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22 January: the hotel’s hyperborean temperatures help me go for an asa-ichi alpine start. Out on the street, the wind knifes through several layers of fibrepile. This is no day to be up a mountain; it will be challenge enough to work out how to get home from Shikoku.

Flakes of snow swirl through the predawn air as I walk past the deserted factory of the Sadamitsu Foodstuffs Company to catch the 7.09 am westwards. 

At Awa-Takeda, the efficient station clerk says that the Sensei’s hometown is cut off by heavy snow – no trains are running from either Kyoto or Maibara. However, he suggests, you could always take the long way round, via Tokyo and Nagano. The first step, though, is to get back to the mainland.

It’s not often that the Shinkansen becomes an instrument of enquiry. Yet, starting with the pink Sakura from Okayama (but no Hello Kitty this time), we’re about to make a transverse section through a classic Japanese winter weather pattern – the continental high/Pacific low snow-making machine.

As far as Osaka, the sky stays bright and windy, although the scattered clouds are “streeting” just as they do on their snow-spawning march over the Japan Sea. 

The first sign of trouble starts at Kyoto. Mt Atago is lightly dusted, and you can see the snow squalls sweeping over the Kitayama hills. Even so, it’s hard to believe the regular announcements that heavy snowfall is causing delays on the Tokaido Shinkansen…

Then the sunlight fades and, running past Biwa, the Hikari noses into the first snow showers. Soon the train slows to half its normal speed in a near-whiteout. This is heavier weather than on yesterday’s mountain.

Mt Ibuki, famed for its snow accumulations, goes by invisibly in the murk, but soon afterwards we run out into the sun again. At Gifu-Hachiman, there’s no more snow on the ground and only the streeting clouds testify to the strong winds aloft.

The Hikari streaks through Shizuoka with such despatch that there’s hardly time to appreciate Fuji trailing its classic winter banner cloud. And by Tokyo, even without the help of Hello Kitty, we’ve made up all but five minutes of the delay.

Within half an hour, I’m on a Hayataka heading north. We pass a lightly dusted Mt Asama under clear skies, running into the first snow showers well north of Nagano. 

At Nao-etsu the clouds break up enough to show their tops catching the last rays of sunset. The train arrives at the Sensei’s hometown only a few minutes late.

Snow flurries down again as I shiver in the bus queue. Even the municipal tyrannosaurus seems a bit under the weather this evening…

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21 January: I report back to the Sadamitsu Taxi company at 7.15 am. At a quarter to eight, the boss comes in and convenes a works council. No, they can’t drive me to Tsurugi-san's summer trailhead, as the road up there is too icy for their two-wheel-drive Toyotas. But they can go as far as the bridge at Kuwadaira (Mulberry Flats) at 600 metres. That’ll do fine, I say, and a young driver ushers me to his car.

We’re soon winding our way along a narrow road at the bottom of a vertiginous gorge. About halfway up the valley, the driver points out a cluster of houses around a hot spring ryokan. That’s the last place you can stay, he says.

He’s also quizzing me delicately about my experience and kit. I try to reassure him, and then he asks how I’m thinking of getting back. I have to admit this part of the plan is, ah, still under review. An element of Hello Kitty may be required. Although, in a gesture at professionalism, I have promised the Sensei I’ll turn back at 2 pm.

At 8.30 am, I wave goodbye to the taxi at Kuwadaira. From here, my hiking area map assures me, a good path leads straight up a ridge to the usual starting point for summer Hyakumeizan baggers. The course time should be no more than three hours and twenty minutes. 

Right beside me is a neatly revetted stone ramp, which must be the trail’s starting point. True, the path is somewhat overgrown, but it leads me over a rusty bridge and into the usual grove of cryptomerias. And then it vanishes into a bed of fallen leaves….

For a moment, I think of heading uphill on a compass bearing. But there’s no time for fossicking about in search of a possibly non-existent path. Returning to the road, I start walking up it. A sign says that it’s 15 kilometres to the Tsurugi ski resort. Well, OK, perhaps I can pick up the hiking trail where it crosses the road higher up.

