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).
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).
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