Biting the world heritage berry

A muted cheer for UNESCO's inscription of the highest Greek mountain.

On the way up to the hut on Mt Olympus, there used to grow a spiky shrub festooned with glossy black berries. In case anybody was tempted to try one, a sign warned them off in perfect English: caution, poisonous plant, don’t eat.

Two decades after encountering this deceitful shrub, I’m wondering if our Greek hosts haven’t just indulged in an enticingly lubricious fruit of a different kind. Last week, Mt. Olympus was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, alongside the D-Day landing beaches and the ancient Japanese capitals of Asuka and Fujiwara.

In the case of Olympus, designated as a mixed world heritage site in recognition of its cultural and natural significance, the news was met in Greece with “near euphoria”, according to the Guardian.

In a previous article, the same newspaper quotes Dimitris Pappas, an official of the Olympus national park management agency, as saying “There’s no doubt that if the area is declared a UNESCO world heritage site it will help contribute to the mountain’s protection.”

Back in 2003, the mountain seemed to be looking after itself quite well. The path from the plateau where I left my rented car led off through shady woods. By the time that we emerged from the trees, afternoon clouds had veiled the sun.

It was cool at 2,060 metres, where the Spilios Agapitos Refuge stands in its grove of pine trees. A mule was parked placidly outside, waiting for somebody to remove its paniers. I stepped around it and into the hut.

Patrons are these days advised to book their stay here “months in advance”. As the local town mayor quoted in the Guardian says, “Olympus’s carrying capacity has reached its limit.” Last year, half a million people visited the mountain. And that was without the added amphetamine shove of a UNESCO inscription.

Because the refuge stands higher than many an alpine hut, the atmosphere within was relaxed. As the summit rises only eight hundred vertical metres above, there would be no need for an alpine start, so no call to fossick around with headtorches while fumbling for the path in the dark.

Instead, we stepped out of the door after a leisurely breakfast of buttered bread with honey washed down with black coffee. Nobody charged us a peak fee, or made us fill in forms, or demanded evidence of a rescue bond, or checked our footwear (although I’m moderately confident that my old but trusty Zamberlans would have ticked that box). Nor did they insist that we bring rain pants as well as a jacket.

For a couple of hours, we walked up a winding and well-marked path, crunching over limestone splinters, and so out onto the hogsback of Skala (2,882 metres). 

Candidates for the main summit of Mytikas (2,918 metres) must then leave the hiking path and step onto the bare rocky floor of a stone couloir that looks as if some ancient cirque glacier might have scooped it out.

Yet route-finding remained straightforward, thanks to the sequence of red paint dots marking the way. No cables or chains defaced the rock, nor was there any need for them – the rock strata here helpfully form natural steps, so that the scrambling was easier than the angle of the couloir’s backwall might suggest.

Except for the red dots, indeed, the mountain seemed to be much as Frédéric Boissonnas and Daniel Baud-Bovy found it in August 1913, when they made the peak’s first modern ascent guided by Christos Kakkalos. The two Swiss alpinists must have felt at home here – in form, geology and height, Olympus resembles a typical “Kalkberg” of the Helvetic Alps. 

After the Great War, Kakkalos went on to accompany Marcel Kurz of Zurich's Academic Alpine Club to the massif’s second highest summit. By a curious coincidence, Kurz was the only Swiss alpinist to be mentioned in Japan’s most famous mountain book. A tireless monographer, he later published Le Mont Olympe, a book that includes the first detailed map of the summits.

You could assemble a platoon or two of hikers atop Mytikas. But the summit rocks were a relaxed place in September 2003. The handful of visitors may or may not have forgotten themselves so far as to shake hands. But nobody was taking selfies. After all, we would have had to wait seven years before uploading them onto Instagram.

Now we were now cut off from the lower world. A sea of cloud, or more likely morning mist, had swirled up and over the lower peaks. On my way down, a gust of wind took my favourite baseball cap and flung it into a gully, a small votive offering to Zeus and his crew. That couldn’t happen today, of course – helmets are more or less de rigueur while climbing in the couloir, no doubt for good reason.

In fact, they might one day soon be compulsory, depending on how deeply the Mt Olympus park authorities bite into the world heritage berry. If this happens, remember you read it here first.

