A meizanologist's diary (88)

24 November: If they won’t come to us, then we must go to them. And this is why we have to drive to a certain rendezvous point by 8am sharp. 

Parking the car in the shadow of a Fukuititan nipponensis – I have mentioned before, haven’t I, the pride we take in our local palaeontology? – we convene with other members of the Sensei’s mountaineering club.

The dinosaur turns out to be a bit of a distraction tactic, for our quest today is purely mycological. An hour later we arrive at a location about which I can reveal only that it is somewhere on Honshu. For obvious reasons, fungus hunters prefer to be vague about these things. 

So, while the sun burns off the last shreds of the morning mists in the valley below, we set off up a wooded ridge led by the club’s president himself.

If you’re lucky, you can sometimes find the button mushrooms known as nameko (Pholiota microspore) floating in your miso soup or in nabe (hot pot) dishes. These were probably cultivated in a dank cellar somewhere. Yet, as with salmon or venison, the wild variants are incomparably more sumptuous than those reared in captivity – hardly surprising when you consider that all cultivated nameko are descended from a single common ancestor.  Hence our annual forays in search of the wild variety.

Nobody is surprised when M-san sights the first nameko. Quite how he has honed his instinct and reputation for sniffing them out must remain a mystery. Like an expert truffle hunter, he seems to have a second sight for their terroir. Gesturing downslope – we are on a ridge wooded with beech, maple and Japanese oak (konara) – he points out some little yellow blobs clustered on a tree trunk.

The mushrooms seem to prefer the shady side of the tree, which makes them harder to spot from our vantage point. We scramble down to take a look and M-san sets to work with scissors to carefully snip their stems. If you just pull them off the tree, a lot of dirt comes with them, explains the Sensei.

Entering into the spirit of nameko-hunting, I dig my boots into the steeply tilting leaf mould and adventure my person yet further down the slope. 

Oh joy, an untouched tree abounding with the little buttons, each a-dripping with its telltale slime (“name” means slippery). One or two have grown to double the usual size, and the largest is garnished with miniature crimson maple leaves, as if presented by some high-class ryōtei for my delectation.

Using a pair of the Sensei’s scissors, I snip carefully at this rich harvest until my Tupperware container is brimming with the sticky trove. 

It’s at this point that I start to appreciate a sinister truth – the tree I’m harvesting is actually dead, and the nameko have colonised its rotting trunk, some even tucking themselves away under its peeling bark.

Looking around, I get the picture. The maple and beech trees on this ridge seem to be in good health, but it’s another story with the oaks (konara), many of which are prematurely bare of leaves. “Nara-gare” (oak wilt) has been documented in Japan since the 1930s, it seems, but outbreaks stayed within limits until the 1980s. Then, starting on the Japan Sea Coast, the disease spread to most of Japan’s prefectures. 

One reason for the pandemic may be that people have stopped cutting down oak trees for firewood in the “satoyama”, the woods bordering on villages. This led to a proliferation of older trees, which are more vulnerable to infestation by the longhorn beetle that carries the nara-gare fungus. And the disease has spread even faster in the hot dry summers of recent years.

Fortunately, it’s impossible to harvest all the mushrooms on this tree: some are out of reach, and my container is too small for the rest. And, anyway, canny fungus hunters leave plenty of mushrooms behind, to ensure next year’s harvest. I work my way back to the ridgeline, stepping over a fallen oak branch, only to find nobody there.

Hollers direct me to a kind of grassy buttress that falls gently from the ridge. Aha, everyone else is working on the mother lode of nameko. Here too, the mushrooms are growing exclusively on the standing hulks of dead or dying oaks. 

The mother lode of nameko
Photo by courtesy of H-san

But these fungi, uniformly small and densely clustered on each peeling trunk, are the top-quality “gokujo”(極上). Everyone is able to take away a shopping bag full, leaving plenty to spawn next year’s harvest.

Back home, the Sensei cooks up nameko-jiru, a rich mushroom soup. The following day, the mushrooms put in a repeat appearance as nameko tsukudani. And there are still enough to freeze for a hot pot later in the week. Well, here’s looking at you, nabe.

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 23 November: “Ni mo kakawarazu …” The very phrase is enough to raise our hackles. “Although” the author of this benighted signboard begins, “Monju-san is a relatively low mountain at 365 metres, it counts as one of the Five Mountains of Echizen thanks to its beautiful form and, from its western aspect, it is also known as the Tsunohara-Fuji.”

Now we Monju fans are unwilling to countenance any qualifications at all about our local mountain. Heck, few Meizan of our acquaintance pack so much history into so few metres. True, we must set off from the Taishōji Tozanguchi through the usual factory forest of cryptomeria, but we soon rise into a handsome maple wood of mixed momiji and kaede. 

