A meizanologist's diary (125)

11 March: What about Genanpo, the Sensei asked yesterday. What, again, I thought. Heck, it once sprang a bear cub on us, and last year a white-out mugged us on the summit. Isn’t twice enough?

The Sensei’s thinking becomes clear when we reach the trailhead. A comfortable number of cars is already parked along the road there. In times when the b-word is buzzing through the media and blogosphere, you don’t want to be too lonely on your chosen mid-week mountain.

And there’s nothing wrong with Genanpo as an excursion. This is how the late doyen of our mountaineering community, Masunaga Michio, introduces it in his One Hundred and Fifty Mountains of Fukui:

As you begin walking south along Sanban-dori in Ono City, the Ginkgo Peak comes into view through the narrow gaps in the street lined with shop signs. And when such a lofty eminence suddenly appears above the bustling city, ridden as it is with human impulses, the summit always attracts my ever-shifting soul.

We start up a flight of wooden steps through the usual factory forest. A few hundred metres up, we meet with new snow over an icy base. Time to put our crampons on. Now the view opens out through gaps in the trees: there’s Hakusan and Arashima too.

Taking a break at the vorgipfel of Mae-yama, we’re overtaken by a woman wearing a pair of rubber boots, the sort you’d wear in your garden or if you work at a fishmonger’s. “Must be a local,” says the Sensei. I watch and learn, in case winter climbing in wellies catches on in the Alps. If it does, remember you read it here first...

A chilly breeze greets us on the summit’s snow dome. Under a cloudless sky, we press on in search of a sheltered spot to eat our sweet potatoes. 

Then we follow a line of bootprints towards the edge of the plateau.

Over there is Heko-san, the next-door peak, looking magnificently alpine in its furbishing of fresh snow. 

I’m starting to understand why Masunaga-san came up here four times in winter, through fair weather and foul. On one occasion, ice had encrusted the trees like molten glass. Like the poet Li Po, he and the mountain never grew tired of each other…

For a moment, we’re tempted to follow those bootprints over the connecting ridge. But winter days are short and mountaineers are slow, especially when they have the salt of age on them. The Sensei and I nod to each other: time to go home. But I suspect we'll be back one of these days...

A meizanologist's diary (124)

7 March: we’re close to summiting Monju-san, which is no great feat given that this local eminence has just one meter of height for every day in the year, when a senior citizen wielding hiking poles comes tapping down the path.

“Mezurashii, na” he says when he notices me, although he’s probably referring more to my antiquated glacier goggles than my gaijin-esque appearance. I know who he is, of course – a retired maths teacher, better known to locals as “the legendary Ohnishi-san”, now over ninety years of age and still climbing Monju almost every day.

And if this should sound somehow monotonous, take a look at his photo album and be amazed by the biodiversity of this miniature Meizan.

We fall into a typical mountaineer's conversation. Ohnishi-san’s done quite a few of the legendary Hyakumeizan. About two thirds, I think he says, as he gives me some beta on Shikoku's Ishizuchi-san, my next objective. 

But their summed altitude can’t compete with the metres he’s put away on Monju. This week, he tells me, he’ll hold a celebration to mark his six thousandth ascent.

And before I can calculate that he’s climbed the equivalent of two hundred Everests or more, just on Monju, he gives me a nod, leans into his poles and starts on down. If you want to be as fit, or as venerable, a mountaineer as Ohnishi-san, there’s no time to waste in idle chatter.

A meizanologist's diary (123)

5 March: On the way to KIX via the southern route, we're flying across Korea about as close to its northern border as is legal or wise. Alas, window seats in these buffs are a bit of a toss-up. Either the windows freeze up on you, or – as in the case of Seat 41A today – there is no window at all, as the plane’s engineers didn’t seem to trust themselves with one in this part of the fuselage.

Fortunately, by leaning forward into somebody else’s airspace, I can just see above the cloud deck a distant and solitary peak to the north, surmounted by an eyebrow wisp of lenticular cloud. Judging by the direction and altitude, this can be none other than Mt Paektu (2,744 metres), the Paradeberg of North Korea.

