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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