A meizanologist's diary (104)

29 March: on a day when both the sakura zensen and a rain front have converged on Tokyo, we’re at a kondankai on the Japanese Alpine Club’s premises near Ichigaya. And since the Sensei has put me on my best behaviour, I’m doing my best not to be controversial. At this point, a lady smilingly asks me if I aim to complete the Hyakumeizan.

Mt Bandai: a mountain that watches over several home villages
(and sometimes demolishes them). 

This puts me on the spot. Having blogged for more than a decade under the masthead of One Hundred Mountains, I can’t plausibly deny an interest in them. On the other hand, the Sensei and I probably haven’t climbed more than half of the full round between us. So I smile back at my interlocutor and prevaricate: “I haven’t yet decided” I hear myself saying wishy-washily.

As further explanation seems to be required, I refer to fellow blogger David Lowe’s reflective and soundly reasoned essay about The Trouble with the Hyakumeizan–And Why I’m Not Finishing. To sum up just a few of his thoughts, too much focus on the Hyakumeizan encourages a checklist mentality, foments overcrowding, and quite possibly promotes unsafe climbing behaviour.

To which I could add, having just returned from a less than totally successful Hyakumeizan foray, that the pleasures were momentary, the positions ridiculous, and the expenses damnable… But as the Sensei is within earshot, I keep that quip to myself. After all, Lord Chesterfield wasn’t talking about mountains.

And yet … had Fukada Kyūya not written that book, I probably would never have acquainted myself with Daisen’s extraordinary character – the rambling and oligarchical ridgeline, with no peaklet topping out more than a few metres above or below another – its curious ecosystems (I mean, how many other mountains can boast a firefly colony on their summit?) – and the tenacious yet friendly villagers who live, still up to their ears in snow right now, within the shadow of its ancient crater walls.

Mmm, the villagers and their community – we may be onto something there. If the Hyakumeizan author didn’t plan on crafting a checklist – he said himself that he might change a mountain or two – then what on earth was he writing about? There is more than a hint in the first paragraph of the chapter on his own home mountain, the one that rises above his birthplace in Daishōji:

A mountain watches over the home village of most Japanese people. Tall or short, near or far, some mountain watches over our native village like a tutelary deity. We spend our childhood in the shadow of our mountain and we carry it with us in memory when we grow up and leave the village. And however much our lives may change, the mountain will always be there, just as it always has been, to welcome us back to our home village. My native mountain is Hakusan …

As it happened, though, it was a foray to a quite different volcano that first started me thinking about Fukada’s paragraph. After tagging the summit of Bandai on a grey mid-November day, I dropped into a local hut and found it crowded almost to the rafters.

Yet nobody, except possibly myself, was questing the Hyakumeizan. In fact, nobody seemed to have any interest in them at all. They were all local folk, intent on celebrating their local hut’s last weekend of the season before it closed for the winter. For Bandai was their home mountain, not some item on a distant city-dweller’s checklist.

Ed Douglas's Kinder Scout: The People's Mountain:
Meizan philosophy applied to the Peak District.

Much more recently, I was flattered to find that Ed Douglas, one of Britain’s most prolific and versatile mountain writers, had quoted the same paragraph by Fukada at the start of his luminous and delightful monograph on Derbyshire’s Kinder Scout: The People’s Mountain. For Kinder Scout is, of course, Ed’s own home mountain.

And his too is a book about the people who surround a mountain and give it meaning. Here are the people who organised the famous mass trespass of 1932 so that everybody would be free to roam their local hills.

And then there is George King (b. 1919), no less public spirited but in a different way, who was tasked by an alien intelligence (see pages 160–61) to charge the mountain’s rocks “with a kind of cosmic energy”. Indeed, the very spot where he did so is illustrated in the book by one of John Beatty’s excellent photos. With stories like these, I think that Ed gets very close to the Hyakumeizan way of thinking, even if he hasn’t yet applied his widely roving pen to the Japanese mountains. 

One who has written about Japanese mountains – quite a lot of them – is William Banff, aka Willie Walks. His Tozan: A Japanese Mountain Odyssey is a lively peak-by-peak account of climbing each of the Hyakumeizan. But, as noted in our review, there’s more going on in this book than wading through a checklist.

In his Hakusan chapter, Willie circles back to Fukada’s famous paragraph, as quoted above, and then segues into a meditation on his own home mountain back in Australia. You’ll have to read this passage for yourself – it deserves not to be paraphrased in a mere blog. Suffice it to say that this too is a book that captures quite a bit of the original Hyakumeizan spirit.

Back at the Japanese Alpine Club, I realise that I haven’t given the smiling lady anything like an adequate answer. So am I going to climb all those Hyakumeizan or am I not? Well, I’ll certainly go on attempting this one or that whenever there’s a chance. And if so, I’ll keep in mind that, as each summit watches over somebody’s home village, we Hyakumeizan seekers are only guests there. 

For the same reason, I think I’ll abstain from trying to charge the rocks with any kind of cosmic energy. The locals might raise their eyebrows, you know.