Blank on maps

Review: unclimbed peaks and untravelled river gorges of the eastern Himalaya, as presented in photography and prose from Nakamura Tamotsu.

Other explorers may claim to have filled in “blanks on the map”, or to challenge “the last frontier on Earth”. But when Tamotsu “Tom” Nakamura uses those stirring phrases to introduce his latest book, he has the photos to back them up. In Unclimbed Summits and Three Parallel Rivers – East of the Himalaya, Blank on Maps, he pays pictorial tribute to mountains and river gorges that few have seen who live outside these remote regions.

The first part of the book focuses mainly on unclimbed mountains in eastern Tibet, especially the hard-to-access border regions. Most of the images were taken by Nakamura himself during his forty or so expeditions to the region, with some additional contributions by other eminent alpinists and travellers. 

Would-be seekers of first ascents should be riveted by these images. Nakamura estimates that 375 peaks of significant height remain unclimbed in the regions covered by his book, about two thirds of them located in the 750 kilometre-long Nyainqentanglha range lying to the north of the main Himalayan crest.

Thanks to the photographers’ compositional skills, the chosen summits stand out on the page with a rare clarity and substantiveness. They are the kind of images that invite you to trace out a climbing line up their ridges, faces and couloirs. 

That’s no accident, since most of the photos were taken by climbers, principally Nakamura himself. To folks who have travelled in these parts, Nakamura will need no introduction, distinguished as he is by honorary memberships and acknowledgements from numerous alpine and geographical associations including a Piolets d’Or Asia Lifetime Achievement Award. For others, it may be worth mentioning that Nakamura has communed with mountains fairly intensively throughout his life.

He went up to Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo in 1953, an institution noted for its strong business and economics orientation and a storied mountaineering club. He joined the latter because, in his own words, "I thought it would be boring to go to university and not do anything. So when I thought about what to do, I played baseball in junior high school and was in the swimming club in high school, but I wasn't very good at it. So when I found out there was a mountaineering club, I decided to join without thinking too much about it, thinking that I could walk (laughs). Another reason was that I loved traveling since I was a child."

In these early years, Nakamura climbed intensively in the winter, with attendant epics: he once spent ten days in a snow hole in a bid to climb the Chinne on Tsurugi in winter and on another trip an avalanche swept him four hundred metres down the mountain. In fact, he spent so many days in the mountains that it took him an extra year at university to graduate. During that “fifth year”, he joined Yoshino Mitsuhiko and Nakamura Yukimasa in the first ascent of the Takidani Grepon in the Japan Northern Alps, a climb which several decades later your reviewer did not entirely succeed in repeating. 

After graduating in 1958, Nakamura joined Ishikawajima Heavy Industries, where a predecessor from his university mountaineering club was an accounting manager. A few years later, IHI took an enlightened view when Nakamura needed several months’ leave of absence to join Yoshizawa Ichirō’s 1961 expedition to the Andes, where they made the first ascent of Pucahirca Norte, one of the last unclimbed six-thousanders in Peru, as well as various first ascents in the Cordillera Apolobamba.

After that, career and family took precedence over expeditions. Nakamura embarked on a series of overseas postings for IHI, starting in Pakistan and working in China, Mexico and New Zealand before being assigned to Hong Kong in 1989 at the age of 55. 

The new business location was fortuitous: as Nakamura was now within reach of the eastern Himalaya, he was able to launch his first expedition the very next year. This would be the first of forty or so forays into remote, restricted and previously untravelled regions of the eastern Himalaya over the next three decades. “Getting permits from the authorities was often problematic,” he has quipped, “but not as difficult as getting permission from my wife.”

All this is by way of explaining why the images in the first part of Nakamura’s latest book should fascinate those who would follow in his bootprints. The second part has a different character. Focusing on the Three Parallel Rivers of China’s Yunnan Province – the rivers in question ultimately flow into the Yangtze, Mekong and Salween – the photos document a region of extraodinary biological and ethnic diversity. 

