A meizanologist's diary (101)

22 March: the early Kagayaki sweeps us past a snowy Mt Asama and into town by midmorning. 

At 11am, we climb the stone steps to the temple of Gokokuji in Bunkyō-ku, walk past the main hall into the cemetery and find a small group of friends in front of the monument to Nonaka Itaru and Chiyoko – whose bold attempt to overwinter on the summit of Mt Fuji in 1895 paved the way for a permanent weather station there.

Falling from a clear blue sky, the spring sunlight brings out every lineament in the gravestone’s bronze relief. 

Garbed in their parkas lined with Russian fur, the young couple look every bit as resolute as they did in October 1895, when settling in for their two-month ordeal atop Japan’s highest mountain.

Laconic as it is, the plaque under the bronze relief explains why we are here. Itaru passed away at the age of eighty-seven in February 1955. So we are paying our respects just a few weeks after his seventieth anniversary. Our group comprises members of the “Fuyō Nikki no Kai”, a study association dedicated to researching the Nonakas’ story.

The Nonaka Observatory of 1895.
Illustration from Itaru's brochure of 1900.

Over the past few years, many more details of that history have come to light. Most fictional accounts of Itaru’s project – particularly the novel by Nitta Jirō and any films based on it – end with the couple’s  rescue from their blizzard-wracked hut on Mt Fuji in late December 1895.

For Itaru, however, this was merely a beginning. While Chiyoko was publishing her Fuyō Nikki (Journal of the Lotus), a lively account of the couple’s mountaintop experiences, Itaru started work on a series of articles for Chigaku Zasshi, a geographical journal, explaining his scientific aims and setting out his weather observations. These were published in the second half of 1896.

And then he went back to Mt Fuji, climbing to the summit in three consecutive summers, those of 1896, 1897 and 1898. His aim was to scope out the site for a bigger and better weather station – one that would house a large enough team to support year-round weather observations.

Design for a new Mt Fuji weather station.
From Itaru's brochure of 1900.

The best place for a new observatory, Itaru decided, would not be on Ken-ga-mine, the highest summit on which he’d built his first small hut, but on a flat part of Mt Fuji’s crater rim at a place called Higashi Yasugawara. Lingering geothermal heat there might also help to heat the hut.

But who was going to pay for all this? In 1899, Itaru founded a fund-raising association and in February the following year came out with an 18-page prospectus for the new weather station.

Alas, the funds were slow to come in but this didn’t daunt Itaru. In 1909, at his own expense, he had a spacious villa built at Takigahara at Mt Fuji’s southern foot, as a base for further work on the mountain. And in 1912, with financial help from a prince of the realm, he set up a storehouse on the crater rim, exactly where he had suggested siting his new improved weather station.

The cover of Itaru's brochure of 1900.

By this time, a new generation of meteorologists had taken up the cause of a permanent weather station on Mt Fuji. Preparations were delayed by the world war and even more by the 1923 earthquake, which destroyed the Takigahara villa. In February of the same year, Itaru had to endure the loss of Chiyoko, who succumbed to a flu epidemic.

And so it wasn’t until 1932 that the professional weathermen were firmly established at the new government-funded summit observatory. The following summer, Itaru paid them a visit, accompanied by his daughter Kyōko, who of all their children most resembled Chiyoko.

After taking a group picture, we move on under the flowering cherry trees to look in at the great mausoleum dedicated to the great statesman Ōkuma Shigenobu (1838–1922) - Ōkuma too, it seems, was not immune to the lure of exploration, having helped in his latter years to raise funds for the Antarctic explorer Shirase Nobu.

As a meeting is scheduled at the offices of the non-profit organisation that has revived the buildings of the Mt Fuji weather station, we have to move on. But not before climbing the “Otowa Fuji” that sits at one corner of Gokokuji’s precincts. Although everybody present is of pensionable age, we seize the chance to revisit the summit of Mt Fuji, even if it has to be a miniaturised one…