Higher up, the hiking trail shows no signs of reappearing, and so I’m committed to the road, which must be twice as long as the vanished path. And the taxi drivers were right about the ice – the occasional patches are now merging together into a continuous glaze of frozen ruts. I try to keep to the less treacherous snow at the road’s edge.

The sky fades from blue to grey as I gain height. Once or twice, pairs of deer fleet away into the forest’s understorey. There seem to be plenty of them around. Now yesterday's newspaper had a story about an enterprising hunter in Mie who’s set up a cannery to sell prepackaged venison curry from culled deer …

While I’m sniffing an imaginary curry, the ski resort heaves into view. It looks no less defunct than Sadamitsu's cinema, although its buildings are still intact. The same cannot be said for the half-derelict building near the La Forêt lodge. I take note of it, however, as a potential bivvy spot.

By now, two cars have passed me going down, crunching their way over the rutted ice: their drivers have presumably summited and are now on the way home. The road is getting lonely, but since it’s only 12.30 pm when I reach the shrine at the foot of the final climb, there’s no reason to stop here.

Any hopes that the climbing path will be more amendable than the road are dashed. This mountain may be a soft touch in summer, but in winter it demands to be taken seriously. I put on crampons, unclip the ice axe and head up into the clouds. A flurry of snow comes down as I pass two distinctive rock pillars – chert, perhaps, or limestone. But no time for a closer look. The wind’s getting up and the clouds are lowering. Wooden steps lead up past a shuttered hut and suddenly my watch altimeter is reading above two thousand metres. This must be the summit.

Intriguingly, a line of footsteps continues across the summit plateau and heads towards a ridge that leads off southwards. Out of curiosity, I follow these tracks for a few minutes and then – bingo! – my watch reads two o’clock and it really is time to turn back. Snow is swirling thickly down, giving my crampons some extra bite on the frozen path.

Taking shelter in the shrine by the car park, I put on my windjacket and extra headgear, as reserved for Scottish-style “full conditions”. Then I set out along the snow-covered road. An overhead sign near the ruined lodge tells me it’s thirty-nine kilometres to Sadamitsu, which would make it around twenty to the onsen village in the gorge.

At 4.30 pm, the snow has stopped falling, the light is fading, and it’s time to take stock. I’m still above a thousand metres and there is no way to assume a taxi. As for hitchhiking, no car has passed since around noon, either upwards or downwards. I’m just settling in for a long walk, resigning myself to one of those Type Two Meizan experiences, when the wholly unexpected crunch of tyres on snow reaches my ears.

Minutes later, I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a warm four-wheel-drive van. My host appears to be a Mage of the Shikoku Mountains – he’s climbed Tsurugi seven hundred times (did I really hear that right?) and has a taste for solo excursions. But how did we not cross paths on the mountain? Because he’d traversed over Tsurugi to a refuge hut on another peak, before returning to his van – those must have been his bootprints that I’d briefly followed beyond the summit.

Before my host drops me off at Sadamitsu, I ask him about the path from Kuwadaira that I’d tried to follow in the morning. Oh, that one, he says, nobody has climbed it since the road was built, and it just faded away years ago.

Mystery of the missing path (arrowed).

After the white van drives off in the direction of Tokushima, I look in at the Sadamitsu Taxi Company, just in case they feel I’ve filed a constructive tozan todoke (climbing plan) with them. The young driver kindly offers to ring around to find a lodging. A shuttered business hotel is persuaded to open, sort of, and I’m under the futon by nine.

True, the aircon unit has seen better days, taking all night to raise the room temperature from eight to twelve degrees. But, heck, that’s still a lot warmer than bivvying in a derelict lodge up on the mountain. I fall asleep dreaming of venison curry.

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20 January: “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with Hello Kitty.” 

The ageless wisdom of Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (suitably updated) applies with special force today. For, seconds after the efficient clerk issues me with the series of tickets that will take me over to Shikoku, it’s announced that the Kyoto train will divert to avoid high winds.

