A meizanologist's diary (106)

2 April: half a day’s flying out of KIX, the map display shows that we’re coasting in over northeast Greenland. Perfectly placed on the shaded side of the aircraft, I turn to the window only to find that it has blacked itself out.

Of course, I realise, we are on one of those notorious craft – let’s just call them buffs – with centrally controlled window darkening. Remonstrating with a flight attendant is not an option, given the airline industry’s current commitment to an intense customer experience.

Konrad Steffen
Portrait by Fridolin Walcher.

Yet somewhere down there, beyond the blacked-out windows, is a coastal glacier named in honour of Konrad Steffen (1952–2020), the Swiss glaciologist who spent his career investigating the dynamics of the Greenland ice sheet. 

About a decade ago, Professor Steffen came to our alpine club in Zurich and explained to us in his quiet, unemphatic way – he was a master of science communication – what would happen if, or rather when, the world’s ice sheets melted. Some years later, he vanished into the depths of the ice sheet he’d dedicated his life to studying.

Location of the Sermeq Konrad Steffen.
Map by courtesy of Leister Expeditions: 2021 and 2022 report.

Later in the flight, kneeling on the floor – with one knee embedded in a bag of garbage to line myself up with the tiny inspection window in the buff’s back door – I do manage a glimpse of the ice sheet scrolling by. Soon other passengers are queuing up to share this intense customer experience. It seems that quite a few of us are fascinated by this land of ice. Alas, it's far too late now for anybody to pay their respects to Koni Steffen's glacier.

Later still, it occurs to me that – rigged in the eclipse though it is – this buff does provide the perfect metaphor for the pickle we’re in. If we can’t handle the idea of seven metres of sea level rise, then it's surely tempting simply to black out the view...

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31 March: for the third time this year, we drive past the papier-mâché dinosaur towards Toritate-yama. For a mountain of just 1,308 metres, just an hour or so from home, the spaciousness of its summit views is hard to beat.

Couples don’t have to agree about everything. When we leave the carpark at the leisurely hour of 9.30 am, the Sensei is wearing crampons while I am doing without, expecting that the snow will soon turn gloppy, as on Daisen a few days ago.

Since our last visit, the pits around each beech tree have deepened and widened, like the gravity wells around a growing black hole. We steer clear of them. As for the crampons, we are both right – the Sensei’s drive firmly into the underlying hard snow, but my cramponless soles feel equally secure in the previous days' light dusting of powder. Even after an hour, the snow shows no sign of gloppiness: the powder must be insulating the rest of the snowpack…

The summer carpark is still a metre deep in snow. We refresh ourselves there with coffee and “monaka”, a kind of anpan with a crispy coating. Then we address the steep ridge up to the summit. It’s noon by the time Hakusan heaves into view above Toritate’s snowdome.

The cool northerly breeze may explain why the snow is still crisp underfoot. And it certainly accounts for the miniature cornice that runs along a nearby snow-berm, as if extruded from the icing syringe of a master pâtissier. 

But what has the wind to do, if anything, with the dingy tone of our local Meizan? Somehow, Hakusan is looking browner than the pristine snows under our own feet. Then we get it – up on the higher mountain, the northerly gale has scoured away all the new powder. This leaves only the old snowpack, stained brown from all the dust that has blown in from the continent in the past few weeks.

We continue up to the subpeak of Itadani-no-kashira, from which we take in the liberal views back along the ridge towards Gomando and eastwards to Hakusan. 

By the time we are back at Toritate, our top-of-descent, the snow has turned slushy under a crisp film of ice – this too we call “monaka” says the Sensei – and we are entirely alone: everyone else went home hours ago.

On our way down, we meet a solitary buzzard working its way up the slope. In easy circles, the bird lifts away until we lose sight of it somewhere among the building clouds.

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29 March: on a day when both the sakura zensen and a rain front have converged on Tokyo, we’re at a kondankai on the Japanese Alpine Club’s premises near Ichigaya. And since the Sensei has put me on my best behaviour, I’m doing my best not to be controversial. At this point, a lady smilingly asks me if I aim to complete the Hyakumeizan.

Mt Bandai: a mountain that watches over several home villages
(and sometimes demolishes them). 

This puts me on the spot. Having blogged for more than a decade under the masthead of One Hundred Mountains, I can’t plausibly deny an interest in them. On the other hand, the Sensei and I probably haven’t climbed more than half of the full round between us. So I smile back at my interlocutor and prevaricate: “I haven’t yet decided” I hear myself saying wishy-washily.

