A meizanologist's diary (133)

28 March: the Sensei takes charge of the plan. We’ll drive up to the Sensuikyo parking lot at 800 metres or so, then tackle a ridge route up to Takadake, at 1,592 metres the highest of Aso-san’s Five Peaks. 

At mid-morning, after a moderately long drive, we pass a stupa dedicated to world peace by a local monk and park the car.

It seems that Nichidatsu Fujii, who was from Aso City, built more than seventy of these giant reliquaries around the world, in Europe and America as well as in Asia. Alas, judging by current events, even that considerable number may not have sufficed.

A whiff of sulphur greets us as we get out of the car. And just in case we haven't noticed, the sign at the trailhead gets straight to the point: “Release of volcanic gas (S02: sulfur dioxide) has been continuing around Mt. Aso. Be ready to protect yourselves individually with full understanding of the risk from volcanic gas.” 

A nearby row of grave markers brings the message home: accidents can and do happen around here.

Our ridge is like the scaly back of some gigantic sea beast. We weave to and fro, seeking out a line before we realise there’s a series of painted yellow arrows to guide us. We’re working our way upwards on solid lava flows: nothing but black rock, except for a patch of withered yellow grass here and there.

The heat and the stench intensify as we struggle upwards. Flies buzz round us. And now we can see where the fumes are coming from – the roiling clouds of acidic vapour spilling over a ridge crest to the right. Although Aso’s main crater is still kilometres away, it must sit exactly upwind of us.

Like the mountain in Dante’s Purgatory, the slopes ease a bit as we gain height. When a headwall starts to loom above, we decide it’s too hot to think about right now and sit down for lunch. I must be having a bad day: having forgotten my water bottle on our hosts’ kitchen counter, I now discover that my bento box has leaked into my pack. It’s still delicious though: Hirai, the local bentoyasan can only be recommended.

The Sensei passes over a “bakudan” (bombshell) rice ball to supplement the bento – goodness, do I really look so debilitated. This too goes down gratefully. After lunch, a cool breeze starts to blow, dispelling the sulphurous fumes, and we pick up the pace. 

When we arrive in the shadow of the headwall, the yellow arrows direct us rightwards, up a ramp like Mt Asama’s famous J-band. Judging by Canto IV of his Purgatory, Dante must have been here too:

Squeezed in between the tight walls of the pass,
we struggled upward through that broken rock,
using our hands and feet to climb the ground…

Illustration by Gustave Doré for Canto IV of Dante's Purgatory

A few hundred metres more takes us to the summit ridge. The breeze strengthens as we walk over to Takadake’s trig point – there doesn’t seem to be a shrine up here. Perhaps the scenery is too desolate even for a god.  Then we walk carefully over the boot-shredding lava edges to the descent path. 

Everyone has visited Aso-san before – heck, I even cycled across the massif in my student days – yet it’s still impossible to get a grip on this volcano’s dimensions. Mote-like figures on a ridge between us and the steaming crater dramatise the gargantuan scale...

Gargantuan? Adjectives crumble under the load of representing this landscape. Other Japanese volcanoes - yes, even the top one - fit into their surroundings. Here, as far as the eye can reach, all you see is the volcano. 

A series of descending ridges bring us to the crest above the main crater. This vast declivity is still venting nonchalantly to itself, the fumes thinning and thickening almost as if the beast is breathing. Occasionally, a mushroom of vapour writhes silently upwards and drifts off with the wind. 

Groping for an adjective to qualify this spectacle, I settle on "Dante-esque". Overused, admittedly, but like the poet's Inferno this scenery doesn't belong to the world we know. 

I stand there enthralled until a sulphur-laden gust blows my hat away. Probably one shouldn’t hang about here too long. Dilapidated shelters along the concrete-surfaced path bear witness to an eruption in 1958 that did for twelve of Aso-san’s admirers.

And over yonder, like a line of monuments, are the pillars of the Mt Aso Ropeway, now abandoned. After starting up in the same year as the eruption disaster, it managed to keep operating for half a century or so, in despite of corrosive effusions, ash falls and earthquakes. But the volcano won in the end.

The Sensei and our host are already far down the path. I hurry after them, putting as many metres as I can between ourselves and that monstrous crater at our back.

 

A meizanologist's diary (132)

27 March: if they won’t come to us, then we will go to them – ever southwards, on a series of trains, each slower than the last, but with a hipper paint-scheme. 

Strictly speaking this is a social visit to a rural part of Kyushu. But since, back in the day, we and our hosts, the K-sans, all belonged to the same climbing/hiking outfit, the temptation inevitably arises to see if our knee joints can still creak their way up a hill. Is this a good idea? Well, there’s only one way to find out.

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. 

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 in its lee to down some rolls and cheese. Although it's too early for lunch, 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 mine, I put on my own crampons, which have the full twelve points. Then I drop down the rabbit hole onto the snow ledge - in days gone by, this would have been a descent into the ancient crater, which lay on the present mountain's north side. 

After a short crossing on frozen snow above a shadowy slope, the trail leads back to the ridge. As there are plenty of trees to hang on to, the ice-axe is superfluous. 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. Once upon a time, the savants say, Azumaya was a tall, conical stratovolcano, but an eruption blew away its summit cone, leaving behind only the gently sloping lower slopes...

... on which the snow’s now 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. With luck, I'll be in time for supper...

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...