untracked slopes.

Here and there, sections of half-buried metal stairway show us where to go. These we tackle with the uphill crampon digging into the icy snow, and the downhill one screeching on the steel gratings. I look up from the last of these passages to find that I’ve almost caught up with the wizard.

This is because he’s dealing with what looks like a wall of snow with extreme care, kicking his boots solidly into the traverse while protecting every move by plunging his ice-axe as deep into the slope as it’ll go. I follow in his bootprints and try to deepen them as I pass by.

There’s about a foot of new snow on top of an icy crust, and I see no reason why the whole slope shouldn’t avalanche. If it does, we’ll be hurled like human pachinko balls from tree to tree in the thickets below. The traverse to easier ground is probably only ten metres, yet it feels like a hundred. When I get across, the wizard is already far ahead; he seems to know where he’s going.

We zig-zag up to the ridge and suddenly we’re in the sun again. My crampons are grating on the flagstones of the path leading up to the summit shrine. 

The wizard is now coming down after paying his respects there. Without a word he disappears down a gap in the rocks. I take a look and see an iron chain, thick enough for an anchor hawse, hanging down into the depths.

By now, the wizard is striding across the ridge to Tengu-iwa, the “Goblin peak” that marks Ishizuchi’s highest point. He makes the traverse look like a stroll through Ginza 4-chome. How tiresome: now I’ll have to get across there too. Grabbing the chain with bare hands – the brown metal's quite warm now – I swing myself down to the ridge. There’s no path over the rocks, but white paint marks show the way.

My crampons are a lightweight type, with aluminium heel-pieces. They really shouldn’t be subjected to metal gratings, let alone rocky traverses. But there’s ice and snow in all the crevices, so I keep them on. The screech of steel (and aluminium) on andesite is starting to get on my nerves when, two thirds of the way over, I meet the wizard coming back.

There is a momentary contretemps: he needs to step across a sloping but holdless slab to where I’m standing. It follows that I’m in his way. So I step downwards to cross the slab at its bottom edge – it has a rill that will stop my spikes slipping off. “That’s not the way,” says the wizard. Too late; I’ve already made the move…

A stone lantern sits atop Shikoku’s highest point. Under a clear sky, I can see from one side of the island to the other, from sea to shining sea. Eastwards, the last clouds are still drifting past an array of high peaks. Ishizuchi-san, the savants say, is the crater wall of an old volcano. Yet the view from its peak is quite convincingly alpine…

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13 March: they say you shouldn’t travel on a Friday, but that wasn’t why the Sensei cancelled. 

The mountain weather forecast is still rating tomorrow’s weather as “c” for “unclimbable”. But, since I have a RailPass, I decide to go ahead anyway. After all, Ishizuchi-san is one of the vaunted Hundred Mountains. And it's the highest mountain in Shikoku....

When the train drops me at Iyo-Saijō, it’s difficult to be optimistic: a strong, cold northerly is driving the clouds against the snow-dusted peaks. Ishizuchi-san hides its head in the murk. It all looks rather grim.

I repair to the hotel, which probably saw its heyday in the mid-Shōwa era. The automatic door needs to be pushed aside by hand. In the room, a contemporaneous beer ad does its best to cover a large crack in a structural wall. But, since we booked for two, there’s plenty of space to strew my kit about …

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11 March: What about Genanpo, the Sensei asked yesterday. What, again, I thought. Heck, it once sprang a bear cub on us, and last year a white-out mugged us on the summit. Isn’t twice enough?

The Sensei’s thinking becomes clear when we reach the trailhead. A comfortable number of cars is already parked along the road there. In times when the b-word is buzzing through the media and blogosphere, you don’t want to be too lonely on your chosen mid-week mountain.

And there’s nothing wrong with Genanpo as an excursion. This is how the late doyen of our mountaineering community, Masunaga Michio, introduces it in his One Hundred and Fifty Mountains of Fukui:

As you begin walking south along Sanban-dori in Ono City, the Ginkgo Peak comes into view through the narrow gaps in the street lined with shop signs. And when such a lofty eminence suddenly appears above the bustling city, ridden as it is with human impulses, the summit always attracts my ever-shifting soul.

We start up a flight of wooden steps through the usual factory forest. A few hundred metres up, we meet with new snow over an icy base. Time to put our crampons on. Now the view opens out through gaps in the trees: there’s Hakusan and Arashima too.

Taking a break at the vorgipfel of Mae-yama, we’re overtaken by a woman wearing a pair of rubber boots, the sort you’d wear in your garden or if you work at a fishmonger’s. “Must be a local,” says the Sensei. I watch and learn, in case winter climbing in wellies catches on in the Alps. If it does, remember you read it here first...

