“Tozan-shi” (3): parting of the ways

An outline history of mountaineering in Japan – divergent trends in early Shōwa

Some see the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1923 as a cultural and political watershed, dividing the liberal Taishō years from the growing tribulations of the early Shōwa era. Its impact on the lives of individual mountaineers was devastating. It marked an end to the mountain holidays of Mr and Mrs Takeuchi, it tossed the prolific alpinist Matsukata Saburō out of his bedroom window, and it buried the writer-mountaineer Tsujimura Isuke and his family in the ruins of their house near Atami.

Climbers of the Rikkyo University expedition on Nanda Kot, 1936 

Yet it’s difficult to see any obvious inflection point in mountaineering developments. After the end of Taishō’s reign, in 1926, hard-core alpinists just kept on doing what they always do: tackling ever harder and steeper routes. As in Europe decades earlier, they now moved on from ridge- and gully-climbing to more demanding rock faces. 

The summer of 1930 showed how this drive for “variation routes” was shaping up. In July, Ogawa Tokio made his debut on the sheer cliffs of Tanigawa-dake . The following summer, Ogawa went on to explore the even steeper terrain of Byōbu-iwa in the Hodaka massif. Winter climbers too made strides: between 1932 and 1934, a Waseda crew climbed several ridges in Takidani on Kita-Hodaka in the snow and ice season.

In the Southern Alps, a party from Kyoto University ventured onto the face of Kita-dake Buttress in July 1929. Ritsumeikan men put up some more new routes a few years later, but a direct ascent via the classic No. 4 Ridge had to await Oyabe Zensuke and his Tokyo Shōdai team in June 1935.

The emphasis on surmounting technical difficulties did not appeal to everybody. Some called for a more appreciative approach to mountain scenery. Itō Hidegoro, a pioneer of the Hokkaidō outback, sought to define this “contemplative mountaineering” as follows:

But, to avoid any misunderstanding, I’d like to make it clear that “contemplative” doesn’t mean walking just on low hills, or easy mountaineering, nor does it signify strolling about lost in thought or meditation like some poet or philosopher … Rather it is something that, as far as possible, should affect you to the depths of your being. Through the contemporary, specific experiences of mountaineering, we seek to approach the wider realm of nature.

The wider realm of nature was already attracting city dwellers in growing hordes. Acknowledging their needs, the government promulgated a law on national parks in 1931, later designating Unzen-dake and the Inland Sea as the first two. More significantly for mountaineers, though, the Shimizu railway tunnel was completed in the same year. This meant that time-pressed salaryman alpinists could do a climb on Tanigawa-dake at the weekend and still get back to Tokyo by Monday morning. 

The best-known salaryman climber was probably a young draughtsman who worked at the Mitsubishi marine diesel factory in Kobe. By the early 1930s, Katō Buntarō had made a nationwide name for himself as a winter soloist, mainly in the Northern Alps. In 1934, however, he started climbing with a partner. This, Fujiki Kuzō suggested, was because he had set his sights on a Himalayan expedition. 

If so, he was not the only one. After entering Kyoto University, the former stalwarts of the city’s Third High School set up the Academic Alpine Club of Kyoto. Their aim was specifically to pursue Himalayan goals. To do so, they first had to master a new set of techniques – setting climbing camps progressively higher up the mountain until the summit was in reach. 

The AACK first tested this “polar method” on Mt Fuji over the 1931 year-end. But after Japan left the League of Nations two years later, the country’s growing international isolation got in the way of everybody’s Himalayan ambitions. In the end, it was not the AACK but a Rikkyō University expedition that bagged Nanda Kot in October 1936, Japan’s first and only pre-war Himalayan summit.

This was too late for Katō Buntarō. Together with his partner, he had fallen to his death from Yari-ga-take in January that year, while attempting a midwinter traverse of the mountain’s North Ridge.  One newspaper lamented Katō’s death as the loss of a “national treasure".  If this accident felt to some like the end of an era, subsequent events more than justified their forebodings. 

References

Main sources are Wolfram Manzenreiter’s “Die soziale Konstruktion des Japanischen Alpinismus”, Beiträge zur Japanologie, Band 36, Vienna, 2000 – this is the first and so far only study of Japanese mountaineering history in any western language – and the Yama to Keikoku illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering (目で見る日本登山史 by 川崎吉光、山と渓谷社), Tokyo 2005.