A meizanologist's diary (83)

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….