A few gleams of sunlight start to push through the clouds as we pass the shrine housing a Kannon statue. Yes, you read that right – a shrine-like building housing a Buddhist statue. For reasons that need further study, folk around here seem to have turned a blind eye to the Meiji government’s attempts to disentangle the Shinto from the Buddhist faith. The mountain proclaims its syncretism even more clearly at its “Oku no in” (inner sanctuary), which enshrines both a Buddhist and a Shinto deity.

Just here two elderly men happen by. Where are you from, they ask. When I reply, the younger of the two says “Then you have read the works of Rock”. Would that be hard rock or extreme rock, I’m wondering, when he amplifies “Rocke and Hume”. My interlocutor likes to read these philosophers in the original English, although he admits he struggles to decipher their sense of irony. 

We wander on up the path discussing local philosophers – it seems that the eminent Nishida Kitarō was a Hokuriku man too, as was his friend Suzuki Daisetz, the author of the classic book on Zen and Japanese Culture …

The second man doesn’t have much to say for himself. Instead he’s concentrating on his foot and stick placements. It turns out that he is ninety years of age, having retired aeons ago from teaching maths at a local high school, and has climbed Monju five thousand times (the philosopher claims a mere four thousand, but he must be a decade or more younger).

We make our way at a very measured pace up to the main shrine, where the Sensei has been bemusedly waiting, wondering what happened. Sorry, I say, I didn’t know that Monju too is a mountain for philosophers …

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20 November (cont’d): back in Bungo-Taketa by early evening, I fail to notice the “Reservations only” sign outside the restaurant, but the kind musume-san lets me in anyway. 

Once seated at the counter, the choice is obvious. As I’ve just come down from the eponymous mountain, it has to be the "Sobo-san" set menu. 

Sipping a dry Kirin to accompany this homely yet refined fare, I can now turn to a question that’s been bothering me since about nine in the morning. That was when I was admiring the tumbled boulders in the streambed below the path that leads up towards the real Sobo-san. And something was out of kilter with them.

“While Kujū-san is a volcano and pleases the eye with its airy, open uplands,” it says in the English version of Japan’s most famous mountain book, ”Sobo and Katamuki are formed of Paleozoic strata and are covered with dark woods. Attracted by the contrast, I decided to climb them and, two years later, was able to carry out my plan.”

Battening on that phrase “Paleozoic strata”, I was expecting to encounter a mountain made of sedimentary rocks such as limestone or slate. And in one way at least, Sobo-san does resemble one of those genial “Kalkberge” in the northern Swiss alps - one of those that, as a local author puts it, offers you on one side a gentle slope to walk up and, on the other side, a cliff to fall to your death from. 

So far so good. But those boulders at the mountain’s base looked more granitic than sedimentary. Perplexed, I had carried on up the ridge, only to be confronted at around the 1,000-metre mark by an outcrop of a fine grey-green crystalline rock – andesite, perhaps, or something else volcanic. So where were those Palaeozoic strata hiding themselves?

I think of taxing the musume-san with the question – she’s just come back to set an exquisite chawanmushi beside my tray, for this is truly the teishoku that trumps them all – but, in fact, Wikipedia tells you all you need to know. Namely, that Sobo-san’s origins are no less igneous than those of its neighbours, Kujū and Aso-san. In fact, you can thank ashfalls from the latter volcano, with a bit of help from the Kikai super-eruption, for the gentle angle of Sobo's northern summit slopes. 

Now, somewhat like the eels writhing in that tank on the other side of the restaurant’s counter, doubts are starting to squirm. Could this confusion have arisen from a translation error when Nihon Hyakumeizan was put into English? After all, this is what Fukada Kyūya wrote in the original text: 九重は火山で、明るくのんびりしたの見応えあるのに対して、祖母、傾は古生層の山で、黒黒した森林に覆われている。

Plugging that text into the translation engine of your choice, you get something like this: “Kujū is a volcano, bright and relaxing and worth seeing, whereas Sobo and Katamuki are paleo-stratigraphic mountains, covered with black, black forests.”

That still leaves the question of where Fukada got his palaeozoic strata from. Later, I find some illumination on a website of the Kyushu regional forest office. This is what the officials have to say:

The terrain is steep, with the mountain ranges of Mt. Sobo (1,757m), Mt. Katsura (1,602m), and Mt. Okuzure (1,643m) at its center. Geologically, it is located on the Usuki-Yatsushiro tectonic line, and is composed of Paleozoic strata with bedrock of sandstone, slate, and chert …

Naruhodo: perhaps it was just the bedrock that Fukada was talking about, not the volcanoes that erupted through it. Taking a deeper swig of my rapidly diminishing glass of Kirin, I vote to absolve the translator of error, although not of the lesser charge of failing to properly ground-truth the mountain before publishing the translation.

