A meizanologist's diary (131)

24 March: resisting the temptation to pour myself another cup of strong and fragrant coffee from the hotel’s “bottomless” pot, I catch the 7.05 bus to the ski resort of Sugadaira. “People who have skied at Sugadaira,” wrote the Hyakumeizan author, "will remember two mountains confronting them across the valley: these are Neko-dake and Azumaya-san, without which Sugadaira would not be worth much.”

Fair enough, but when the bus drops me at a stop called “Davos”, after the Swiss resort, the only mountain I can see is “Davos Hill”, which still has a few ski tracks etched into its dwindling snow cover. Otherwise, the pistes have already lapsed into the somnolence of the “Zwischensaison”.

A roadside map suggests that Azumaya lies somewhere to the east. A long straight lane leads me in that direction, past deserted chalets and the rugby pitches of university summer camps. 

Orange drifts of last year’s larch needles cushion my footfall on the hard tarmac. After the trees end, snow starts to dapple the pastures on either side of the road.

At a farm’s gate, a sign on a wooden box invites me to fill in a tozan-todoke or mountaineering plan. Hmm, truth to tell, there isn’t much of a plan today. And the only map I have is on my phone, copied off the monitor of our home computer. But I file a todoke anyway.

The wisest course seems to be to follow the footprints. Most of these lead up a snowslope towards Neko-dake. It can’t be a mistake to climb a Cat Mountain: we like cats. I pause at a rustic pavilion to admire the serried array of the Northern Alps, all floating luminously above the haze horizon.

Next comes a quiet grove of silver birches, their branches still bare. Mmm, interesting – these seem to be occupying the height band that beech trees would populate in our home mountains of Hokuriku…

Above the wood I catch up with a couple from Kanagawa – they must have started their four-hour drive in the graveyard hours to get up here so fast. Our arrival on the summit is announced by tolling on a ship’s bell that hangs from nearby post, somewhat away from the regulation-issue shrine. 

Like last night's hotel, this summit seems to be fairly eclectic in its cultural references.

As there’s also a panorama table, you could even call Neko-dake a fully equipped public facility. I sit down in its lee to down some rolls and cheese. It’s too early for lunch, but mountaineers need to eat when they can. Thus it is that I’m lagging somewhat behind the Kanagawa couple as they set off towards Azumaya proper.

Just as the snowy ridgetop starts to narrow, the couple disappear, like March hares down an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole. Reaching the spot, I’m in time to see them kick their way down the side of the ridge and along a ledge that runs underneath a giant rock. For folk equipped merely with instep crampons, with no ice-axes or poles, they’re moving with confidence.

To reinforce my own, I put on my own crampons, which have the full twelve points. Then I drop down the rabbit hole onto the snow ledge. A short crossing on frozen snow above a shadowy slope, and the trail leads back to the ridge. I come up with the Kanagawa couple again on an intermediate col.

Now we’re zig-zagging up through the shadowy pine forest on the main peak, our crampons biting well into yesterday’s still-frozen bootprints. 

The summit ridge is a magnificent whorl of snow, from which a corner of the half-buried shrine peeps out. Fukada compares it to "the roof of a thatched hut, standing on four pillars but without walls, as if atop a garden pavilion". The Hyakumeizan author and his friends came up here on skis in mid-March: even now, these open easy-angled slopes must be ideal for ski-touring when there's enough snow.

I take a look along the ridge to see if anyone has continued traversing eastwards: no tracks, so this must be the terminus. It’s time to admire the view. A local climber kindly provides an orientation – judging by his proprietorial air, he must come up here often.

Westwards, the Northern Alps are gradually fading into the noonday haze. To the south, Asama looms large – the unflattering angle renders it as a gigantic slagheap. 

As for that teapot dome to the north, that’ll be Myōkō. Mmm, interesting – three big volcanoes all lined up as if on parade, although so far Azumaya has shown little sign of its kinship with the other two cones.

On the way down, I’m momentarily embarrassed. Since the relevant arm has fallen off the key signpost, I’m uncertain if I’ve reached the turn-off point. I’m starting to regret the lack of a proper map, not to mention GPS (I can’t say that Bre’r David didn’t warn me), when a woman happens by with her young son. She turns out to be Brazilian, but we have enough Japanese in common to sort matters. Yes, I am heading down towards the Torii Pass, where most of the climbers who arrived in cars seem to be coming from...

It was at this pass, by the way, that the mountain got its name. As told in Nihon Hyakumeizan, the story goes that, while returning from his eastern expedition, the warlord Yamato Takeru looked eastward from that spot and uttered a cry of longing ("Azuma-haya!") for his absent wife, the Princess Ototachibana (right)...

Alas, there's no time to pay homage to Yamato Takeru or his commemorative carpark.  Well above the pass, I break off southwestwards to slant across the mountain’s lower slopes. Immediately, the track I’m following dwindles to just a scatter of bootprints, perhaps from earlier in the day. This obviously isn’t the trade route.