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3 April We’ve climbed Arashima-dake in spring and autumn, but our winter attempt back in January didn’t get far. We’re hoping for better luck in this in-between season, when spring is starting to tinge the lower woods with green but snow still covers the summit ridges.

Alas, the snow has long since melted off a new sign enforcing one-way traffic on the ‘up’ and ‘down’ paths – an unwelcome byproduct of Arashima’s status as a Hyakumeizan peak. Excessive signage is a bête noire of Alex Kerr in his recent book on Hidden Japan:

Despite being known as the land of aesthetics, the physical environment of Japan could better be called the land of junk. It’s overwhelming, all enveloping. Tourists, Japan and foreign, simply don’t see it because they’re so focused on finding what’s beautiful. That’s a credit to their love of Japan. But the junk is there nonetheless.

We are soon distracted by an elegant slime mould growing on the path – I hope it will have the sense to complete its reproductive cycle before the Hyakumeizan-bagging hordes trample it flat later in the season. Or perhaps it’s lying in wait for them.

Now we’re climbing into the beechwoods. And that is an impressive burl on one of the trees – common enough in old forests, so Google says. It looks like the obi on a well-fitted kimono....

We meet a first snowdrift on Mochi-ga-kabe, the step that leads up to the summit ridge, but don’t deem it worthy of our crampons. That’s as well, because there’s still a hundred metres of dry, bouldery path to negotiate above it.

Nevertheless, we meet a mountain photographer coming down who seems to prefer crunching over the rocks in his new-looking climbing irons. Dry tooling is all the rage now, they say.

A steep ramp, which we tackle with crampons, leads us to the summit ridge, with aery views over to Hakusan. Even if we couldn’t identify our famous local ‘white mountain’, we would be sorted by the computer-generated panorama table that awaits us on the summit.

No need to invoke Alex Kerr for a rant here: the Hyakumeizan author expressed his views on such fixtures decades ago:

You never saw such things in the old days and, speaking for myself, I prefer my summits unencumbered with them. (Senjо̄-dake, One Hundred Mountains of Japan)

But the junk is there nonetheless.

Back in the bare woods, we are coming down the path as fast as our ageing knees will allow when we hear an odd clapping sound, somewhat guttural. I take it to be a large bird, pre-flighting its wings. Or, the Sensei says, it might be the discreet cough that a polite bear utters to remind visitors of his presence.

Birds or a courteous bear? A true Meizan is an inexhaustible font of mountain mysteries.

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2 April (cont.): ideally, one shouldn't visit the Miidera just as its famous cherry trees come into full bloom. I mean, the temple has hundreds of Important Cultural Properties, and how can you pay due attention to them with all that sakura in your face? Nevertheless, the Miidera lies on the way home and my Japan Rail Pass turns into a pumpkin at midnight. So it’s now or never…

Miidera, or the Onjō-ji, features as the eighth destination in Alex Kerr’s latest book, Hidden Japan: An Astonishing World of Thatched Villages, Ancient Shrines and Primeval Forests. Since the temple is “hidden in plain sight”, the taxi driver has no difficulty in finding it – it would have been an easy walk from the station, but every minute counts now that we’re halfway through the afternoon.

Without a millisecond to waste, I walk through the Daimon Gate – repurposed from Hideyoshi’s Fushimi Castle – and up the stone steps to the courtyard in front of the Kondo. This great hall was built in 1599 with funds donated by Hideyoshi’s widow. Regime change seems to have done this temple no harm at all.

The Kondo, Kerr writes, is “one of the most splendid Momoyama buildings in existence …expansive and strong, yet delicate and light.” 

Alas, the late afternoon shadows, not to mention the distracting highlights of the flowering trees, reduce the otherwise graceful hall to a black hulk. So I give up on architectural appreciation, shuck off my shoes, and go inside.

Halfway round our clockwise shuffle around the hall, we come to a dark corner. And there, as if carefully segregated from the fine and polished examples of classical statuary all about, are seven figures that look as if they were roughly hewn out of a discarded log. The labels identify each one as a “dragon king” (or queen), yet each wears a gentle and engaging smile.