People are starting to queue at the restaurant’s door – clearly I am privileged to be dining at the Bertolini’s of Bungo-Taketa. When I ask the musume-san for the bill, I notice she is fielding the other foreign guests in fluent English. Really, I should have consulted her about Sobo-san's geology first – she seems so universally competent that it's impossible to believe she doesn't have the local stratigraphy down too.

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20 November: less than an hour after starting from the Kamoshika taxi’s drop zone at Kōbara (God’s Field), I reach Sobo-san’s fifth station – this is curious, as on my way up through the factory plantations I don’t recall seeing any first, second, third or fourth stations, such as would befit a self-respecting Meizan with a tradition of pilgrimages. But now the trees are starting to look more like a natural forest, and it’s time to take a break.

As magic potion to Obelix the Gaul, so Kirin’s Fire One Day Black bottled coffee is to the caffeine-starved hiker. After sinking half of my supply, I set off through the forest with renewed vigour – which is offset by the need to take note of the various signboards educating me about the trees. 

Just above the fifth station, the glossy pink trunk of a camellia-bearing himeshara (Stewartia monadelpha) shows that we are still low down the mountain, climatically speaking.

Soon the path is so deeply mulched in fallen maple leaves (six different varieties, a helpful signboard says), to say nothing of the fallout from the zelkova (keyaki) and oaks (mizunara), that I have to keep looking for the red tapes tied onto branches to stay on track. The succession of trees on Sobo-san typifies an “intermediate-temperate deciduous broad-leaved forest”, thought Oita University's Professor Suzuki Tokihiro, an eminent geo-botanist.

Gaining a ridge, we enter a conifer grove, probably of tsuga (Japanese hemlock). A rock outcrop forces the path to zigzag, and a signboard warns hikers about the “zeppeki” (sheer cliff). The language seems a bit overdone but, then again, Bre’er Ben over on Meizan Memories warns that a hiker slipped on one of Sobo’s normal routes on a winter day and died of exposure before anyone found him. So have a bit of extra care here, friends.

As the morning light starts to graze the nearby ridges, we reach the beechwoods – this must be above 1,100 metres now, as the cool-loving trees won’t grow any lower in these southern climes. Then the trees thin out as the path leads into a clearing surveyed by a solitary red-bibbed jizō on its far side. Judging by the expansive view, this must be See-the-Country Pass or Kunimi-tōge (1,480 metres). Two or three other hikers are taking a break here.

I push onwards into a low-ceilinged wood, its stunted and twisted trees suggesting that we’ve moved up into yet another climatic zone. Frost pillars glitter in the slanting sunlight, and a shaded gully still harbours a patch of early-season snow. 

My, so far south, and there seems to be more snow here than on Mt Fuji right now.

I follow two lady hikers onto the bare summit. “Yabeh!” (bad!) says the one with orange-tinted hair as she takes in the view. Bad is right: the air is so crystalline today that it would be criminal to neglect the panorama that opens up on all sides.

Fukada Kyūya had similar luck with the weather: “Under a cloudless sky,” the Hyakumeizan author wrote, “I spent a happy hour in the warm sun counting off all the mountains around. There to the west was Aso, the skirts of its outer bastions stretching off towards Kujū-san, these vast fields extending almost as far as the eye could see. And standing at the corners of this space, like the legs of a tripod, were Aso, Kujū and Sobo.”

Taking a leaf from Fukada’s book, I document the views with my weatherbeaten Nikon. We can actually see from one side of Kyushu to the other today. 

The summit shrine too deserves attention. It looks centuries older than the wooden fanes that typically adorn a Japanese mountaintop. Unlike them, it consists of stone slabs, roughly clenched together. There’s no knowing how many centuries it has stood there, but the guidebook says that the god enshrined there is mentioned in the eighth-century Shoku Nihongi. This must be a Meizan with a very lengthy tradition.

If so, why does Sobo-san have such an effete name – it means “grandmother’s peak” – when its dragon-manifesting guardian deity is so obviously masculine? The question is raised in the booklet accompanying my Yama to Kōgen map. One thesis, it says, is that “Sobo” is a corruption of an older name – “Sohori-no-yama” – which in turn derived from a Korean term meaning “place with a god”. If so, the mountain’s name would be kith and kin to that of modern-day Seoul.

