A meizanologist's diary (121)

1 February: it's still dark when we shuffle our way into the Fukuchi-in’s ornate main hall. Even at a few minutes before 7 am, we are almost too late. All the seats close to the oil stove are taken, which means that the air around the remaining ones is close to the temperature outside. That’s fine: we are both dressed for an alpine bivouac. Soon three monks file in - or is it four - and make their obeisances towards the inner sanctuary.

Although attendance at the temple’s morning service is entirely voluntary, it seems that most of the Fukuchi-in's guests are present, whether Japanese or foreign. 

And why would we not be? According to Philip Nicoloff, the Rishu-zammai-hōyo, designated by Kōbō Daishi himself as Shingon’s primary daily service, helps to deflect bad karma, advances individuals towards enlightenment, solicits material benefit, assuages the sufferings of the dead, and serves as a vehicle for meditation...

After breakfast, we walk out into a frigid breeze and set out for the Oku-no-in on foot. Black ice glazes the pavements. When the Sensei takes a tumble, we find refuge on a passing bus. This takes us to the Oku-no-in’s carpark, a vast empty concrete space.

Monks in a snowstorm (detail).
Photography and copyright, Nagasaka Yoshimitsu.

Repairing to a café, we warm up with a cappuccino while admiring the photos exhibited on the wall. They are the work of a local photographer, Nagasaka Yoshimitsu. On the evidence of his pictures, Kōya-san was even colder back in Shōwa times.

Thus fortified, we take the back route into the Oku-no-in’s cryptomeria groves. This leads us into a long avenue of corporate monuments. The first, featuring an Apollo-Saturn rocket, commemorates employees of the company formerly known as Shin-Meiwa and before that Kawanishi, of past and present flying boat fame. 

We take note too of an on-brand stele put up by the Ueshima Coffee Company, whose products have just revived us. Not to mention a memorial to the makers of a fermented milk drink.

Professor Nicoloff writes that modern corporations have built almost as many monuments on Kōya-san (108) as did the feudal daimyōs of old (110). Even so, not everything here is business-sponsored. A side-chapel slightly away from the main path is dedicated to or by the Jōdo sect. It’s said that Tendai Buddhism is for the Court, Shingon for the nobles, Zen for the warriors, and Jōdo for the people. Up here, though, matters may be less clear-cut.

So what is the side-chapel doing here? Has it anything to do with the twelfth-century episode when selected elements of Jōdo doctrine and worship helped to revivify the Shingon faith? Again, I get the feeling that the Kōya-san we see today resembles an iceberg that floats over a very deep keel of history.

Sun is starting to filter through the trees as we walk around the Torōdō’s gallery of bronze lanterns. On the north side, we wait for a group of pilgrims to pay their respects to the Daishi’s mausoleum – if mausoleum is the right word, given that many believe that he continues to meditate for eternity there. Then we start our walk back through the Oku-no-in.

By now, the sun and some rock salt have turned the frozen snow into slush, making the footing less lethal. We've warmed up enough to stop and examine the monuments that line the stone-flagged path through the trees. Today, it seems, the dead greatly outnumber the living in this wood between the worlds.

The memorials, receding between the trees as far as the eye can see, bring to mind the rest of the parable from yesterday evening’s glance at the Fukuchi-in’s breviary:

Then, Yama asked him once more if he had ever seen a dead man. The man replied: "Yes, my Lord, I have been in the presence of death many times." Yama said to him: "It is because you did not recognize in these men. the heavenly messengers sent to warn you that you are brought to this. If you had recognized these messengers and taken their warnings, you would have changed your course, and would not have come to this place of suffering.”

The Sensei is surprised to see a stele that commemorates Akechi Mitsuhide, who assassinated his own overlord, Oda Nobunaga. Soon we realise that everyone is here, regardless of their politics or persuasions – poets and pilgrims, adversaries and antagonists, whether Allied soldiers or Navy pilots.

We pass a memorial to the haiku master Matsuo Bashō on the main path, but must scale a flight of steps away from it to visit the overlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The row of steles that commemorates him is surprisingly modest for somebody so ostentatious in life. Kōya-san is a great leveller.

Further on is a sign that marks the spot where the Daishi interrupted his eternal meditation to come and pronounce the funeral obsequies over the body of his departed friend, the Emperor Saga (786–842). Even today, records Philip Nicoloff, no other emperor is held in such esteem on Kōya-san. He once sent the monk a set of warm clothes, accompanied with a wistful poem:

This quiet monk has lived on the peak in the clouds

For a long time. 