Trying to make up the lost half hour, I abandon the Thunderbird at Maibara and hop onto a Shinkansen to Shin-Osaka. The next westbound connection happens to be a battered pink stopping train dedicated to Hello Kitty. 

Yet, by the time we reach Okayama, we’ve somehow caught up with the efficient clerk’s original schedule, even though this had called for a ride on the high-speed Nozomi. How is that even possible? Well, thank you anyway, Hello Kitty…

From Okayama, a diesel train runs over the world’s longest truss bridge to Japan’s fourth largest island. I watch the tiderace swirling and foaming scant metres below while sipping a coffee that promises to deliver a “full-bodied bitterness”. 

We’re welcomed back to dry land by the sight of Mt Iino, the “Sanuki Fuji”. And by mid-afternoon, a local train drops me at Sadamitsu, the jumping-off point for Shikoku’s Tsurugi-san, one of the island’s two Hyakumeizan.

It doesn’t take long for the plan to derail again. Calling in at the Sadamitsu Taxi Company, I ask if they can drive me to the mountain’s foot tomorrow. “Hmm,” is the reply, “we never go up there in winter, but let me discuss with the drivers and we’ll let you know tomorrow morning.”

There’s nowhere to stay in Sadamitsu, as everything but the supermarket seems to have been shuttered for the season. Except, that is, for the cinema, which must have shuttered decades ago: it’s still promoting 203 Kōchi (Hill 203), a film about the Russo-Japanese War that came out in the mid-fifties of the Shōwa era. This really is a town that time forgot.

After holing up in a business hotel in the next town, I consult the Sensei by phone. While reporting that my transport arrangements are in disarray, I remark that the Hyakumeizan author himself had to make two attempts to get up Tsurugi-san. But that was because of a rainstorm, points out the Sensei, while with you it’s your lack of planning…

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17 January: although it’s still dark when we arrive at the car park for Kanmuri-yama, we’re too late to find a space. So we drive several kilometres further to a spot where we can approach the mountain from another direction.

Setting off along a river valley, we make good progress – until a side stream blocks our path. Forget Kanmuri, it’s decided, we’ll turn left, up this ridge, and climb Wakamaru-yama (1,286 metres) instead.

We snowshoe up a steep slope, weaving through brushwood, until we reach the open halls of the beech groves. Unlike on Kanmuri, where a well-trodden trench must lead to the top, the snow is untracked. With nine of us taking turns, though, we should be able to russell our way up nicely.

This is not the only difference with Kanmuri. If that “Echizen Matterhorn” is your hail-fellow-well-met kind of mountain, flaunting its rocky summit block far and wide – heck, it even has an English-language Wikipedia page – then Wakamaru is the strong, silent type. Indeed, an hour after we start up the ridge, I’m still wondering when we’ll actually set eyes on it.

Despite its shy and retiring nature, Wakamaru has never lacked for discerning admirers. One fan was none other than Imanishi Kinji (1902–1992), the ecologist, ethnographer and anthropologist who helped to found the Academic Alpine Club of Kyoto and led a reconnaissance expedition to Manaslu, “Japan’s eight-thousander”, in the 1950s.

Having seen the mountain from a distance during his student days, Imanishi (left) set his heart on climbing it. And when, half a century later, the chance finally presented itself, he asked the doyen of Fukui’s mountaineering community, Masunaga Michio, to guide him. For then as now, no path leads up Wakamaru.

The two men set out on a cloudless May morning in 1978. Wrens had started to sing, but the air was still chilly and frost sheened the grassy flats on the mountain’s northern side. At the end of the forest road, they had to ford a river before taking to a curving gully that was still crammed with snow. Above them the sky was an “incredible blue”…

Right now, we’re not much bothered with the sky because we’re descending a wooded spur. Using our snowshoes as crampons, we carefully side-step down over tree roots and rock steps. Appreciable declivities open up on either side as we come down to the ridge that leads towards Wakamaru.

