A meizanologist's diary (90)

2 December: after days of rain, the sky is clear. But too late for us; time's up – we are driving to the station. When suddenly the Sensei exclaims, “Ah, Hakusan da!"

By chance, this street happens to line up exactly on the mountain, which rises there like a gigantic snowcrest, so that we are heading straight towards it.

“The only mountains I know that display this flawless pallor, without spot or shadow,” says the Hyakumeizan author, “are Hiuchi and Hakusan in Kaga Province.” The snowcrest in front of us bears out his words. Just in time for winter, our white mountain is restored to us. 

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25 November: a crystal dome of clear, cold air sits over central Honshu. The slanting winter light transfigures even the cryptomeria and bamboo groves of the forestry plantations. 

We are on our way up Ochi-san, a mountain first opened by Monk Taichō (682–767), and we are climbing it for much the same reason that he did – namely that it’s close to home.

Above the factory forest, we spot two paddle-shaped leaves lying on the path. 

Those are from a ho'o no ki, the Sensei explains: it has beautiful flowers like a magnolia in spring, plus you can bake your vegetables in the leaves to give them more taste.

But you don't eat the leaves themselves, I ask. No, she says, but look at the koshiabura over there – those leaves are delicious if you boil them up, or you can fry them as tempura. Though after the Fukushima disaster, they say you have to watch out for the radiation level …

I’m reminded of the days when every tree in the satoyama (village woods) had its use. Dr Junichi Saga caught the end of that era in Memories of Silk and Straw, in which he recorded the reminiscences of his elderly patients. There was the charcoal burner who went around buying up kunugi (sawtooth oak) trees for his kilns, the clog-maker who toured the northern prefectures looking for prime kiri (paulownia) timber …

Climbing towards the 600-metre mark, we reach the first stand of beeches – at half the height of the beechwoods on Sobo-san, just the other day. The wood is perfect for a good solid kitchen table and chairs, if you are lucky enough to find somebody to make them for you. One last steep ascent and we’re at the shrine building, all boarded up for the winter. Nobody else is about.

We take a flight of stone stairs to the mountain’s summit. Ochi-san tops out at a mere 616 metres, yet today the view seems to be limited only by the earth’s curvature. That serrated line of peaks on the eastern horizon must be the Northern Alps, more than a 100 kilometres away – can that really be Tateyama and Tsurugi at their northern end?

Hakusan floats in front of us: this must have been the view that inspired Taichō Daishi to make the mountain’s first ascent in the first year of Yōrō (717). We see with relief that it has started to snow up. It doesn’t yet dispose of the “flawless pallor without spot or shadow” described by Fukada Kyūya, but the last few stormy days have redeemed the mountain from its unnatural late-autumn barrenness. Winter has come, sort of.

On the way down, our boots rustling and occasionally slipping in the fallen leaves, we pass a row of recently installed jizō figurines. The Sensei has her doubts about these votive objects: they're probably made of imported stone, she suspects. Still, one of them, donated by a local couple, has an inscription that no fan of Ochi-san could find fault with: “Thank you for this path,” it says.

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24 November: If they won’t come to us, then we must go to them. And this is why we have to be at 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 for my delectation by some high-class ryōtei.

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.