A meizanologist's diary (71)

28 March (cont’d): on the way home, I have to change trains in Matsumoto. There is time to slip out of the station and pay my respects to Monk Banryū, whose fine bronze statue has presided over the station plaza since 1986. Appropriately so, since it was from a local temple, the Genkōji, in the ninth year of Bunsei (1826) that he started out on the first of his pilgrimages towards Yari-ga-take. Although not via the station, of course.

On previous visits, I hadn’t noticed the accompanying signboard, installed beside the statue by the local Lions Club. “On July 20, 1828,” it proclaims, “Banryu Shonin overcame many hardships to become the first climber in history to reach the summit of Mt. Yarigatake. Fifty years before William Gowland, the Englishman who named the Japanese Alps, reached the summit on July 28, 1878, Banryu Shonin’s historic ascent left behind an immortal achievement that marked the dawn of modern alpinism …”

History is slippery stuff. Admittedly, Fukada Kyūya, in the Yari-ga-take chapter of his One Hundred Mountains of Japan, does agree that “The first to climb it was Banryū …”. But, a few pages later in the same book, he all but contradicts himself in the chapter about nearby Kasa-ga-dake, a mountain also climbed by Banryū, in 1823. Here Fukada implies that other monks, including Enku (1632–1695), had long been subjecting themselves to a “Trial of Five Mountains” in the region, these being Kasa, Hodaka, Yake-dake, Norikura - and Yari.

So was Banryū really the "first climber in history" to top out on Yari-ga-take? The question probably wouldn't have meant much to the monk himself. As Scott Schnell points out in a luminous essay (Believing is seeing: A Religious Perspective on Mountaineering in the Japanese Alps), Banryū never spoke of climbing, let alone conquering a peak. Instead, when visiting a mountain, he used the same word that others would reserve for entering the sacred precincts of a shrine or temple.