A chilly breeze greets us on the summit’s snow dome. Under a cloudless sky, we press on in search of a sheltered spot to eat our sweet potatoes. 

Then we follow a line of bootprints towards the edge of the plateau.

Over there is Heko-san, the next-door peak, looking magnificently alpine in its furbishing of fresh snow. 

I’m starting to understand why Masunaga-san came up here four times in winter, through fair weather and foul. On one occasion, ice had encrusted the trees like molten glass. Like the poet Li Po, he and the mountain never grew tired of each other…

For a moment, we’re tempted to follow those bootprints over the connecting ridge. But winter days are short and mountaineers are slow, especially when they have the salt of age on them. The Sensei and I nod to each other: time to go home. But I suspect we'll be back one of these days...

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7 March: we’re close to summiting Monju-san, which is no great feat given that this local eminence has just one meter of height for every day in the year, when a senior citizen wielding hiking poles comes tapping down the path.

“Mezurashii, na” he says when he notices me, although he’s probably referring more to my antiquated glacier goggles than my gaijin-esque appearance. I know who he is, of course – a retired maths teacher, better known to locals as “the legendary Ohnishi-san”, now over ninety years of age and still climbing Monju almost every day.

And if this should sound somehow monotonous, take a look at his photo album and be amazed by the biodiversity of this miniature Meizan.

We fall into a typical mountaineer's conversation. Ohnishi-san’s done quite a few of the legendary Hyakumeizan. About two thirds, I think he says, as he gives me some beta on Shikoku's Ishizuchi-san, my next objective. 

But their summed altitude can’t compete with the metres he’s put away on Monju. This week, he tells me, he’ll hold a celebration to mark his six thousandth ascent.

And before I can calculate that he’s climbed the equivalent of two hundred Everests or more, just on Monju, he gives me a nod, leans into his poles and starts on down. If you want to be as fit, or as venerable, a mountaineer as Ohnishi-san, there’s no time to waste in idle chatter.

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5 March: On the way to KIX via the southern route, we're flying across Korea about as close to its northern border as is legal or wise. Alas, window seats in these buffs are a bit of a toss-up. Either the windows freeze up on you, or – as in the case of Seat 41A today – there is no window at all, as the plane’s engineers didn’t seem to trust themselves with one in this part of the fuselage.

Fortunately, by leaning forward into somebody else’s airspace, I can just see above the cloud deck a distant and solitary peak to the north, surmounted by an eyebrow wisp of lenticular cloud. Judging by the direction and altitude, this can be none other than Mt Paektu (2,744 metres), the Paradeberg of North Korea.

Sorry, there’s no question of bringing a camera to bear – to do so, I’d have to mug the passenger in front – but it’s gratifying even to have managed a glimpse of this elusive peak. Few Europeans get closer than this. 

One who did, though, is Clive Oppenheimer, professor of volcanology at Cambridge, who worked with DPRK scientists to establish exactly when the volcano’s last great outburst, the devastating “Millennium Eruption”, took place. 

The scientists went about this task by taking a carbon sample from a larch tree buried in that cataclysm. With the help of a lab in Zurich, this helped to establish the year as between CE 946 and 947. 

A researcher in Japan then supplied the missing clue: a chronicle maintained at the Kōfukuji temple in Kyoto records that, on 3 November 946, “white ash fell gently like snow” – although no volcano within Japan was known to be erupting at that time.

For the full story of this volcanological detective work – the time-chronicling varves of Lake Suigetsu also get a look-in – it’s best to read the lively write-up in Professor Oppenheimer’s Mountains of Fire. Subtitled The Secret Lives of Volcanoes, the book will give you a much better close-up view of North Korea’s secretive volcano than any window seat on a bucketing buff.

Greenland: a darker shade of white

Review: a Swiss gallery shows Sebastian Copeland's images of the evanescent ice.

Famous for its rail junction, Olten is separated from the settlement of Qaanaaq in northern Greenland by a full thirty degrees of latitude. 

On an unseasonably warm April afternoon, this made the Swiss town an ideal venue for taking in some arctic photography by Sebastian Copeland, one of the genre’s most prominent exponents. Congratulations to IPFO’s Haus der Fotografie for staging this well-curated exhibition in its homely yet spacious gallery.

Space does matter when exhibiting Greenland. The landscape’s scale demands a corresponding expansiveness in print dimensions. And Copeland certainly comes through here. Many of the photos shown at IPFO have previously appeared in his acclaimed book The Arctic: A Darker Shade of White. Yet they surely gain much when viewed on a scale of metres rather than centimetres.