At a col where the snow has melted to reveal bright ochre rubble, my nostrils start prickling with the scent of sulphur. And if any doubts linger that Azumaya was once a vigorously erupting volcano, they are dispelled by that view across a gully to the layers of crumbling lava shoring up the main peak’s headwall.

The snow’s becoming too thin and slushy for crampons, so I strap them onto the pack to dry. The tracks, such as they are, lead across a succession of ridges and troughs, then sink down into the silver birch forest. There’s a mid-afternoon bus to catch if I’m to have any chance of supper with the Princess Ototachibana, so I start pushing the pace, occasionally plunge-stepping into the softening snow.

What about the bears, I start to wonder. Not without reason, you understand, as Azumaya ranks in the top tercile of bear encounters on the Hyakumeizan, as collated by Kumamap. Since my bear bell doesn’t seem to be chiming with sufficient vim, I have recourse to chanting “o-jama shimasu” ("please excuse the intrusion"). The gambit is borrowed from the playbook of the extreme Hyakumeizan athlete Tanaka Yōki, although he probably doesn’t go as far as rendering the phrase to the tune of a well-known hymn.

At which point, I pop up over the brow of a rill to encounter what appears to be a human mother with her daughter coming the other way. Escaping with no more than a weird glance from them, I continue my hasty descent in bear bell-only mode, arriving at “Davos” with ten minutes to spare before the 3.10 bus down to Ueda.

A meizanologist's diary (130)

23 March: As you know, the terms of the Japan Rail Pass do not explicitly disallow time travel. So I’m unfazed when the doors of the Hakutaka super express shush open at Ueda and vector me out into a late Shōwa afternoon. Just on the way to the hotel I pass two or three shuttered camera shops – remember those? – all advertising the wares of Kodak and Fujifilm. 

Film, in case anyone under fifty is reading this blog, was a rich smörgåsbord of chemicals smeared onto a celluloid substrate. Still is, in fact: you really should try it some time…

We digress. I check in at the hotel, which has a bookshelf of manga on each of its elevator landings, along with a chair styled in the fashion of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. When I ask the reception about them, they tell me that the hotel’s owner is a fan of the great Scottish designer. Well, this too makes sense: according to Wikipedia, Mackintosh was strongly influenced by the simplicity of Japanese design…

Now I need food for tomorrow. The way to the supermarket leads past a movie palace that looks to be of even greater vintage than Shōwa. The Ueda Eigekijo’s website says it was built in Taishō 6 (1917), on the site of a Meiji-era theatre called the Suehiroza. It still has a coffered ceiling from those days, just like the one in the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo, before it burned down in the Great Kanto Earthquake.

Interior of the Ueda Eigekijo.
Image courtesy of the NPO Ueda Eigekijo.

In the Eigeki’s heyday, maids brought coffee to patrons in the gallery seats and five or six staff were on hand at all times, including ticket sellers, ticket takers, two projectionists, and cleaners. Alas, the opening of a modern multiplex nearby ended its days as a viable cinema in 2011. It’s now kept alive as a cultural centre by a non-profit organisation of concerned citizens. Quite similar, indeed, to the story of the NPO that runs the once and future Mt Fuji research station…

Ueda, by contrast, is cashing in nicely on its retro streetscapes. Film-makers converge on it when they are looking for that mid-Shōwa vibe. In 2013, "Seiten no Hekireki" (“A bolt from the blue”) was filmed here with the aim of recreating Asakusa in the 1960s. The plot follows a struggling stage magician who gets sent back in time, where he befriends his future parents before he's born. Better not try this with a Japan Rail Pass, though…

By the time I have scored myself some bread and cheese at the supermarket, dusk has fallen on old Ueda's machiya and taverns. Still illuminated by the last rays of the sunset, a pink lenticular hovers over the eastern mountains. 

Which reminds me: I’m here to climb a volcano tomorrow. Like the movie palace, Azumaya is somewhat of a period piece, having last erupted a third of a million years ago. But there’s always the weather to worry about. And, of course, the bears...

A meizanologist's diary (129)

15 March: after feeding the rat a bit yesterday, we’ll calm down by taking in a garden. Takamatsu’s Ritsurin is on the way home, more or less. Meizanology can take a break. Or so I delude myself. 

So it is that, after parting with 500 yen to a faceless vending machine, I find myself face to face with a “no drones” sign. Well, there’s no need for such contraptions here: a colourful map gives me the lay of the land quite well enough. 

As I’m starting at the northern gate, I will saunter southwards and hence backwards through time, from the more recently created park-like grounds to the original “stroll gardens” as they were laid out by the local daimyo and his successors from the seventeenth century onwards.

Compared with yesterday’s mountainside, it seems as if biodiversity will be limited. Although “Ritsurin” means “chestnut grove”, it is pine trees, more than a thousand of them, variously trained and manicured, that provide the park with most of its greenery.