Featuring river landscapes, people and settlements, the photos in this section will appeal to a broad readership. It’s somewhat strange, then, that English translations seem to be lacking for some of the information in the Japanese-language captions to the images in this section. This stands in contrast to the book’s first part, where English-language captions seem, if anything, to be prioritised under the illustrations. 

None of this detracts from the book’s visual impact, which is reinforced by the excellent print quality afforded by one of Japan’s longest-standing publishers of mountain-related literature. When I had finished leafing through the book’s more than two hundred pages – most of them illustrated with photos or maps – I fell to wondering what other unique images Nakamura-san may hold in his archives, and whether he might one day publish more of them for an English-speaking readership. 

References

Tamotsu Nakamura, Unclimbed Summits and Three Parallel Rivers: East of the Himalaya, Blank on Maps, Kyoto: Nakanishiya Shuppan, April 2021, 224 pages (Japanese and English, parallel text).

"Exploring the last frontier of the eastern Himalaya”, interview with Nakamura Tamotsu on the Hitotsubashi University website, 2017 (Japanese language only).

Notes on equipment (15): "more deadly than glacier water"

Advice on alpine outfitting from the mid-1930s. 

Food.—During the early stages of an Alpine holiday, while the appetite may still require tempting, many people fall back on dainties in the shape of tinned foods; but there are signs that the popularity of preserved foods has reached a climax and is now declining. Many travellers now believe that a week or two spent on a diet of tinned food has a bad effect on the health. They are probably right, and it is a good plan to rely chiefly on fresh eatables such as meat, butter, cheese, and eggs. The condition of the last named may be tested by putting them into a bowl of water, when only the more recently laid eggs will sink to the bottom. Some epicures find that eggs are pleasanter to eat and easier to digest, if they are not cooked as hard as bricks, but are either boiled for only four minutes or not at all. They must then, of course, be carefully packed. 

Alpinists cooking up in the mid-1930s
Image by courtesy of Mechanical Advantage (see References)

Jam (tinned though it be) and other sweet foods are a useful form of nourishment for those taking violent exercise. Glucose has a higher value than sugar as a restorative after muscular fatigue, but only inferior jams are supposed to be prepared with glucose, and jam-makers do not as a rule advertise its presence in their wares. A firm such as Jackson of Piccadilly would no doubt supply jam made with a sweetening of 50 per cent glucose, if specially requested to do so.

In regard to fruit, it is better to carry dried prunes and raisins rather heavy tins of peaches and apricots preserved in syrup. The rather puny oranges sometimes found in Alpine resorts can profitably be converted into orange juice and put in a flask.

If a party are benighted they should on no account sip brandy, for each reaction that it produces lowers the vitality. A spirit flask is, nevertheless, an agreeable luxury, and when the perspiring owner merely uses the contents to dilute icy glacier water before drinking large quantities of it, the spirits will serve a useful purpose.

The Alpine climate is even healthier than that of England in some respects, but it must be remembered that it is rather easier to catch chills in the Alps than at home. Consequently it is advisable, when halting at a cheese-makers’ chalet, during a long, hot, and tiring descent, to avoid drinking large quantities of refreshingly cool milk (still less, cream), especially if a prolonged siesta is to be taken immediately afterwards. Milk in such circumstances can be more deadly than glacier water.

An exhausted and untrained man will often arrive at the top of a peak without any desire to eat, but he will probably find that his appetite for a meal will return, if he will only allow himself half an hour’s pause instead of forcing himself to eat at once. Most men find that on big expeditions intervals of three hours between meals are quite long enough. 

References

Text: Chapter Three “Equipment” by C F Meade in The Lonsdale Library of Sports, Games and Pastimes, Volume XVIII, Mountaineering, London: Seeley Service & Co, 1934. 

Image: from Mechanical Advantage, John Middendorf's excellent blog on climbing technology: see Big Wall Bivouacs and "camping"part 2a.