Sorry, there’s no question of bringing a camera to bear – to do so, I’d have to mug the passenger in front – but it’s gratifying even to have managed a glimpse of this elusive peak. Few Europeans get closer than this. 

One who did, though, is Clive Oppenheimer, professor of volcanology at Cambridge, who worked with DPRK scientists to establish exactly when the volcano’s last great outburst, the devastating “Millennium Eruption”, took place. 

The scientists went about this task by taking a carbon sample from a larch tree buried in that cataclysm. With the help of a lab in Zurich, this helped to establish the year as between CE 946 and 947. 

A researcher in Japan then supplied the missing clue: a chronicle maintained at the Kōfukuji temple in Kyoto records that, on 3 November 946, “white ash fell gently like snow” – although no volcano within Japan was known to be erupting at that time.

For the full story of this volcanological detective work – the time-chronicling varves of Lake Suigetsu also get a look-in – it’s best to read the lively write-up in Professor Oppenheimer’s Mountains of Fire. Subtitled The Secret Lives of Volcanoes, the book will give you a much better close-up view of North Korea’s secretive volcano than any window seat on a bucketing buff.

Greenland: a darker shade of white

Review: a Swiss gallery shows Sebastian Copeland's images of the evanescent ice.

Famous for its rail junction, Olten is separated from the settlement of Qaanaaq in northern Greenland by a full thirty degrees of latitude. 

On an unseasonably warm April afternoon, this made the Swiss town an ideal venue for taking in some arctic photography by Sebastian Copeland, one of the genre’s most prominent exponents. Congratulations to IPFO’s Haus der Fotografie for staging this well-curated exhibition in its homely yet spacious gallery.

Space does matter when exhibiting Greenland. The landscape’s scale demands a corresponding expansiveness in print dimensions. And Copeland certainly comes through here. Many of the photos shown at IPFO have previously appeared in his acclaimed book The Arctic: A Darker Shade of White. Yet they surely gain much when viewed on a scale of metres rather than centimetres.

Intriguingly, Copeland opts for the panoramic format in many of his most impressive images. It might be the limitless horizons of polar landscapes that pull so many photographers in this direction. Tiina Itkonen and Stuart D. Klipper, for example, have used wide-format Technorama-type cameras to put together complete collections (thanks, Snowhenge, for introducing these artists). 

Unlike them, Copeland hasn’t gone the whole panoramic hog. A variety of formats was probably better suited to his book. And they work well for the exhibition too. 

In terms of format, he seems to have chosen a conventional portrait or landscape treatment for most of his iceberg studies. Their scale, scope and lighting are almost painterly. 

Entitled “Breakthrough”, one of these images gets a whole gallery wall to itself (above). And rightly so: to my mind, this study invites comparison with works such as Frederic Church’s famous oil of The Icebergs.

Lighting is equally a key element in Copeland’s portraits of Greenlanders. These are presented in a sepia-toned monochrome that was probably not straight out of the camera. 

It’s worth sitting through the accompanying video about “the making of” these images. This shows how Copeland turned an Inuit village's chapel and schoolroom into a makeshift studio, complete with lights and reflectors. Gearheads will note that he used a Canon DSLR with Zeiss lenses.

The technical quality of his images bears witness to Copeland’s background as a commercial photographer before he turned to expeditioning. It stands to reason that skills honed in product or fashion photography can be turned to account when capturing images of icebergs or Greenlanders. This does raise a question, though – what is the product in these circumpolar use cases?