Image courtesy of Miidera1200 (Instagram)

I make a slight bow in their direction. This is by way of an apology. In One Hundred Mountains of Japan, the English version of Fukada Kyūya’s Nihon Hyakumeizan, mention is made of a wandering monk called Enkū (1632–1695), said to have been the first to climb Kasa-ga-dake in the Northern Alps: “This is the monk,” says the translation, “who with a hatchet carved an image of the Buddha that latterly became famous.”

One image? That should have read thousands. Enkū himself vowed to carve 120,000 religious effigies during his lifetime, and he may well have done so. Ten a day could have sufficed, one scholar has calculated. At any rate, something like 4,320 of his sculptures survive. These include the seven in front of me, which were rediscovered as recently as 1963, in a dusty niche above the Miidera’s revolving sutra repository.

As this history suggests, both Enkū and his works fell into obscurity after his death. It was only in the 1930s that scholars started to take an interest in him, and not until the late 1950s – just before Fukada started writing Nihon Hyakumeizan – that big museums began to exhibit Enkū’s statues.

As a result, Enkū’s origins are difficult to establish. He grew up in Mino Province, in the southern reaches of what is today’s Gifu Prefecture. When he was seven years old, his mother may or may not have perished in a great flood. Later he took religious orders in the Tendai sect and set out on mountain pilgrimages in all parts of the realm.

A visit to Hakusan in June 1679 seems to have been particularly revelatory. While Enkū was meditating beneath a waterfall, the Hakusan deity appeared to him and announced “Here lives Shaka.” From this time forward, says Julian Daizan Skinner, a modern Rinzai Zen master, “his work is considered to take on a new depth and excellence.”

Curiously, it was in the very next month that Enkū came here to the Onjō-ji and received the "Succession Lineage of the Buddha-nature Eternal Vajra Castle" from the hands of the Great Abbot Dōei himself. This, and we seem to be on firm historical ground here, was on July 5th of the seventh year of Enpō (1679). The Hōryū-ji in Nara had bestowed a similar honour on him some years before.

As Alex Kerr notes, Enkū did not often seek out the great prelates of Kyoto and Nara. He preferred to make the rounds of country villages, offering his services as a traditional healer or performing ceremonies to end a drought. However, Kerr suggests, he may have made an exception for the Miidera on account of its “mystical Mikkyō teachings”. Enkū visited the temple again in August 1689 and received a further transmission, this time from the Abbot Son’ei.

Tradition has it that Enkū ended his days far from the big cities. Returning to his hometown in Gifu, he had a cave dug into the banks of the Nagara River and entered into his final meditation there – at the very same place where his mother had been swept away in a great flood so many years before.

By the time I leave the Kondo, the sun has set behind the bulk of Hiei-zan. At least the sakura are less distracting, now that the shadows have muted them. 

There’s just time for a last quick circuit of the temple grounds. Last of all, I pass the sacred spring which gives the Onjō-ji the name that everybody knows it by: Miidera, the temple of the three wells. 

Now it really is time to run for that evening Thunderbird. Only hours are left on my well-worn Rail Pass...

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2 April: nansen-hokuba, 南船北馬, sailing south by boat, riding north on horseback is a phrase that denotes the urge to madly rush about. Overtaken by just such an impulse when a Japanese Rail Pass is about to expire, I let the Hokuriku Main Line waft me down to Kusatsu on the shores of Lake Biwa.

Although it may seem off-script for a meizanologist to visit a museum dedicated to a lake, an exception has to be made here. As a geological phenomenon, Lake Biwa is remarkable not just for its size – the largest freshwater expanse in Japan – but for its age. Most lakes fill in quickly, yet Biwa-ko has endured for four million years, so that it sustains no fewer than sixty or so endemic plants and fish.

An exhibit in the endemic Lake Biwa Museum explains this longevity. The reconstructed site of a geological fault line shows how the lake’s rocky floor has kept sinking over time, at roughly a metre every thousand years. In addition, the lake has tended to migrate in a northerly direction.

I’m reminded of the folk tale that a Godzilla-like giant Daidarabotchi excavated Lake Biwa, all in a single night, and piled up Mt. Fuji from the left-over spoil-tip…

The folk tale has it right in one respect - the lake has a history that is every bit as epic as the mountain's. Back in the museum, a diorama takes us into the deep past, when elephants roamed through forests of metasequoia, and crocodiles lurked at their watering holes. The elephants dwindled in size over time, thus anticipating the art of bonsai by almost two million years. 

