"Enjoy tackling difficult tasks” (1)

How Nakamura Teru paved the way to winter climbing and economic independence for women.

But how could we have forgotten Nakamura Teru? In Yamakei’s illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering, there she stands, flanked by two companions, every bit as tall and confident as the president of Japan’s first climbing club for women should be. The photo was probably taken a few years after she made her name as the first woman to scale Mt Fuji in mid-winter.

Nakamura Teru (centre) at the Iwabara ski resort, early Showa era.
Image by courtesy of the Yamakei illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering. 

She topped out on Japan’s highest mountain on New Year’s Day in the second year of Shо̄wa (1927), after starting from Gotemba on the previous day. As was her usual practice in the mountains, she climbed not with men friends – which she thought improper – but escorted by a professional guide and “goriki” (porters). On the party’s return, journalists were waiting for her at the mountain’s foot.

Nakamura Teru and her guides at a shrine before climbing Mt Fuji.
Image by courtesy of the Yamakei illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering. 

The year of her Fuji climb helps to explain why Nakamura’s achievements might be missed, at least in a too casual sweep of Japan’s mountaineering history. Her climbing days came a decade or so after those of the Taishо̄-era “otenba” (tomboys) yet too soon to profit from the social freedoms gained by the post-war generations. So she was born too late to be a mountain pioneer, like Murai Yoneko, but too early to be a Himalayan mama-san, on the lines of Tabei Junko.

But she did pave the way towards economic independence for women. Indeed, she had no choice in the matter. After Teru was born in 1904 in Yubari, Hokkaido, her father’s mining business failed and her mother moved the family first to Kitakata in Fukushima, where Teru started primary school, and then Tokyo. Since they got no financial support from Nakamura’s father, her mother started a small boarding house while making kimonos, helped by her daughter after school hours.

Nevertheless, Teru managed to start learning English at an early age – unusual in those days – and later attended a typing school to learn English typing. These skills led to a job with a trading company, where her salary soon exceeded that of a university graduate. After work, she went to the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) to learn English shorthand. She also became a Christian around this time. Later she moved to the Ford Motor Company subsidiary in Japan, where she worked for almost a decade and a half.

Nakamura Teru at Matsumoto station after a ski trip.
Image by courtesy of the Yamakei illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering. 

Nakamura started mountaineering in the early 1920s, and climbed Mt Fuji when she was 22. The following year, she went back and made her famous winter ascent. As she said in an interview much later:

Anyone can climb Mt Fuji in the summer, but I really wanted to challenge myself by climbing it in winter. If I want to do something, I can't hold back; I immediately think, "Let's try it, whether I can do it or not!" Winter mountaineering is a battle against the snow. More important than reaching the summit is dedicating yourself wholeheartedly to the mountain itself. Because I was the first woman to do it, I gained a lot of attention, and even received an offer from a film company.

Climbing with guides and porters would take Nakamura only so far. In 1931, she helped to found what was probably Japan’s first mountaineering club for women, the Tokyo YMCA Sangaku-kai. After a decade in which the club typically carried out two or three long traverses in the northern or southern Japan Alps every year, the club formally ceased to exist during the second world war. But its former members continued to meet up for many years afterwards.

Members of the YMCA mountaineering club on Kaikoma in 1932.
Image by courtesy of the Yamakei illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering. 

As for Nakamura herself, she kept on climbing in winter too. The cultural historian Miyashita Keizо̄ quotes from an article she wrote for the mountaineering magazine Tozan to Ski in 1933 about a trip to the Ushiro-Tateyama range:

I sometimes gain a sense of peace even from the bitter north wind that whirls up the powder snow and buffets my body, just as if it were a zephyr from Botticelli. For what better raiment can the mountains have than snow. Like Eloise’s wedding robe, snow evokes a sense of solitude, while in the moonlight it recalls the chilly beauty of Ophelia's winter weeds.

At the age of 33 Nakamura donned a wedding robe herself, changing her name to Satо̄, and leaving her job at Ford Japan. “I married relatively late, but that was because I loved my job and due to family circumstances,” she said in a post-war interview. Her husband’s work took them to Busan in Korea yet Teru’s English skills were not left to languish – at one point during the war, she was asked to work as a spy....

(To be continued)