A meizanologist's diary (89)

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.