One of these smaller elephants later caused a sensation. In 1804, when people discovered its fossilised bones on the lake’s western shore, they thought at first they’d found the remains of a dragon.

From geology, we move into historical times. In the feudal era, long barges known as maruko-bune plied the lake, moving as elegantly as a modern N700, if not quite as fast.

There’s also a typical lakeside house, set up as it was in 1964, when water came from a stream and the nightsoil went straight onto the vegetable patch. In his Japan Journals, Donald Richie recalls how this latter practice led in the late 1940s to what he wryly calls a reverse Occupation…

After an hour or so among the cultural exhibits, I decide to make shorter work of those on insect and plant life.

After gawking at a giant dragonfly, I follow the children who are tugging their parents in the direction of the museum’s famous aquarium. 

Somehow I manage to miss an encounter with a giant catfish, one of the so-called lords of Lake Biwa. This one must have luck on its side too, having miraculously survived the rupture of its tank three years ago.

I miss the catfish because I’m distracted by a friendly seal, who seems to be inspecting his visitors as curiously as they are inspecting him. Surely he can’t be an endemic? No, the seal is a Russian émigré, imported from Baikal, presumably one of Biwa-ko's Twin Lakes. I hope he doesn't miss the depths and ice sheets of his native waters.

Intending patrons of this museum should note that there is only one bus an hour back to Kusatsu station. Before catching the next one, there's just time to stroll out onto the outdoor viewing platform. A brisk spring breeze is whipping up white-capped waves out on the lake.

Under the clear sky, I start to appreciate Lake Biwa's scale. It seems reasonable that scooping it out would leave you with a Mt. Fuji-sized spoil-tip. How sad then that the volumes don’t match. No, not at all – the savants have calculated that you’d need to dig out something like fifty* Lake Biwa basins to pile up just one 3,776 metre-high mountain. Now even for a Daidarabotchi, that sounds too much like hard work...

*Footnote: Or perhaps only thirty-seven Lake Biwa basins. In his Fujiyama: The Sacred Mountain of Japan (1924), the o-fuda expert and anthropologist Frederick Starr has this to say:-

The Japanese often claim that Mount Fuji was formed in a single night and that simultaneously with its elevation the basin of Lake Biwa was scooped out. Apparently the idea is that the material from the lake basin was thrust up into the mountain. The distance between the two mountain and lake is about one hundred and fifty miles. 

Lake Biwa takes its name from its shape. The biwa is a musical instrument something like a guitar. The lake is contracted at the middle by a bending in of the shore lines. It is about 36 miles long, and 12 miles in greatest width. 

So persistent is this notion of a relation between the lake and mountain that Professor Omori has seen fit to demolish it by a calculation. According to the popular notion there should be some equivalence of bulk between the mountain and the lake basin. 

In Japanese measures Lake Biwa is 16 ri 9 cho 45 ken in length by 5 ri 26 cho 49 ken in greatest breadth; it covers an area of 44.5 square ri and has an average depth of 130.7 shaku; its volume is 20,956 cubic cho, or 0.449 cubic ri. 

Mount Fuji rises to a height of 34.6 cho above the sea; it covers an area of about 68 square ri; considering it a regular cone, its volume will be 16.7 cubic ri. The volume of Mount Fuji then will be thirty-seven times that of the water in Lake Biwa.

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29 March (cont): on the way home, we stop at the Hill of Oshitoishi. The place is listed in the Aso Geopark's application for Unesco heritage status as just "a group of megalithic andesite stones located on a hill 845 metres above sea level", but we understand that it has a bit of a new age vibe too.  

Arriving at the car park in one piece, no thanks to the rough approach road, we fork out three hundred yen each at a makeshift booth. In return, the attendant hands over a brochure, proudly pointing out to us the bit about Oshitoishi’s mysterious alignment along paths representing water, fire and the sun. These, the brochure suggests, may be divine paths created during the Jōmon period.

For my money, the “Path of the Sun” is the one to watch. The brochure shows it slanting away directly from this hill through the Tokugawa mausoleum at Nikkō and then right on out into the Pacific. Follow it far enough, I reckon, and you’d surely end up at Glastonbury.

Taking leave of the amiable attendant, who has also lent us a brace of compasses, we wander uphill in search of stones. 