A partial answer comes from the blurb at the exhibition’s entrance. Against the background of the photographer’s face, suitably ice-encrusted, it reads as follows:

For 30 years Sebastian Copeland has been documenting his expeditions and adventures in the form of books, exhibitions, events and films - transforming himself and inspiring the people and organizations that he comes into contact with. He is a climate analyst, award-winning photographer and aspirational athlete and combines these tools to powerfully communicate the urgency of action on climate change and sustainable growth…

Some have queried motivations of this kind, given the carbon output involved in travelling to places like Qaanaaq. But to leave such misgivings aside – I refer you to fellow blogger Snowhenge to give them voice – a more fundamental critique looms. That is, in an age of climate denial, photography just doesn’t seem to be working as a tool to communicate the urgency of action on climate change.

This isn't for the lack of a lengthy history. Landscape photography in Greenland can be traced back, via luminaries and activists such as Ragnar Axelsson and James Balog, for well over a century. Yet, whatever their merits as artists, none of Greenland's many photographers seem to have exerted so much as a milli-erg on actual policymaking.

Does that mean that photographing icebergs is futile? By no means. As the navigator John Davis said, Greenland is “the place of greatest dignitie”. As such, it cries out to be documented. And one day, or rather sooner, we will be grateful for the diligent work of Sebastian Copeland and his peers.

This brings us to the very beginning of colour photography in Greenland, the Swiss scientific expedition of 1912. By good fortune, their legacy is well preserved. Using both hand-tinted glass slides and Autochrome colour prints, the explorers recorded a world that has utterly vanished – whether coastal glaciers, traditional communities or the Greenlanders they portrayed. And their images have the freshness and charm that is reserved for first-comers.

Recent museum displays have shown that individual images from the 1912 expedition can be successfully printed up to Copeland-ish dimensions and even beyond, as seen below at the Swiss National Museum:

And yet, to my knowledge, nobody in the past century has ever staged a pure photography exhibition showing a decent array of these remarkable pictures. 

Should there be any curators out there who find this curious, please get in touch or drop me a comment below. And together we might perhaps have a go at making it happen.

References and further reading

The exhibition of Sebastian Copeland’s Greenland photographs at the IPFO Haus der Fotografie Olten, Switzerland, runs from 11 April to 19 July 2026. 

IPFO stands for the International Photo Festival Olten, a prominent Swiss photography event featuring exhibitions, workshops and lectures. The organization also maintains the Haus der Fotografie (House of Photography), a permanent venue for exhibitions.

Sebastian Copeland, The Arctic: A Darker Shade of White, Rizzoli International Publications, September 2024.

Arctic dreams in Autochrome: How the polar pioneers pursued photography in colour, One Hundred Mountains (this blog).

Alfred de Quervain, Quer durchs Grönlandeis, 1914, available in German in:

Alfred de Quervain, Quer durchs Grönlandeis: Die Expeditionen 1909 und 1912/13, Eingeleitet von Peter Haffner Mit einem Nachwort von Marcel de Quervain Mit Fotos, Verlag Neue Züricher Zeitung, 1998. 

or in English:

Alfred de Quervain, Across Greenland's Ice Cap: The Remarkable Swiss Scientific Expedition of 1912, with an introduction by Martin Hood, Andreas Vieli and Martin Lüthi, McGill-Queen's University Press, May 2022, with more than sixty colour images.

Beyond the bear bell

Risk management tools for Hyakumeizan fans, with a hint from Italy

17 March: “That’ll be bear scat,” she said pointing at the ground next to my boots. I expressed surprise: after all, we weren’t even on a mountain hike. This was more like a spring morning stroll on a low hill bordering farmland on the edge of the Sensei's hometown. Classic satoyama territory, in fact.

Smoking "fun"? Suspected bear scat from a hill near us.

We do seem to be hearing and seeing more of the ursine types. A few years ago, a cub ran across our trail on Genanpo. We were serenaded from a thicket on Hakusan. And we saw a pawprint in the snow on Honoke, earlier this year. Such personal encounters tend to support what statistics and news reports are suggesting: Honshu’s bear population has come roaring back.

