A meizanologist's diary (61)

16 March: the president of the local mountaineering club invites us to hike the Kurosaki peninsula near Tsuruga. Driving towards the rendezvous, we see sluggardly bales of fog roll in from the Japan Sea. 

We leave the cars beside a hot spring hotel and set off up a steep, muddy path through an unpromising factory forest.  Before we reach the ridgeline, though, we can see that a more variegated woodland seems to be pushing back against the serried cryptomeria. This seems a good place to take a break.

Sitting on fallen branches and munching on konyaku jelly and the Sensei's homegrown sweet potatoes, we discuss factionalism in mountaineering clubs – a tendency as old as the hoary debates about guided vs guideless climbing in the original Alpine Club a century and more ago.

Speaking of alpine history, it seems that our president is enthusiastically reading the latest book about Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance. The grey ceiling truncates the hills around so that – like those fated climbers on the 1924 Everest expedition – it looks as if we too may soon vanish into the clouds.

Here and there, a camellia bush has scattered its red blooms across the forest floor. They lie there forlorn, rather like the medley of lopped heads on the ground after one of Toshiro Mifune’s more extravagant swordplays. Apparently, this is why the warriors of old tended to shun the camellia. And why you shouldn’t present them to invalids.

We’re now heading along the high spine of the peninsula, towards its seaward tip. High is relatively speaking of course. Unlike Mallory, we’re not going to have trouble with our oxygen supply. Our summit for the day is Taiyō ga Oka (293.7 metres), named for the sun that is now starting to burn through the fog. Good: we aren’t likely to vanish into the clouds after all.

By this point, the camellias have grown up into a mixed forest. Some have even managed to keep their blooms aloft. A forest of camellias? Before this morning, I didn’t even know that was a thing.

Yet, to my surprise, the savants report that such forests are found all the way up the Japan Sea coast, even as far as Akita. There’s even a “snow camellia” that has learned to hunker down under the heavy winter drifts of Niigata and other parts of the snow country … Naruhodo, I murmur to myself.

I glance across at the Sensei, but she appears quite unfazed by our surroundings: I guess she knew about the camellia forests all along …