As further explanation seems to be required, I refer to fellow blogger David Lowe’s reflective and soundly reasoned essay about The Trouble with the Hyakumeizan–And Why I’m Not Finishing. To sum up just a few of his thoughts, too much focus on the Hyakumeizan encourages a checklist mentality, foments overcrowding, and quite possibly promotes unsafe climbing behaviour.

To which I could add, having just returned from a less than totally successful Hyakumeizan foray, that the pleasures were momentary, the positions ridiculous, and the expenses damnable… But as the Sensei is within earshot, I keep that quip to myself. After all, Lord Chesterfield wasn’t talking about mountains.

And yet … had Fukada Kyūya not written that book, I probably would never have acquainted myself with Daisen’s extraordinary character – the rambling and oligarchical ridgeline, with no peaklet topping out more than a few metres above or below another – its curious ecosystems (I mean, how many other mountains can boast a firefly colony on their summit?) – and the tenacious yet friendly villagers who live, still up to their ears in snow right now, within the shadow of its ancient crater walls.

Mmm, the villagers and their community – we may be onto something there. If the Hyakumeizan author didn’t plan on crafting a checklist – he said himself that he might change a mountain or two – then what on earth was he writing about? There is more than a hint in the first paragraph of the chapter on his own home mountain, the one that rises above his birthplace in Daishōji:

A mountain watches over the home village of most Japanese people. Tall or short, near or far, some mountain watches over our native village like a tutelary deity. We spend our childhood in the shadow of our mountain and we carry it with us in memory when we grow up and leave the village. And however much our lives may change, the mountain will always be there, just as it always has been, to welcome us back to our home village. My native mountain is Hakusan …

As it happened, though, it was a foray to a quite different volcano that first started me thinking about Fukada’s paragraph. After tagging the summit of Bandai on a grey mid-November day, I dropped into a local hut and found it crowded almost to the rafters.

Yet nobody, except possibly myself, was questing the Hyakumeizan. In fact, nobody seemed to have any interest in them at all. They were all local folk, intent on celebrating their local hut’s last weekend of the season before it closed for the winter. For Bandai was their home mountain, not some item on a distant city-dweller’s checklist.

Ed Douglas's Kinder Scout: The People's Mountain:
Meizan philosophy applied to the Peak District.

Much more recently, I was flattered to find that Ed Douglas, one of Britain’s most prolific and versatile mountain writers, had quoted the same paragraph by Fukada at the start of his luminous and delightful monograph on Derbyshire’s Kinder Scout: The People’s Mountain. For Kinder Scout is, of course, Ed’s own home mountain.

And his too is a book about the people who surround a mountain and give it meaning. Here are the people who organised the famous mass trespass of 1932 so that everybody would be free to roam their local hills.

And then there is George King (b. 1919), no less public spirited but in a different way, who was tasked by an alien intelligence (see pages 160–61) to charge the mountain’s rocks “with a kind of cosmic energy”. Indeed, the very spot where he did so is illustrated in the book by one of John Beatty’s excellent photos. With stories like these, I think that Ed gets very close to the Hyakumeizan way of thinking, even if he hasn’t yet applied his widely roving pen to the Japanese mountains. 

One who has written about Japanese mountains – quite a lot of them – is William Banff, aka Willie Walks. His Tozan: A Japanese Mountain Odyssey is a lively peak-by-peak account of climbing each of the Hyakumeizan. But, as noted in our review, there’s more going on in this book than wading through a checklist.

In his Hakusan chapter, Willie circles back to Fukada’s famous paragraph, as quoted above, and then segues into a meditation on his own home mountain back in Australia. You’ll have to read this passage for yourself – it deserves not to be paraphrased in a mere blog. Suffice it to say that this too is a book that captures quite a bit of the original Hyakumeizan spirit.

Back at the Japanese Alpine Club, I realise that I haven’t given the smiling lady anything like an adequate answer. So am I going to climb all those Hyakumeizan or am I not? Well, I’ll certainly go on attempting this one or that whenever there’s a chance. And if so, I’ll keep in mind that, as each summit watches over somebody’s home village, we Hyakumeizan seekers are only guests there. 

For the same reason, I think I’ll abstain from trying to charge the rocks with any kind of cosmic energy. The locals might raise their eyebrows, you know.

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25 March: the Yakumo – it’s almost fraudulent to call it an express – meanders through the undramatic river valleys of Bitchū towards its rencontre with the Japan Sea at Yonago....