Before you hit up Rakuten for a can of bear spray – more on that later – it’s worth checking whether you are travelling in bear country at all. This information sheet from the Toyota City authorities helps you do so. Bear scat comes in several different forms, it explains, depending on the creature's diet:

Bear essentials: how to recognise their scat and pawprints.
Courtesy of the Toyota City bear information sheet.

Bears also announce themselves through their pawprints, scratches on tree trunks and the so-called nests of tangled branches that they make while gathering nuts or fruit. To prevent confusion, the information sheet also shows the droppings, hoofprints or scratches left by other kinds of forest denizen such as deer and wild boar.

Then, after taking a deep breath, it would be wise to read Emma Goto’s admirably cool and collected risk assessment over on her blog. Despite the rising number of reported bear encounters, including fatal ones, she points out, “the probability of you actually being attacked by a bear on the trail is still statistically very, very low.”

That may be, but ardent Hyakumeizan baggers can’t confine themselves to the mountains of Shikoku, where bears are few, or Kyushu, where none have been sighted for years. In other regions, the Hyakumeizan mountains might be less frequented by bears, as Emma suggests. But this would hold true only for the routes most frequented by hikers.

Bear witness: Kumamap shows you where the heat is.

Fortunately, it’s possible to estimate the risk of encountering a bear on any specific Hyakumeizan peak. This is thanks to the work of Kumamap, who run a database that aggregates reports of bear encounters all over Japan. Helpfully, they have already parsed that data to rank the One Hundred Mountains by bear safety.

The results, the authors say, are surprising – and they certainly surprised me. None of the top three mountains are in Akita or Iwate, the prefectures most in the news for bear attacks. Rather, they are Norikura in Gifu, where a skyline road brings thousands of day trippers straight into bear habitat, Bandai in Fukushima, where trails and ski resorts push deep into bear territories, and Yake-dake in the Northern Alps.

Into the danger zone? Ski-mountaineers on Norikura.

Taking a regional view, there are more encounters in the Chubu and Kanto than in Tohoku. And Hokkaido might not be as dangerous as you may have thought, despite that horrifying incident on Rausu. But you'd better study Kumamap’s full analysis for yourself. It’s required reading for any Hyakumeizan fan.

So how should hikers protect themselves? The usual nostrums include walking in a group, or if hiking solo, choosing a trail with other people on it. There are established guidelines for what to do if you actually see a bear. And, of course, most hikers carry a bear bell, and some pack bear spray too.

Some doubt whether these devices really work. Project Hyakumeizan feels unqualified to join this debate, having never actually set eyes on a bear in Japan. But like the Sensei, who has several times been within nodding distance of one, he does carry a bell. 

Bear belles: a chime in time saves nine ...

And there’s no harm in referring readers to the advice of an expert, as quoted in the Japan Times:

I carry bear spray and three bear bells, [says Muto Shun, a government geologist who ranges through the mountains of Iwate]. My bear spray is set at my right waist, where I can reach it with my right hand immediately. When walking through bushy places or moving at a fast pace, I have my bear spray out from the holster and in my hand in case of close encounters. My bear bells are placed on both sides of my body so that I can be heard well from all directions.

Vested wisdom: Walk, don't run, through her territory....

Can other countries add to this stock of precautionary wisdom? Italy reintroduced the brown bear into its Apennines mountain range during the 2000s. As this population numbers just a hundred or so individuals, bear encounters are far fewer than in Honshu. Nevertheless, since 2014, bears have attacked people eight times.

Six of these cases involved a female bear with yearling cubs, and in one case a female bear killed the victim. It may be that this bear – the infamous JJ4 – was unusually aggressive. It may also be significant that the victim was a trail runner.