Here far from you, I think of the deep mountain still cold

Even though it is Spring.

The pines and the cedars keep silent.

How long have you been breathing the mist and fog ...

Under a cloudless sky, a stone bridge brings us back to the high street.

We drop in at Kōya-san’s oldest coffee shop for another capuccino before the cable-car (or funicular railway) wafts us to the waiting local train. 

We’re still several hundred metres above sea-level when the doors rumble open at a deserted platform to reveal a grove of palm trees, their leaves fluttering in the warm afternoon breeze. 

It’s a different world down here.

A meizanologist's diary (120)

31 January: Admittedly, the Sensei had difficulty in following my logic. We’d voted to take a break from ceaseless snow shovelling in her home town. And what was I proposing but an overnight stay on a freezing plateau, covered with snow, at eight hundred metres? OK, she agreed reluctantly, but only if there’s an onsen.

Which is why, around noon, we’re walking past a pair of bronze gate guardians into the precincts of the Fukuchi-in on Kōya-san, the mountain retreat founded by Kūkai in the ninth century. The temple and lodging house is one of Kōya-san's fifty-one hospitable “shukubō”, but the only one to have tapped a spring of geothermally heated water.

After dropping our light packs (best leave your bulky baggage down below), we take refuge from a snow shower in a restaurant. And then, since the snow keeps falling, we wash lunch down with a cappuccino in a nearby café.

When the snow flurries still won’t let up, we flee along Kōya’s high street to the only other modern structure we can think of – the Reihōkan museum. The temperature inside is close to ambient, but at least we’re sheltered from the wind.

In plastic slippers – boots must be left at the entrance – we pad past an impressive Heian-era Buddha into the museum’s largest exhibition hall. And at once we encounter great art. The sculptor Kaikei’s four heavenly kings stand out from anything else in the museum. Occupying the place of honour at the end of the hall, his Peacock King too will stick in memory, although it may demand a greater amount of cultural adjustment to appreciate.

Kaikei's Peacock King.
Image by courtesy of the Koya-san Reihokan Museum.

Almost forgetting the cold, we sit through a well-produced series of videos in an adjacent room that explain the background to the sculptures. I try to grapple with the historical context. Kaikei’s working life (c.1183–1236) overlapped the start of the Kamakura period, when a military junta imposed its will after a destructive civil war…

But what did this era look like to the artists? Did they deplore the collapse of Heian civilisation, or were they hailing a new age of stability? Or both. In the end, genius is genius, even if context matters too. Michelangelo might never have existed. But, if he did, then he could only have been a Renaissance man…

Deeply chilled – at least, in my case; the Sensei seems to be made of sterner stuff – we put on our boots and slip-slide out into the street. The snow has stopped falling, and some weak sunbeams are probing through the clouds.

Over the road is the Kongōbu-ji, the institution that heads up the four thousand or so temples of the Shingon faith. 

Skirting a snowball fight between some children by the belfry, we make for the main building. Again, we exchange boots for plastic slippers and skitter our way past a row of stately rooms.

In one of them, a bilingual sign tells us, Hideyoshi’s men forced his own nephew, Hidetsugu, to commit suicide – this was in August 1595 – as the prelude to having his entire line wiped out, women, children and all. They played politics for keeps in those days. Two decades later, much the same treatment was meted out to Hideyoshi’s own family. The Buddhist term inga-ōhō might have been invented for such cases. 

With relief, we proceed along a series of galleries that overlook a garden. An array of rocks rise up through the snow like peaks through a cloud sea. The stones are said to have been brought from Shikoku, where Kōya-san’s founder Kūkai was born in 774. That could make them kin to those strange rock pillars that I saw on Tsurugi-san the other day…

While I’m photographing the garden, the Sensei has slipped away. I find her sipping a welcoming cup of tea in a reception hall at the end of the tourist route. 

To remind us that we are still in a temple, an effigy of Kūkai presides benignly over the far end of the room.

Daylight has all but faded by the time we return to the Fukuchi-in, where we find our room already warm and cozy, our hosts having thoughtfully left a gas stove running. We take care with the heating: fires have repeatedly devastated Kōya-san, and the most destructive of them all started at this very shukobō in the winter of 1521. (I am obliged to Philip Nicoloff's book on Sacred Kōya-san for this historical detail.)

The Fukuchi-in’s corridors, however, remain unheated and it isn’t until I’ve visited the rotenburo, soaking up the geothermal heat while watching the sunset clouds scrolling by, that I feel sufficiently reanimated to examine the treasures they harbour.