... when – what the heck is that? – a monstrous excrescence looms up at the end of the valley we’re heading into. Striped with snow in all its south-facing gullies, and completely out of scale with the surrounding landscape, this incredible bulk suggests a half-inflated balloon already tugging at its moorings. This has to be Daisen: no other candidate is possible. The name means “big mountain” in local dialect and nothing else in this part of Japan comes close to its seventeen hundred metres. 

26 March: fortunately there is no need to tackle all of those metres, since yesterday evening's bus up to Daisenji has disposed of a good half of them. Under a dripping canopy of beech, I set off into a morning fog at a quarter to seven – the hostelry was inflexible about an earlier breakfast. In this season, snow lies underfoot from the start but there’s no need for crampons until the slope steepens some way above the secluded pavilion of the Amida-dō.

The sun starts to break through the mist more or less at the treeline. And here the trees really do end: unlike on other high mountains, there is no upper tier of sporadic pines or silver birch above the beechwoods. I take a break at the first refuge hut, which is still half-buried, and by the time I’m on my way again the spring sunlight has already started to soften the snow. 

A broad snow ridge leads up to the slanted tableland of Misen. Here the snow is thinner, and a sturdy boardwalk testifies to the erosive power of thousands of summer Hyakumeizan seekers. 

The crampon-chewed planks lead past a patch of scruffy evergreens which turn out to be the much-vaunted kyaraboku grove. The Daisen Museum at the mountain's foot apostrophises it as follows:

The yew … forms vast pure forests of some eight hectares ... and because it is Japan’s largest pure forest, it is designated as a Special Natural Monument. The yew is said to be a variant type of yew, but while the height of many yews is more than 20m, the height of Japanese yew is 1 to 2m. The trunk of the Japanese yew seems to be creeping on the ground, so the community is just like a green carpet.

I’m up on Misen at about 9.30. The day is yet young, and the ridgeline looks navigable as far as Ken-ga-mine, the true summit, which is all of twenty metres higher than Misen. Indeed, another climber is coming back from that direction. But he wears a disenchanted look on his face and for good reason – at every other step he is sinking knee-deep into the porridge-like snow.

Trying my own luck, I go over a small peaklet and posthole my way down into the first big dip in the ridge. So far so good: judging by the footprints, the other climber didn’t get this far. Then the ridgeline narrows. A prod with the ice-axe rules out one alternative – to keep walking Blondin-style along the ridge crest. After hours in the broiling sun, the snow up there has degenerated into candyfloss. So what about cutting crabwise across the northward slope – I glance downwards: if the mushy snow gives way there, it will precipitate a handsome “tour of the north face”. And after a bit of reflection, I find myself in complete accord with the other climber – it's time to turn back. 

Back on Misen, I’m starting to regret that late breakfast. On the other hand, there is now time to appreciate the view. Snowy Daisen floats above a sea of haze like an iceberg; the "kosa" from the continent cuts the summit ridge off from the lower world so that its wooded footings just dissolve into the murk below.

No other peaks rise above the charcoal line of the dust horizon: we are alone above a sea of vapour. People question whether it’s meaningful to pick out just one hundred mountains from all that Japan has to offer. But, if you insist on playing that game, then surely Daisen has to be one of them.

In the afternoon, I climb up the stone steps to the Daisenji's main temple hall. “It is a deeply evocative place,” says the Hyakumeizan author, and who am I to disagree. The courtyard is still a metre deep in snow so that the one other visitor, wearing shoes that are ill adapted to the conditions, has to mince his way back to safety. When he reaches me, he asks if I can take his photo with his mobile phone. We fall into conversation.

It turns out that he is a recently retired production engineer who is about to take up a voluntary role as the organiser of a sports event. But before starting on that project, he’s undertaken to visit all the twenty (or was that twenty-eight) famous shrines and temples of the Sanyōdō. And today he has completed his round. I nod sympathetically: we are all captives of our self-appointed quests ...

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23 March: seen from the van, a red ball sun dips in and out of the eastern hilltops as we scour down Route 8 in S-san’s van. While we wait for our friends at the rendezvous point, newly arrived bank martins flutter overhead. The groves of plum trees nearby have started to shimmer with blossom. Spring has arrived. Those snowshoes we’ve brought just in case will stay tied to our packs.

We’d long wanted to visit Sanjusangenzan – the Mountain of the Thirty-Three Bays – not least on account of its curious name. Can there really be a link between the Hall of the Thirty-Three Bays in Kyoto, famous for its thousand-and-one images of the Kannon-sama, and the eponymous mountain at the other end of Lake Biwa? After raising the question a while back, it was time to seek some ground truth …

Alas, it seems that mountain etymology is not top-of-mind today for our club’s president, who’s just arrived at the carpark. To explain, he came slip-sliding down these very snowslopes just a week or so ago, only to find that one of his crampons had become, like Prometheus, unbound. So our mission today is to reclimb Sanjusangenzan to help search for the missing set of spikes.