The brochure says that a 360-degree panorama awaits us up there, along with a sacred Jōmon site and the power spot of Oshitoshi. And by way of background, it relates that

The Minami-oguni Town Board of Education discovered mysterious engraved patterns on the megalithic group at Oshitoishi Hill. They commissioned Kei Koda, president of the Japan Petroglyph Association, to investigate, and it was confirmed that these were Sumerian characters (petroglyphs). Subsequently, this megalithic group was recognised by international academic societies, including the UNESCO Society for Petrology and the Petrology Societies of the United States and Canada, as a prehistoric megalithic cultural site consisting of nine artificially arranged stone rows.

Artificially arranged or not, we are grateful for those stone rows. Fatigued after our vigorous morning hike, we arrange ourselves over the first of them for a rest. 

Although the sky has clouded over, Oshitoishi delivers handsomely on its promise of a 360-degree panorama. We can still see the central peaks of Aso-san to the south, while eastwards rise the volcanic tumps of the Kujū range. 

The view is spacious, austere and bracing all at once. It explains why talented photographers like Kawauchi Rinko keep seeking out these vast and rolling hillscapes…

Behind us, just upslope, is the Kagami-ishi that we’ve come so far to see. Now it’s time to inspect it. Again, I reach for the brochure to see what mysteries this “mirror stone” may reflect:

The Kagami-ishi bears Sumerian inscriptions representing a serpent god and a sacred bull. Our local place name is Nakabaru in Minami-oguni Town. As the serpent god is read as 'Naga' and the sacred bull as 'Baal', it is thought that the place name Nakabaru is derived from the Sumerian characters.

To the untrained eye, all that can be seen are flecks of lichen and some rune-like rills and cracks. But that doesn’t mean that the bull isn’t there, or the serpent. It’s a fact that the Sumerians and the Jōmons overlapped for more than two millennia – allowing ample time for a venturesome Sumerian to sail his (or her) reed boat as far as Nagasaki and hop on the Shinkansen down to Kumamoto, chisel in hand…

This reverie is interrupted when the Sensei hands me a compass. Momentarily bemused, I take another glance at the brochure.

The Oshito Stone is 5.5 metres high, has a circumference of 15.3 metres, and forms the centre of a group of megaliths. The North Star lies directly north of its apex. Strangely, the magnetic field around this stone is abnormal, so that a compass spins wildly when brought near it. Legend has it that it will rain if you try to climb the stone. It was formerly known as 'the demon's beanbag', and has attracted people’s admiration since ancient times.

Naruhodo: the compass should swing if we bring it near the rock. But nothing would be less surprising – since all the rock around here is andesite, as it is in half of Kyushu, it’s more than likely to be magnetic. That said, the Oshito is an exceptionally magnificent megalith. In days gone by, warlords would have fought for the privilege of planting it in their gardens.

I’m about to give the compass a whirl anyway when we’re distracted. A mother – and is it just me, or do I not detect something faintly Sumerian in her lineaments – is handing a spoon to her pig-tailed daughter. Just an ordinary tablespoon, mind you, but given that we’re standing at a veritable ganglion of ley lines, something is bound to happen.

Nor are we disappointed. Steering her daughter by the shoulders, the mother begins to shuffle round the Oshito Rock in a clockwise direction. The little girl walks on ahead, holding the spoon upright in both hands like a votive candle. And right then and there it happens – the spoon bends and wilts in her hands like a plant you’ve forgotten to water.

At least, that’s how the Sensei later describes it to me – she actually saw the bent spoon, if not the spoon bending, with her own eyes, but my gaze is diverted elsewhere at the critical moment. In fact, I’m looking at the handwritten sign that somebody has left at the foot of the rock. 'Supūn wo okanaide,' it says – please don’t leave your spoons.

I look up at the Sensei. There is a hint of concern in her expression: something seems to be troubling her. "That sign," she says, 'it’s ungrammatical. It should read Supūn wo itte okanaide." Don't leave without taking your spoons with you.

So there we have to leave it, I'm afraid. Nobody can say for certain whether the Oshitoishi will bend your spoons. So don't blame me if it does. Or doesn't. One thing can be avowed, though - once you get within the old stone's spot of power, you need to watch out most carefully that your sense of style and syntax doesn't get itself distorted...