Hidden in an alcove, and quite unexpected in a temple, is a collection of polished mineral sections from all over Japan. And even less to be expected is the suit of samurai armour lurking in a gloomy corner.

On closer inspection, it has a blue crucifix mounted on its helmet. A placard explains that this equipage belonged to the “Christian samurai” Takayama Ukon (c.1552–1615), who was eventually exiled for his faith. But, before that, he was a loyal supporter of Nobunaga – who came within an ace of reducing Kōya-san to ashes during his campaigns to unify Japan.

The characters for Kōya mean no more and no less than “high place”. But the suit of armour suggests it's a place with fathomless depths too.

After a simple but exquisite supper of shōjin ryōri, we retire to our room. There’s a TV there. There's wifi too, so we could equally well commune with our phones. Or we could dip into the bilingual breviary placed unobtrusively by the teapot, somewhat like a Gideon Bible. When I open it at random, the word “Yama” catches my eye. But not at all in the expected sense:

Once Yama, the legendary King of Hell, asked a man who had fallen into hell on account of his evil deeds in life, whether, during his life, he had ever met the three heavenly messengers. The man replied: "No, my Lord, I never met any such persons."

Yama asked him if he had ever met an old person bent with age and walking with a cane. The man replied: "Yes, my Lord, I have met such persons frequently." Then Yama said to him: "You are suffering this present punishment because you did not recognize in that old man a heavenly messenger sent to warn you that you must quickly change your ways before you, too, become an old man."

Yama asked him again if he had ever seen a poor, sick and friendless man. The man replied: "Yes, my Lord. I have seen many such men." Then, Yama said to him: "You have come into this place because you failed to recognize in these sick men the messengers from heaven sent to warn you of your own sickness …"

Before I can acquaint myself with the third heavenly messenger, I hear the merest hint of a snore from the futons. The Sensei is already asleep. It’s been a long day...

A meizanologist's diary (119)

24 January: forty-seven centimetres of snow have fallen on the Sensei’s hometown in the last couple of days, enforcing on us what Scottish climbers are pleased to call a “fester”. 

Recalling that a former head of the Mt Fuji Weather Station has lent us a DVD of Nikkatsu’s Fuji-sanchō, we settle in for a video evening.

The opening sequence, showing a survey team struggling through a high-altitude blizzard, makes us grateful to be sitting in a warm living room. 

Then the scene switches to a meeting at the finance ministry, where a meteorological agency staffer named Katsuragi (Ashida Shinsuke) is putting the case for building a radar station atop Mt Fuji to give advance warning of incoming typhoons.

Once Katsuragi has his budget allocation, Umehara (Ishihara Yujiro), an engineer from Mitsubishi Electric, and his team take on the challenge of designing and installing the radar. 

Huge amounts of material have to be moved up the mountain, forcing the traditional packhorse drivers to master the art of high-altitude bulldozer driving.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of the entire cast, the radar station is completed on time. 

As the grand finale, a bold pilot, straining his helicopter to its limits, flies in the dome that will house the radar. And soon the new installation successfully meets the test of a real typhoon…

It’s a ripping yarn, well told. The Sensei is impressed with the all-star cast, which even includes a few female luminaries such as Hoshi Yuriko to leaven up an otherwise all-guy gig. 

And thanks to plentiful on-location filming, Japan’s top mountain is allowed to do a great job of starring as itself. 

In fact, the camerawork alone would be sufficient reason to see this film. The location shots underscore the volcano’s vast size and the varied challenges of working there – the summit’s thin air, the storms and the shifting slopes of scoria. There’s even a cameo appearance by a brockenspectre.

Fuji-sanchō came out in 1970, a bare six years after the radar station was completed. Thanks to this promptitude, it feels credibly authentic. The helicopters, bulldozers and other featured hardware must be identical to the kit actually used during the building campaign. 

Even so, after an hour or so of highly convincing re-enactions, we had to remind ourselves that Fuji-sanchō is just a movie. The movie, in turn, drew on a 1967 novel of the same name – whose author, Nitta Jirō, had been the actual leader of the radar station project a few years earlier. So the underlying events have been twice filtered through the prism of fiction.

In the end, it’s probably futile to try disentwining fact from fantasy. If Fuji-sanchō isn’t exactly documentary, then it shows what history should have been like. And it does that very entertainingly. It's no surprise to learn that Fuji-sanchō did well at the box office too.

So anybody who feels any nostalgia for that mid-Shōwa spirit of high-altitude derring-do should not hesitate to sit down and soak this movie up, all 126 action-packed minutes of it. Especially if you happen to be snowed in for an evening or two.