We set off through a still leafless wood – leafless, that is, except for the pines and evergreen camellia trees, which are endemic in this “southern march” of our province. At about 500 metres, we take a break alongside, but not too close to, the rotten snag of what was once a husband-and-wife pine tree.

Reaching the snow – it has retreated a long way in two weeks – we spread out in a line like grouse-beaters to see if we can start up the missing irons. At first a spirit of optimism prevails – surely those crampons can’t evade a well-organised search party like ours – but all too soon we come up to the ridgeline, still spikeless.

As if to distract us from our lack of success, a tall pylon rises from the col ahead, festooned with whirling anemometers. This, the Sensei explains, is sniffing the wind for a planned row of power-generating turbines. If they build it, she adds, a whole hecatomb of beech trees will have to be sacrificed. Well, maybe not her exact words, but you get the drift.

For now, the forest seems to be in good shape: we even see a pair of fearsome-looking caterpillars inching their way across the snow. 

The summit is reached through a grove of dog-beeches – their twisted shadows, lying this way and that across the snow, bring some easement to the eyes after the harsh glare of the open ridge.

The summit marker itself is still half-buried. A great tit flutters in a tizzy from branch to branch as we sit down to lunch. As we tuck into our onigiri, S-san, a practitioner of kyūdo, reveals that he goes to Kyoto every year to take part in a ceremony at the Sanjusangendō. So perhaps there is some hidden link between mountain and temple?

All too soon, it’s time to descend. Distant views of Hakusan do not distract us as we walk down the softening afternoon snow. Indeed, there are no views to distract us at all: kosa, the yellow haze drifting in from the continent, has smothered them all. That may be just as well though: we still have that crampon to find….

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22 March: the early Kagayaki sweeps us past a snowy Mt Asama and into town by midmorning. 

At 11am, we climb the stone steps to the temple of Gokokuji in Bunkyō-ku, walk past the main hall into the cemetery and find a small group of friends in front of the monument to Nonaka Itaru and Chiyoko – whose bold attempt to overwinter on the summit of Mt Fuji in 1895 paved the way for a permanent weather station there.

Falling from a clear blue sky, the spring sunlight brings out every lineament in the gravestone’s bronze relief. 

Garbed in their parkas lined with Russian fur, the young couple look every bit as resolute as they did in October 1895, when settling in for their two-month ordeal atop Japan’s highest mountain.

Laconic as it is, the plaque under the bronze relief explains why we are here. Itaru passed away at the age of eighty-seven in February 1955. So we are paying our respects just a few weeks after his seventieth anniversary. Our group comprises members of the “Fuyō Nikki no Kai”, a study association dedicated to researching the Nonakas’ story.

The Nonaka Observatory of 1895.
Illustration from Itaru's brochure of 1900.

Over the past few years, many more details of that history have come to light. Most fictional accounts of Itaru’s project – particularly the novel by Nitta Jirō and any films based on it – end with the couple’s  rescue from their blizzard-wracked hut on Mt Fuji in late December 1895.

For Itaru, however, this was merely a beginning. While Chiyoko was publishing her Fuyō Nikki (Journal of the Lotus), a lively account of the couple’s mountaintop experiences, Itaru started work on a series of articles for Chigaku Zasshi, a geographical journal, explaining his scientific aims and setting out his weather observations. These were published in the second half of 1896.

And then he went back to Mt Fuji, climbing to the summit in three consecutive summers, those of 1896, 1897 and 1898. His aim was to scope out the site for a bigger and better weather station – one that would house a large enough team to support year-round weather observations.

Design for a new Mt Fuji weather station.
From Itaru's brochure of 1900.

The best place for a new observatory, Itaru decided, would not be on Ken-ga-mine, the highest summit on which he’d built his first small hut, but on a flat part of Mt Fuji’s crater rim at a place called Higashi Yasugawara. Lingering geothermal heat there might also help to heat the hut.

But who was going to pay for all this? In 1899, Itaru founded a fund-raising association and in February the following year came out with an 18-page prospectus for the new weather station.

Alas, the funds were slow to come in but this didn’t daunt Itaru. In 1909, at his own expense, he had a spacious villa built at Takigahara at Mt Fuji’s southern foot, as a base for further work on the mountain. And in 1912, with financial help from a prince of the realm, he set up a storehouse on the crater rim, exactly where he had suggested siting his new improved weather station.