This handsome stand of conifers, a sign tells me, was planted by “members of the British royal family” on a state visit in 1922. Tactfully it omits that one of them was the future Edward VIIII and Duke of Windsor.

After such a plethora of pines, it’s a relief to find a grove of tropical cycads, presented by a southern daimyo centuries ago. They look like one of those museum dioramas of the Carboniferous age.

The antics of an egret interrupt my southward stroll. Unabashed by the presence of its fans, it seems to be seeking our applause as it flits across a small stream and strikes a pose on the opposite bank. 

On this warm Sunday morning, the garden settles into a genial groove. Families with children wander here and there. Couples sip tea in rustic pavilions, or admire curiously coiffured conifers. Nobody is wielding selfie sticks, shooting video, or – heaven forfend – flying drones.

Of course, there’s nothing here for the influencer types. You see, Ritsurin is not one of the “Three Great Gardens of Japan”. Loraine Kuck, my favourite author on Japan’s gardens, doesn’t see fit to mention it in her The World of the Japanese Garden. As for Itoh Teiji, another horticultural heavyweight, he consigns it to his book's appendix as the forty-seventh garden out of fifty, where it’s damned with faint praise:

Once a villa of the Matsudaira lords, the Ritsurin is now a park. The Kikugetsu-tei pavilion adjacent to the Nanko pond is well cared for, and the park in general is a fully equipped public facility…

And hardly less dismissive is Donald Richie in his picaresque progress around The Inland Sea:

I could imagine an antiquarian daimyo having built this [pavilion] for himself. He purposely chose the architecture of another, earlier, better age, that of Heian-kyo, with its T’ang influenced roofs, its elegant verandas stretching into the waters. Like the Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimasa, he was sick of his own times, of the wars, and the police-state government. Like Beckford or Horace Walpole, he built this anachronistic pavilion, surrounded by acres of woodland and high walls with guards on them, and created the kind of life he thought he ought to have.

Richie’s intuitions were pretty much on the money. It was a youthful Ikoma Takatoshi (1611–1659), Takamatsu’s daimyo, who set out the garden’s main features. This was in 1625. Fifteen years later, the shogunal authorities attaindered him on charges of misrule – it seems his wife weighed in too, irked by his taste in “male favourites”. Or so Grokipedia insinuates. Ikoma did get to keep his head on his shoulders – not a given in those police-state days – but had to accept a transfer to a smaller, chillier province up north, where no cycads were likely to grow.

None of this unfortunate history seems to be troubling the folk who are enjoying shaved ice and possibly even less salubrious refreshments on Lord Ikoma’s lakeshore. 

Sampans with straw-hatted passengers ply the waters as if they've drifted out of a Hiroshige print. Another chilled-out egret, perched on a pine branch, surveys the scene.

From the bank, children ogle the carp, and they in turn ogle the children – alas, carp fodder is sold out for today, a sign says, for the sake of the fishes’ “helth”.

I stroll onwards up an artificial hill that, a sign tells me, resembles Mt. Fuji. Be that as it may, its summit provides the perfect perspective for viewing Lord Ikoma’s handiwork. 

In the background is a real mountain, Shiun, whose granite cliffs bound the garden on its western side. This “borrowed scenery” melds harmoniously with that of the “fully equipped public facility”.

So why didn’t the Ritsurin make it to the top three gardens list, I wonder. Could it have been the misguided or downright shady characters in the backstory? Or was Takamatsu simply too far away for arbiters of taste to bother with ? 

As if to counterpoint these musings, I happen on one of those neat wooden signs, which tells me (in English) that the Michelin Green Guide has awarded the garden its "highest rating" of three stars. And, it adds – almost plaintively but in Japanese only – back in the Meiji period, an officially approved school textbook once opined that, for its arrangements of stones and trees, the Ritsurin surpasses even the top three…

While pondering this appeal, I stroll up another eminence only to find, to my mild astonishment, that this one too supposedly resembles Mt. Fuji. As if to underscore the claim, the second hill even goes by the name of Fuyō, a poetic name for the top mountain. 

Now, finally, I'm starting to get it. As a garden with a brace of Mt. Fujis side by side, the Ritsurin must necessarily be in a class of its own. Meizanologically speaking, it would be a solecism to lump this garden in with those other three, the ones with their merely monadic Mt. Fujis...

On the way out, a spray of white petals is glimpsed hanging over another tea-green pool. Just the merest hint of spring, of course, as if mediated through the most refined display of ikebana. So the cherry blossom front has arrived in Takamatsu. Now it really is time to go home; the Sensei's garden will soon need weeding...

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 descent, 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 in 1923 - the year of the Great Tokyo Earthquake - when a teacher by the name of Kitagawa Jun’ichirō took charge of the Matsuyama High School’s “travel club”. 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 stature struggle to paint mountains convincingly, and ends by theorising 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, or even not-so-high ones, could bestow the self-same gifts, it should 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, it would be no surprise 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-vintage spectacles?