Only when we’ve regrouped do we notice that the sky is no longer blue. Grey clouds float on a sea of haze – the wind must be freighting in a new cargo of kosa dust from China. Now and then, a pallid spot of sunlight drifts over the nearby hills.

Feeble as it is, the sunlight is softening the snow by the minute. So when the slope starts to steepen again, where the connecting ridge abuts on Wakamaru’s southern flank, our snowshoes start to sink dauntingly deep.

It’s my turn up front. At first, I try zig-zagging, as if tackling a slope on a Swiss ski-tour. But then the narrowing ridge forces us to go straight up. Wow: while following the leaders, I had no idea the snow was this soft – the sludge slides backwards under my snow shoes at every step.

Falling out of a rotten snowstep, I go sprawling. Without a word, our two senior members pick up the lead. One of them is senior enough to have contributed a lively article to Arashima no Fuyu. Embarrassed, I hasten after them. But there’s no catching up with these veterans. We overcome a small rockstep by climbing a tree (A0), and the way is free to Wakamaru’s summit ridge.

“All at once, the world seemed to open up,” records Masunaga-san when he reached the same spot almost half a century ago. And so it does for us too. Over there is the magnificent hulk of Nogo-Hakusan, the mountain from which the youthful Imanishi first saw Wakamaru.

And all around us are mountains as far as the eye can see. Indeed, I gradually realise that mountains are all we can see – there's no trace of human habitation: no villages, no roads, no river works … although it may be that today's low clouds and haze are helping to hide them.

And instantly it’s obvious why Imanishi Kinji – scholar-alpinist, Himalayan pioneer and aficionado of vast open spaces – so cherished this remote and retiring peak.

 

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12 January: thanks to yesterday’s cold front, which swept away the haze, we get a clear view of Japan’s top mountain from the morning Kagayaki. 

It is Mt Fuji that hales us to Tokyo today, for a meeting of the Fuyō Nikki no Kai. This is a research association dedicated to the memory of the meteorologist Nonaka Itaru and his wife Chiyoko, who held out on the summit of Mt Fuji for almost three months in the winter of 1895 while they made weather observations.

As usual, we meet in the offices of the non-profit organisation that leases the buildings of Mt Fuji's former summit weather station. After the weathermen went down the mountain for the last time in 2004, their jobs taken over by automated instruments, the NPO has kept up the buildings so that high-altitude researchers can use them during the summer months.

This year, the NPO Mt Fuji Research Station will celebrate its second decade, and we discuss how to mark the event (please watch this space). After the meeting, our association’s literary scholar presses a bag of Mt Fuji-themed confectionery into our hands. 

And, in case we feel in need of more cerebral fare, a former head of the weather station lends us some DVDs about its illustrious backstory.

Now it looks as if we have some homework to do…

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10 January: we’re following a snow trench that leads from the car park at Kadohara to the summit of Arashima-dake (1,523m), our prefecture’s only Hyakumeizan peak. So far, there’s no need for snowshoes or crampons on this well-trodden snow. But the icy gusts persuade us most feelingly to wear everything we have.

We climb in the shadows until the sun starts to filter through the beeches. Lumps of snow, blown from the branches, explode on their way down so that sheets of spindrift whirl through the trees. It is a fresh morning.

In three seasons of the year, Arashima is a straightforward hike by any of its main routes. Winter is different:

The winter monsoon winds transform Arashima. Northwesterly winds freight the snow up the Kuzuryu River valley towards the Ono Basin, where Arashima blocks them, bringing down torrents of snow. Ice and snow festoon the west-facing walls of Mochigakura, while the avalanches tumble ceaselessly down the Arashima Valley to the east. There our mountain stands, rugged and burnished by the wind and blizzards. Yet within all this ferocity resides a hidden beauty.

These words were written by a certain Mr. Yamaguchi, by way of introducing Arashima in the winter (Arashima no fuyu), a volume published in 1976 that recorded the efforts of Fukui Mountaineering Club members to climb their local Hyakumeizan by as many different routes as possible, most of them in full winter conditions. 