Intriguingly, Copeland opts for the panoramic format in many of his most impressive images. It might be the limitless horizons of polar landscapes that pull so many photographers in this direction. Tiina Itkonen and Stuart D. Klipper, for example, have used wide-format Technorama-type cameras to put together complete collections (thanks, Snowhenge, for introducing these artists). 

Unlike them, Copeland hasn’t gone the whole panoramic hog. A variety of formats was probably better suited to his book. And they work well for the exhibition too. 

In terms of format, he seems to have chosen a conventional portrait or landscape treatment for most of his iceberg studies. Their scale, scope and lighting are almost painterly. 

Entitled “Breakthrough”, one of these images gets a whole gallery wall to itself (above). And rightly so: to my mind, this study invites comparison with works such as Frederic Church’s famous oil of The Icebergs.

Lighting is equally a key element in Copeland’s portraits of Greenlanders. These are presented in a sepia-toned monochrome that was probably not straight out of the camera. 

It’s worth sitting through the accompanying video about “the making of” these images. This shows how Copeland turned an Inuit village's chapel and schoolroom into a makeshift studio, complete with lights and reflectors. Gearheads will note that he used a Canon DSLR with Zeiss lenses.

The technical quality of his images bears witness to Copeland’s background as a commercial photographer before he turned to expeditioning. It stands to reason that skills honed in product or fashion photography can be turned to account when capturing images of icebergs or Greenlanders. This does raise a question, though – what is the product in these circumpolar use cases?

A partial answer comes from the blurb at the exhibition’s entrance. Against the background of the photographer’s face, suitably ice-encrusted, it reads as follows:

For 30 years Sebastian Copeland has been documenting his expeditions and adventures in the form of books, exhibitions, events and films - transforming himself and inspiring the people and organizations that he comes into contact with. He is a climate analyst, award-winning photographer and aspirational athlete and combines these tools to powerfully communicate the urgency of action on climate change and sustainable growth…

Some have queried motivations of this kind, given the carbon output involved in travelling to places like Qaanaaq. But to leave such misgivings aside – I refer you to fellow blogger Snowhenge to give them voice – a more fundamental critique looms. That is, in an age of climate denial, photography just doesn’t seem to be working as a tool to communicate the urgency of action on climate change.

This isn't for the lack of a lengthy history. Landscape photography in Greenland can be traced back, via luminaries and activists such as Ragnar Axelsson and James Balog, for well over a century. Yet, whatever their merits as artists, none of Greenland's many photographers seem to have exerted so much as a milli-erg on actual policymaking.

Does that mean that photographing icebergs is futile? By no means. As the navigator John Davis said, Greenland is “the place of greatest dignitie”. As such, it cries out to be documented. And one day, or rather sooner, we will be grateful for the diligent work of Sebastian Copeland and his peers.

This brings us to the very beginning of colour photography in Greenland, the Swiss scientific expedition of 1912. By good fortune, their legacy is well preserved. Using both hand-tinted glass slides and Autochrome colour prints, the explorers recorded a world that has utterly vanished – whether coastal glaciers, traditional communities or the Greenlanders they portrayed. And their images have the freshness and charm that is reserved for first-comers.

Recent museum displays have shown that individual images from the 1912 expedition can be successfully printed up to Copeland-ish dimensions and even beyond, as seen below at the Swiss National Museum:

And yet, to my knowledge, nobody in the past century has ever staged a pure photography exhibition showing a decent array of these remarkable pictures. 

Should there be any curators out there who find this curious, please get in touch or drop me a comment below. And together we might perhaps have a go at making it happen.

References and further reading

The exhibition of Sebastian Copeland’s Greenland photographs at the IPFO Haus der Fotografie Olten, Switzerland, runs from 11 April to 19 July 2026. 

IPFO stands for the International Photo Festival Olten, a prominent Swiss photography event featuring exhibitions, workshops and lectures. The organization also maintains the Haus der Fotografie (House of Photography), a permanent venue for exhibitions.

Sebastian Copeland, The Arctic: A Darker Shade of White, Rizzoli International Publications, September 2024.

Arctic dreams in Autochrome: How the polar pioneers pursued photography in colour, One Hundred Mountains (this blog).

Alfred de Quervain, Quer durchs Grönlandeis, 1914, available in German in:

Alfred de Quervain, Quer durchs Grönlandeis: Die Expeditionen 1909 und 1912/13, Eingeleitet von Peter Haffner Mit einem Nachwort von Marcel de Quervain Mit Fotos, Verlag Neue Züricher Zeitung, 1998. 

or in English:

Alfred de Quervain, Across Greenland's Ice Cap: The Remarkable Swiss Scientific Expedition of 1912, with an introduction by Martin Hood, Andreas Vieli and Martin Lüthi, McGill-Queen's University Press, May 2022, with more than sixty colour images.