The cover of Itaru's brochure of 1900.

By this time, a new generation of meteorologists had taken up the cause of a permanent weather station on Mt Fuji. Preparations were delayed by the world war and even more by the 1923 earthquake, which destroyed the Takigahara villa. In February of the same year, Itaru had to endure the loss of Chiyoko, who succumbed to a flu epidemic.

And so it wasn’t until 1932 that the professional weathermen were firmly established at the new government-funded summit observatory. The following summer, Itaru paid them a visit, accompanied by his daughter Kyōko, who of all their children most resembled Chiyoko.

After taking a group picture, we move on under the flowering cherry trees to look in at the great mausoleum dedicated to the great statesman Ōkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922) - Ōkuma too, it seems, was not immune to the lure of exploration, having helped in his latter years to raise funds for the Antarctic explorer Shirase Nobu.

As a meeting is scheduled at the offices of the non-profit organisation that has revived the buildings of the Mt Fuji weather station, we have to move on. But not before climbing the “Otowa Fuji” that sits at one corner of Gokokuji’s precincts. Although everybody present is of pensionable age, we seize the chance to revisit the summit of Mt Fuji, even if it has to be a miniaturised one…

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15 March: the weather forecast induces Alpinist A to change her plan. Instead of an all-day snowshoe trip, we’ll go for a quick morning traverse of Monju (365 metres), our local miniature Meizan. The sky is already grey when we start out from a temple at the east end of the ridge. And the clouds have dropped yet lower by the time we reach the main summit, an hour or so later.

All three of us have been here many times before. Yet I haven't previously noticed the big boulder to the right of the summit shrine. A helpful placard identifies it as a “lightning fossil”, hinting that the rock has its own magnetic field.

Using my phone’s inbuilt compass, we put this claim to the test. And, gratifyingly, when the phone is brought within a few centimetres of the rock, the needle does swing five degrees or so away from magnetic north. Perhaps there’s a mother lode of magnetite in this rock …

In the woods beyond Monju’s third summit, we pass by a more dramatic reminder of lightning’s power. A bolt from above has split a sapling from its crown almost down to the ground. The wood splinters scattered several metres away are still fresh, suggesting that the tree was struck within the last few months.

On the Japan Sea coast, thunderstorms are more famous for their vigour in winter than in summer. What stirs them up is the temperature difference between cold air flowing in from Siberia and the warm Japan Sea currents, as this NHK programme explains. And right here in our neighbourhood the storms often get an extra fillip from a North Korean volcano…

Blowing cold and hot: how the clouds get their charge.
Diagram courtesy of NHK.

All this adds up to the potential for some serious voltage. In January 1973, a satellite charged with monitoring the test-ban treaty detected a lightning superbolt over the Japan Sea that flashed as brightly as a tactical nuclear weapon. It was hereabouts too, near Kanazawa in 1969, that winter lightning downed one of the Air Self-Defence Force’s accident-prone Starfighters. Another lightning-struck F104 fell into the Japan Sea a few years later.

A big flash over the Sea of Japan.
Image courtesy of NHK.

Rain is spotting down as I put my phone away after capturing the shattered tree. I have to hurry after the two ladies, never ceasing to wonder at how they can walk while conversing at full tilt…

While navigating the muddy path, I’m wondering about that “fossil thunder” boulder that we tested an hour ago. Lightning clearly hits home quite a bit around here - we've seen the remains of blitzed trees on a previous Monju hike too. 

But can lightning really change a rock’s magnetic field? Well, the savants say it can. And, according to this blog, there are other “lightning fossils” on Japanese peaks, such as on Takayama (532m) in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Ryumonzan in Wakayama, and Utsukushigahara in Shinshu – the last named being one of those Hundred Mountains of Japan.

The shrine island of Oshima: strolling over to a magnetic anomaly.

But – hold it – the blogger also names Oshima (above), a rocky island more famous for its shrine and grove of cinnamon trees, as a locus of such strangely magnetised stones. Indeed, we were there with our guest just the other day: it's just an hour's drive away. But on Oshima the suspect rocks are located right by the sea in an old lava flow, not on any summit or eminence. Were they also supposed to have been recrystallized by lightning strikes? Hmm, this may need some further looking into…

By the time we get back to the car, a steady rain has set in, vindicating Alpinist A’s weather sense. It's a good thing we kept our outing short. Fortunately, there is no sign of any electricity in the air.