I sit down behind a boulder out of the wind while I munch on one of the Sensei’s sweet potatoes, wash it down with the rest of the Fire One Day Black, and consult the map. It’s not yet eleven o’clock: too early to go down yet. Fukada had the right idea: he traversed Sobo-san, went down to the old mining village of Obira “enjoying on the way a splendid view of Sobo’s east flank, a corrie-like valley walled in by cliffs that rise out of dense primeval forest.” 

And on the next day, the Hyakumeizan author and his local guide climbed Katamuki-yama, the rugged ridge rising to the east. This is surely the correct way to appreciate a Meizan, turning it on all sides as you would an antique tea bowl….

For a moment, I consider a recklessly extended one-day hike across the mountains until I run out of daylight. Two voices war within my soul: you’ve got a head-torch whispers Mubō-kun, perhaps fired up by an overdose of One Day Black, and surely the weather’s going to hold – that is, if we tune out the lenticular cloud that’s just materialised over Katamuki-yama. Hey, objects Captain Majime, you told the efficient and courteous Kamoshika taxi driver you’d be back at Kōbara by 3.15 pm…

Captain Majime and Mubō-kun negotiate a compromise. I will drop down the peak’s southern side, just to take a look you understand. Curiously, no helpful sign identifies the way to go, and I have to check the direction with another hiker. 

The path heads down a rake of loose stones, and I soon find myself above another zeppeki. This one is for real, and I’m happy to grab the fixed nylon ropes while clambering down it.

Then a series of ladders plumb the depths of a shady gully. At last we reach the ridge below. The path that leads southwards is less trodden than the trade route up from Kōbara. It’s clear that I’m not going to get very far today if the taxi rendezvous is to be respected. So, reaching a viewpoint above the trees, I turn to look back at Sobo-san.

From this side, the mountain has changed its character as profoundly as any Jekyll and Hyde. Instead of the modestly angled parkland that greets climbers from the north, a rocky fist of volcanic rock punches upwards from the brushwood. And the peak seems to frown as cloud shadows start drifting across it. Now it really is time to turn back.

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19 November: as time travel isn’t specifically excluded by the terms and conditions of a Japan Rail Pass, I use mine to board the present-day Sakura 555 super-express. As you would expect, the Shinkansen hums at a near-relativistic speed down to Kyushu. Time starts to dilate at Kokura where we change to a battered blue Sonic limited express for the run down the coast. Deprived of onboard wifi, passengers have to look out of the windows.

Sonic at full tilt, courtesy of JR Kyushu

At every rural station we pass, the grass grows longer and longer on the abandoned platforms. And now the afternoon light is lengthening too. When the overhead electricity wires run out at Oita, I take to a one-man diesel railcar for the journey inland, along with scores of schoolchildren who just want to nod off into their anime-themed sports bags.

There’s one last glimpse of a Fuji-like peak against the sunset glow – could that be tomorrow’s mountain? – and then we’re heading into Kyushu’s darkest interior. There is no street lighting here because there are no streets to light.

Night has fallen by the time we arrive in Bungo-Taketa, a town that seems to hover somewhere in early Shōwa. Streetlights are sparse because nobody is on the street at 6 pm; there are no convenience stores, and the town’s only supermarket closed an hour ago. If you wanted to buy food for your hike tomorrow, then your chances would be Slim or None. 

Fortunately, in her estimable Hyakumeizan blog, Emma Goto warns of just this eventuality – thanks for the heads-up, Emma – and my ragged but capacious bergen already holds enough rations to get by with. At the same time, it’s heart-warming to know that places still exist that lie beyond Seven-Eleven’s supply chain. Long may they do so.

Glancing at the map over supper at the Marufuku restaurant – to be commended for its finger-lickin’ good chicken cuisine – I see that the Fuji-shaped peak which looked so handsome against the sunset isn’t even in the same massif as tomorrow’s mountain. I must have been looking at Yufu-dake. Goodness, I haven’t a clue about this region. Am I still in present-day Japan?

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Meteorologist Wada Yuji
Image courtesy of Wikipedia

16 November: we’ve been summoned to Tokyo, on the early morning Kagayaki, by Wada Yūji (1859–1918). Not in person, of course, given those dates, but to take in an exhibition dedicated to him and his boss, the eminent Meiji-era meteorologist, Nakamura Kiyo’o (1855–1930).

We’re interested in these weathermen because both – but especially Wada – played a key part in the story of Nonaka Itaru and Chiyoko. This was the husband-and-wife team who survived more than two months in a small hut atop Mt Fuji in the winter of 1895 making weather measurements to within an inch of their lives. And had it not been for Wada's timely intervention, they would have burned through that last inch too.