The circumstances of the Italian tragedy recall the – fortunately non-fatal – attack that befell Yamanoi Yasushi near Tokyo in 2011. But let Sartaj Ghuman tell the story, as he masterfully does in his profile of the elite climber published in Alpinist 62:

Nine years ago, Yamanoi-san was running in the forested hills near his house. He had to watch where he put his feet on the narrow, rocky path, and he almost bumped into the bear before he saw her. And then he noticed the cub that she was hiding behind her. He put his arm up instinctively, and the bear’s teeth bore down into his flesh. With a jerk of her massive head, she sent him flying through the air. He landed in some brambles, and before he knew it, the bear was upon him again. This time she bit into his face. Blood streamed. It took him about forty minutes to crawl down the mountain to his house, and then his neighbor called for an ambulance…

Statistically insignificant as they may be, these two incidents do suggest one more point of practical etiquette when visiting the realm of the mountain monarchs. So by all means know your bear signs, refer to Kumamap, and let them know you’re coming.

And then, above all, walk – don’t run – through their territory.

Appendix: "There's no point in worrying at all"

Alan Booth on the predictability of Hokkaido’s bears

The man who told me about bears had lived on the shore of the lake for thirty years. He had been a prisoner of the Russians on Sakhalin, and the Russians had told him that he would never go home again. In the end they had released him after two years, and he had gone back to Sapporo where he had found no one he knew, he said, and no way of making a living. So he had settled here on the shore of Lake Shikotsu, a wiry brown-faced hermit, and an amiable one…

Bears, he said, are the most predictable of animals – far more predictable than human beings, whom he confessed he had not much interest in and whom he thought overrated as a species.

“There are dozens of bears in the hills around the lake. They come down almost daily to the road over there."

He pointed at the road I had just walked along, and I said "Oh really?" with a great deal of nonchalance.

"You want to whistle or sing when you walk," he said, "or have a bell and ring it from time to time, or bang a stick. They won't come near you unless they’re really hungry, and then it's only your food they'll want.”

I nodded pleasantly, having no food.

“If you turn a corner and you see a bear and it’s thirty metres away, you’ve no need to worry. The bear will run away. It’ll be far more frightened than you are.”

“Well, well!”, I said, and sipped my tea.

“If you turn a corner and you see a bear, say, twenty metres away, there’s still a good chance it won’t bother you. It’ll roar a bit just to let you know it’s there, but if you stand quite still, it’ll probably get bored and go back into the forest.”

“Mm”, I said, giving the forest a very uncursory glance.

“And then, of course, if you turn a corner and you see a bear and it’s five or ten metres away from you…”

“Then, presumably, I should start to worry,” I said, chuckling my most British chuckle.

“Not really,” he said. “You’ve no need to worry. Bears are the most predictable of animals. If it’s five metres away it’ll certainly kill you. There’s no point in worrying at all.”

References

From Alan Booth, The Roads to Sata: A 2,000-mile Walk through Japan, Penguin Travel Library, 1987. Image courtesy of ChatGPT.

Confessions of a blogspot bumbler

And why it might pay to start posting about industrial descalers.

A big hand for Bre’er David over at Ridgeline Images. Anybody who wants to start a blog needs to read his admirably transparent post on What It Costs to Run My Blog in 2026 – And How Much It Earns.

SEO spike: Yari pulls in the readers, at least on this blog.

Bottom line is: If you’re serious about building a blog with genuine reach, start with a self-hosted WordPress.org setup from day one, like David’s own. Or, if technically adept, like Emma Goto, you could build your own static site.

This leaves the free and easy-to-use Google Blogger/BlogSpot solution somewhat out in the cold. The problem, David says, is visibility. Since Google tends to demote blogspot.com subdomains, you’ll get less attention, lowering your blog’s earning potential.

To which I’d add another beef: Blogger’s limited range of templates and design options won’t let you max out your mountain photography, as a more bespoke platform might. With similar effects on attention and earnings.

Before you brush off Blogger, though, you have to ask whether any of this matters. If it’s revenues you seek, then you need to blog about food, beauty tips, or technology. Blogs about hiking in Japan limit themselves to a niche.

And if you further limit yourself to just One Hundred (Japanese) Mountains, then you shoehorn yourself into a superniche. So costs need to be kept commensurably low. Which means that Blogger will do you nicely.

