Famous mountains with a difference

After giving up the triathlon, an Osaka man takes on the Hyakumeizan...

“Climbing mountains on your own gives you a great sense of fulfilment and accomplishment …. That's why I want to see if I can actually do the hundred famous mountains solo.” Many a Hyakumeizan fan might agree with these words, but few face such challenges as the man who uttered them. For Kuwamura Masaharu is currently questing his hundred mountains with only a pair of lightweight crutches to help him on his way. 

"Challenging mountains with a disability": 
Gakujin magazine accompanied Kuwahara-san to Mt Kongo in late 2024.

Now in his early sixties and retired, Kuwamura-san (b.1963) has gone about on one leg for most of his life. Diagnosed at the age of eight with a bone cancer, he underwent an operation that involved the amputation of his left leg at the hip. And since he couldn’t have a prosthetic limb fitted, he wields his crutches wherever he goes, on city streets and mountain trails alike.

Kuwahara-kun
with his mother (NHK).

While he was growing up in Osaka, he worked out ways to play with his friends and keep up with them on a bicycle. His mother encouraged him. Instead of trying to hide the fact that her son had a disability, she actively took him out to local events and public places. “At first, I was embarrassed, but I soon got used to it and didn't mind the curious looks,” Kuwamura recalled last year in an interview with Gakujin, Japan’s second-oldest mountain monthly.

By the time he was twenty, Kuwamura had thoughts of aiming for the Paralympics. At the age of twenty-three, he did become the first Japanese to win a medal in badminton at the FESPIC in Indonesia, which was the start of the Asian Para Games. Then, around the start of this century, now in his forties, he started competing in triathlons, inspiring more and more people with disabilities to follow his example.

Not that he's ever limited himself to events for the disabled: “I didn't like being treated differently as a disabled person, and I often competed in tournaments for able-bodied athletes. Of course, I lost a lot, but I think there's more to be gained from fighting and losing against stronger opponents than winning in a narrow field and playing defensively. What's important isn't winning or losing, but how high you can aim for yourself," he told Gakujin.

Unfortunately, the triathlons started to undermine Kuwamura’s health. The additional stress on his liver worsened a longstanding infection with hepatitis C, which he’d incurred via a blood transfusion during his childhood. Hospitalised in Chiba and suffering from diabetes, a side effect of the treatment he was undergoing, he was close to giving up on life. He credits his recovery to a former colleague, Isako – now his wife – who travelled to see him from Kyoto almost every month during his year in therapy: “I consider her my saviour,” he said in the Gakujin interview.

Kuwahara-san tackles Goryu-dake.
Still from an NHK documentary (see References).

When he left hospital, Kuwamura was almost fifty. Looking around for a less intensive form of exercise than the triathlon, he soon hit on an alternative. As he put it, “I had a firm belief that climbing was the next thing I should do. Mountains are neither won nor lost, and they challenge both able-bodied and disabled people alike.” And since he’d already climbed Mt Fuji more than once while training for triathlons, the idea of tackling the Hyakumeizan followed naturally. A book too inspired him.*

Even for somebody as motivated as Kuwamura, the challenges of the Hyakumeizan are substantial. He had to turn back on Makihata-yama (1,967m), one of the easier peaks, after going two hours over his six-hour time budget for the ascent. His wrists and hands take the brunt of his crutchwork, meaning that he makes frequent visits to his chiropractor. And, of course, the crutches themselves must be replaced regularly, since breaking one on a mountain could be fatal.

Rugged Goryu...
Image courtesy Wikipedia.

Yet, by the end of last year, Kuwamura had despatched almost seven tenths of Fukada Kyūya’s time-honoured list. These included most of the marquee peaks in the Northern Alps, including rugged Tsurugi and Goryū, his sixty-fifth mountain. And as if Yari-ga-take’s chains and ladders weren’t challenging enough on their own, he chose to approach this rock spire via the Dai-Kiretto, an aery traverse over from the Hodaka peaks.

Since retiring, Kuwamura-san also found time to write a book. It’s called Kata-ashi de hagemu sanryо̄ (Running the ridges on one leg), and it was published in September 2024 by Gentо̄sha. As he says in the Gakujin interview, “I'd be so happy if people are inspired by my experience climbing mountains, even with just one leg, and are encouraged to give it a go themselves. And if they do, I'm really looking forward to meeting them on a mountain somewhere."

An English alpinist said something similar about seven decades ago:

I had determined to finish my own climbing for the year with the Matterhorn … To a mountaineer, to climb the Matterhorn must always possess a great significance, however often he may have climbed it or however easy its ascent may be upon a given fine day. I had another reason. If I was to give a much-needed encouragement to all those in Europe who had lost limbs in the war, and make a practical demonstration that the fatigue or inertia from which all who have lost legs suffer is a nervous fiction, then nothing was likely to call more attention, or have a better good-news value, than an ascent of the Matterhorn.

Geoffrey Winthrop Young resting after an ascent of the Grepon.
Illustration from Mountains with a Difference.

The writer was Geoffrey Winthrop Young (1876–1958), who during the Belle Époque had put up some of Europe’s most difficult alpine routes. This pioneer work ended in 1917, when Young lost his left leg to a shell explosion on the Italian front. But a decade later, then in his fifties and fitted with an ingenious metal peg partly of his own contriving, he felt ready to make an alpine comeback. And so, signing up some of his old guides, he reclimbed several of the highest peaks around Zermatt, Chamonix and other centres. The book in which he describes these one-legged adventures is called Mountains with a Difference.

Kuwamura-san aims to reach his one hundredth summit by his sixty-fifth birthday. When he does, let’s hope that he will update his book or write another one. Whatever title he may choose, readers will learn something about the human spirit. Some of them will probably decide to give the mountains a go themselves. And most will concur that Kuwamura-san’s are truly the Hyakumeizan with a difference.

References

Gakujin magazine, “Shо̄gai to tomo ni yama ni idomu” (Tackling the mountains with a disability: an interview with Kuwamura Masaharu), December 2024 edition.

NHK documentary (English version) on Kuwamura’s Hyakumeizan campaign and Goryū climb.

Geoffrey Winthrop Young, Mountains with a Difference, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951. 

• *Note: Surprisingly, Kuwamura-san is not the first Japanese author to write about mountain-climbing on one leg. That honour probably belongs to Yokota Sadao (b.1901) who published Matsubadzue tozan 40-nen (Forty years of climbing on crutches) in 1974. He was famous, among other things, for roaming the mountains in sandals and a yukata, a style that even in his day was distinctively retro.
  
  

  

  
  Born in 1901, Yokota graduated from primary school in 1914 at the age of twelve and started out as an apprentice in a soy sauce factory in mountainous Nagano Prefecture. About three years later, he noticed a small protrusion on the back of his right knee. This gradually swelled up until the leg had to be amputated in May 1922 following a diagnosis of synovial chondromatosis. There are more details of his life in this blog post (in Japanese).

  After recovering, and having lost about 16 kilos in weight, Yokota climbed around fifty famous peaks all over Japan, starting with his “home mountain” of Togakushi. His tally included Hakkoda, Tanigawa, Yari, Shirouma, Kiso-kaikoma, Unzen and the “Three sacred mountains” of Mt Fuji, Tateyama and Hakusan. He attained the last-named peak in his seventieth year.  Unsurprisingly, Kuwamura-san has taken Yokota’s climbing life and his book as an inspiration for his own Hyakumeizan project.