“May we seek out unknown frontiers on our local peak?” Yamaguchi-san asked rhetorically. The trip reports which follow suggest that the club’s members both could and did.

Showa-era climbers approach Arashima by a variation route.
Illustration from Arashima no fuyu.

Our own ambitions are modest. Arriving at the col of Shakunage-daira (no rhododendrons are visible in this season), we take a rest. But not too long: embarrassingly I can’t locate my windjacket, an omission that soon has me shivering with incipient exposure from the windchill. Now the plan is to traverse over to Ko-Arashima, another subpeak.

Nobody has been that way, so we don snowshoes and wade into the deep drifts. Fortunately, the trees blunt the wind’s address below the ridgeline. But perhaps the drifts are not yet deep enough: so much brushwood is still standing above them that we soon find ourselves stymied. I mean, who would think to bring a machete along on a winter climb?

Back on the junction col of Shakunage-daira, we consider our options. Arashima’s main summit is only a paltry few hundred metres away, but the peak is now trailing a banner cloud almost as impressive as the one that Mt Fuji likes to flaunt. The wind up there is monosugoi, confirms a descending climber. With the forecast in mind – it calls for a mo-fubuki (wild blizzard) by evening – we decide to go down.

Now well past noon, and not far from the carpark, we pass a solitary woman toiling her way upwards, bent under a huge pack that obviously contains a full set of winter camping gear. It seems that, half a century after Fukui Mountaineering Club published its Arashima manifesto, at least one bold soul is still seeking out unknown frontiers on this Wild Island of a peak.

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9 January: Honoke-yama is one of only two mountains in this prefecture to have its name spelled out in katakana. Thus writes Masunaga Michio, the author of One Hundred and Fifty Mountains of Fukui. From the layby where we park, this seems to be the mountain’s only distinction: all we see is a snowy path vanishing into some dreary woods.

Again, I’m about to find that an otherwise lowly eminence has a way of making you take it seriously. We’ve been under way for less than five minutes when the Sensei says we’ve just crossed a set of bear tracks. Aren’t they supposed to be asleep by now? “Probably just waking up for a sip of water and a snack,” she replies.

A snack? Turning up our bear bells to the max, we head up a wooded ridge. Nobody seems to have been here recently, judging by the lack of bootprints along the line of the summer path. 

So it’s a matter of getting our heads down below the overhanging branches and breaking trail through the ankle-deep snow. The low clouds and the woods shut us in.

Others have had it worse. Just after we come out on an aery ridge, a sign tells us the story of a retainer who fled up here following the defeat of the Asakura clan in the second year of Tenshō (1574). 

Realising that, with Hideyoshi’s men in hot pursuit, he’d never make his escape over the pass, the retainer chose to end his life at this very spot. At least from here he would have had one last view of his beloved home mountains.

We munch a sweet potato at a kind of pavilion and eye up the last hundred metres of ascent. It’s getting late. Shall we call it a day here, suggests the Sensei. I demur, feeling that our tour book can’t possibly sustain the disgrace of defeat on a mountain of just 736 metres.

Hurling myself at the final snowslope, I find myself sinking in up to my knees. It’s deep, I whinge. Deep? counters the Sensei: it’s only when we’re ploughing through it up to our chests that we call it deep around here. Near the top, I have to cede the lead to the Sensei, who leads away through a beech grove.

Following her, I'm dimly aware of a band of light to our right. I’m so far gone with the snow-ploughing that, when we reach the top, the Sensei has to point out that it’s the Japan Sea we’re looking at, gleaming dully under the leaden sky. 

As Masunaga-san writes in his 150 Mountains book, Honoke is probably the only mountain in the prefecture where you can see from a single viewpoint the coastal town of Tsuruga, as well as the inland ones of Fukui, Sabae and Takefu.

Then I get it – Honoke-yama means Beacon Peak. In feudal times, they set signal fires up here to superflash the news from province to province. So this is a view that is well worth the effort of wading through some not-unduly-deep snow.