As for a blog’s look and feel, you might be better off with Behance, flickr, 500px and their ilk if photography is your main thing. You could even write a bit more under your images on Insta.

Or, to turn that idea on its head, you could use Blogger to write well-regarded photography posts without ever publishing an image. Andrew Molitor’s been doing (or did) just that for years.

What about attention? Revenues or none, there’s no point writing a Japan blog for the applause of just one hand clapping. Of course, it depends what you want to achieve. This blog, One Hundred Mountains, was started back in 2008 with a single purpose in mind – to find a publisher for a forthcoming translation of Fukada Kyūya’s Nihon Hyakumeizan.

Until then, we’d drawn a blank. About thirty publishers had been approached in the traditional way, via email or letter. But all found the book a bit too superniche. One said it contained too many obscure Japanese place names. Another quoted five thousand pounds, which seemed generous. Until it dawned that he wanted me to pay him, not the other way round.

Then a sample Hyakumeizan chapter was posted on this blog, during its very first month. This soon caught the attention of an American academic – thanks David F. – who sent over a list of about ten US publishers who he thought might be interested. And the first one on the list spoke for the book. 

Always, you should be careful what you wish for. At a stroke, the blog was deprived of its prime reason for existing. And since then it has strayed hobbyhorsically off-topic, into realms as unrelated as cats, photography tips, and arctic expeditions.

Blog mavens counsel against such hobbyhorsicality:

“Blogs should focus on one topic to build authority, trust, and a dedicated audience, making it easier to monetize and rank in search engines. A niche focus allows search engines to understand your site's purpose, boosting SEO, while offering a cohesive experience that keeps visitors engaged and encourages them to return.” 

Thus Google AI, no doubt riffing off many a human blogger's posts.

To which Project Hyakumeizan retorts, riffing off Tristram Shandy, that “so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him – pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?”

Manga sell better than mountains...

In deference to Google AI, it has to be admitted that this blog’s most-viewed post is impeccably on-topic. This is Life and death on Japan’s Matterhorn, which concerns Yarigatake, probably the most prominent of the One Hundred Mountains after Mount Fuji.

But the reason for the post’s popularity has more to do with manga than with mountains: it features Katō Buntarō, the solo alpinist who posthumously became the hero of a best-selling graphic story series. Stands to reason that the blog’s second most popular post also concerns Katō and his soloist's philosophy. 

Here’s the thing, though. The blog’s third most-read post, Legends from the Alps, doesn’t deal with Japan at all. Nor does it say much about mountains. It reviews an exhibition at the Swiss National Museum about folk tales and superstitions. Why this post should be so popular is entirely mystifying. 

It does suggest, however,  that if you write something that interests folk, they will find it. Even on Blogger.

And here’s another thing about attention. You won't believe the number of hopefuls who try to post comments advertising their industrial descalers. Luckily, Blogger’s filters do a good job of screening them out. 

Then again, if you ever get bored of life in a superniche, you could do worse than to start blogging about One Hundred Industrial Descalers.

Success would be guaranteed. Yes, even on blogspot.com. Or do I mean especially on blogspot.com?

A meizanologist's diary (122)

3 February: Kōya-san’s gravitational well extends as far as Kansai International Airport. A large poster advertising the mountain greets you at the terminal's entrance. 

And to board the plane, we walk over an airbridge manufactured by ShinMaywa, the flying boat maker whose corporate monument we inspected at Kōya-san's Oku-no-in just a couple of days ago.

Forty minutes after take-off we get an unusual perspective on a cone-shaped mountain as it rises into view behind the Southern Alps. Then lunch is served and my neighbour and I fall into conversation. He’s just been touring Japan for the first time. I mention our recent trip to Kōya-san.

At this, the woman sitting in the aisle seat joins in. Her father was a Shingon priest and trained on Kōya-san, she says, before showing us a picture of him, in sacerdotal robes, standing in front of his home temple on the mountain. Even as Mt Fuji falls astern, the Daishi is everywhere.