Tales of past and present (5)

Continued: a talk about foreign explorers of Japan's mountains, then and now.

The Great Tokyo Earthquake marked a kind of boundary in history. It’s difficult to generalise what effect it had on mountaineers, Japanese or foreign. That said, it’s hard to find any full-length book written by a foreign mountaineer in Japan after 1923, at least in English.

Murray Walton (centre) with companion and guide at Yarisawa.
Illustration from Scrambles in Japan and Formosa.

The prominent exception is Scrambles in Japan and Formosa published in 1934 by W. H. Murray Walton (b. 1890). Murray Walton climbed Niitaka-yama on Taiwan, the “new highest mountain” in the Japanese Empire, traversed the Southern Japan Alps from end to end, and made climbs in the Central and Northern Alps too. 

Daihasenzan, a mountain of Taiwan.
Illustration from Scrambles in Japan and Formosa.

Like his acquaintance Walter Weston,  Murray Walton was a missionary and was fascinated by the Ontake religion, visiting the mountain three times. He knew and climbed with several prominent MGK members (for example, the Reverend W H Elwin, and the American diplomat Eugene Dooman) but doesn’t mention the club in his book. On the other hand, he was a proud member of the JAC for at least 15 years.

A seance on Ontake.
Illustration from Scrambles in Japan and Formosa. 

After Murray Walton, foreign climbers in Japan go very quiet. Was that due to the earthquake or Japan’s growing international isolation? Or did foreigners simply stop writing books? It seems that the drop in activity was real. Kojima Usui, who wrote the foreword to Murray Walton’s book, says this: “In recent years there have been, however, fewer foreign residents interested in mountaineering. Their enthusiasm too seems to be decreasing.”

One possible explanation comes from the scholar-diplomat Edwin Reischauer, who as the son of missionaries, was brought up in Japan. As he recalls in My Life Between Japan and America:

During the 1930s, when the police were becoming increasingly suspicious of all foreigners as potential spies and one was constantly subjected to police interrogation while traveling, my birth in Japan served as a form of passport. A policeman, after dutifully questioning my identity, what I was doing, and where I was going, all of which was already recorded in his notebook, would then frequently ask me about my attitude toward the Japanese government or the current aggression Japan was engaged in on the continent. 

Indeed, the enthusiasm of foreign mountaineers took a long time to rekindle. In the 1950s and 1960s, Japan saw an enormous resurgence of hiking and alpinism, especially after the first ascent of Manaslu in May 1956.

May 9, 1956: first ascent of Manaslu by a JAC expedition.

But where were the foreigners during this so-called Manaslu boom? In English, at least, I can’t find much writing about the Japanese mountains during these decades. 

Well-thumbed copy of the JNTO guide, with a roughly contemporaneous carabiner.

And there was certainly no up-to-date guidebook to Japan’s mountains for foreigners, although the official Japan National Tourist Office guide did its best to include mountain-related advice. My copy, dated February 1975, recommends the Ochūdo-meguri on Mt Fuji as “a delightful summer excursion”. I hope that bit has been updated in more recent editions, or somebody is in for a shock.

A first sign of renewed foreign interest in Japan’s mountains came from Oscar Benl (1914–86), a professor of Japanese literature, who translated Inoue Yasushi’s Hyōheki into German as Die Eiswand in 1979. Benl studied at Tokyo University before the war, and submitted his doctorate on the ideals of Zeami, the noh master, in 1943.

Professor Benl also translated works by Murasaki Shikibu, Yoshida Kenkō, Shiga Naoya, Ibuse Masuji, Kawabata Yasunari, Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Funabashi Seiichi and Abe Kōbō. He was Germany’s retort to Donald Keene. Why did he pick Hyōheki in particular? (He translated Inoue’s Tempyō no iraka (The rooftile of Tempyō) and Ryōjū (The hunting gun) too). Perhaps it was because his first academic post was in Munich, the capital city of German alpinism. But this is just a guess…

(Continued)