From Yotsuya Station, we walk over to the Tokyo University of Science, where the museum is housed in a fine replica of a Meiji-era building. Nakamura Kiyo’o was the institution's second president, taking office in 1896, one year after he was appointed head of the Central Meteorological Observatory, the forerunner of today’s meteorological agency. 

It’s good that we have just taken a restorative cup of coffee at the station because we are about to get a masterclass on the art of scientific networking in mid-Meiji Japan.

It turns out that both Nakamura and Wada were students of Thomas Mendenhall (1841–1924), who came to Japan in 1878 to teach physics at Tokyo University – there they are in the commemorative class photograph below, taken probably in the same year. And both accompanied Mendenhall to Mt Fuji in the summer of 1880, when he conducted his famous gravity experiment from the summit of Japan’s highest mountain in order to “weigh the earth”.

Thomas Mendenhall and his students in Tokyo, c. 1878 (?)
Nakamura and Wada are sitting to Mendenhall's left
(Image courtesy of Thomas C. Mendenhall II via Wikipedia)

In 1895, a young dropout from pre-medical school, as Nonaka Itaru then was, visited Nakamura and Wada to discuss a preposterous scheme to overwinter on the summit of Mt Fuji. The meteorologists would probably have dismissed this madcap proposal out of hand, had not the meeting been orchestrated by the distinguished scientist Terao Hisashi (1855-1923), another of the “Mendenhall boys” and the science university’s first president. As it happened, both Terao and Nonaka were from samurai families in the old province of Chikuzen. 

So, instead of showing Nonaka Itaru the door, Wada suggested that his stay on Mt Fuji would be more productive if he took a full year’s worth of weather observations. And he further offered to lend him the instruments he would need.

From then onwards, the project was prosecuted with typical mid-Meiji verve. Itaru spent the summer building a hut, Wada helped him instal the instruments, and in October Nonaka reclimbed the mountain to start his observations. Soon afterwards, Chiyoko came up to join him, suspecting that her husband wouldn’t be able to manage on his own (where do women get these ideas, I wonder). Then things started to go horribly wrong, as detailed elsewhere on this blog …

Poster for the exhibition at the Tokyo University of Science

In the afternoon, we attend a meeting of the Fuyō Nikki no Kai. This is an association dedicated to researching the background to Nonaka Chiyoko’s eponymous “Journal of the Lotus”, which she started writing just weeks after she and her husband were rescued from their summit hut. They had in fact been carried down the mountain in a blizzard by an impromptu team of porters led by Wada Yūji himself. By now the fate of the Nonakas was so much a matter of public interest that the meteorologist later wrote a report on this episode for his ultimate superior, the Minister of Education, Marquis Saionji Kinmochi (1849-1940). 

After that, the story as often told – including here on this blog – takes a sombre turn. Itaru was never able to realise his dream of building a bigger and better weather station, perhaps because Wada was posted to Korea in 1899, depriving him of a mentor and a network. And Chiyoko died in her early fifties during the flu epidemic of 1922. But today’s meeting reminds us of Mark Twain’s jibe: “In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.”

Nonaka Itaru's storehouse built on the crater rim in 1912.
(Image source: historical report by the Mt Fuji Weather Station)

What prompts this thought is an official report which turns out to contain a rare photo of a storehouse that Nonaka Itaru commissioned to be built on Mt Fuji’s crater rim in 1912, more than a decade after he and his wife were dramatically rescued from their cramped and blizzard-wracked summit hut. The new storehouse was set up at Higashi Yasugawara, on the south-eastern side of the crater, exactly where Nonaka had once proposed to build a new and larger hut.

Three years previously, he’d built a spacious villa at Takigahara, a village at Mt. Fuji’s foot, so that future summit parties could use it as a staging post or even as an observatory when simultaneous readings were required at both the top and the foot of the mountain.

So it looks as if Itaru had both the ambition and the means to plot a return to the summit. Nor had he entirely lost contact with Wada – a photo we saw at the morning’s exhibition purports to show the two men together at a “7.5” station hut on Mt Fuji in 1912, the very same year that Nonaka built his summit storehouse.

In the end, though, it was the professionals of Japan’s meteorological service who built a more-or-less permanent weather station on the summit of Mt Fuji. Yet, when they did so, the meteorologists paid Itaru the compliment of adopting the wind-deflecting design of his storehouse for their own building. They also made use of Itaru’s storehouse itself. And they continued to treat him as an honoured guest in their new summit station. 

The full story is sometimes more complicated and nuanced than the storytellers would like to make it….