A meizanologist's diary (120)

31 January: Admittedly, the Sensei had difficulty in following my logic. We’d voted to take a break from ceaseless snow shovelling in her home town. And what was I proposing but an overnight stay on a freezing plateau, covered with snow, at eight hundred metres? OK, she agreed reluctantly, but only if there’s an onsen.

Which is why, around noon, we’re walking past a pair of bronze gate guardians into the precincts of the Fukuchi-in on Kōya-san, the mountain retreat founded by Kūkai in the ninth century. The temple and lodging house is one of Kōya-san's fifty-one hospitable “shukubō”, but the only one to have tapped a spring of geothermally heated water.

After dropping our light packs (best leave your bulky baggage down below), we take refuge from a snow shower in a restaurant. And then, since the snow keeps falling, we wash lunch down with a cappuccino in a nearby café.

When the snow flurries still won’t let up, we flee along Kōya’s high street to the only other modern structure we can think of – the Reihōkan museum. The temperature inside is close to ambient, but at least we’re sheltered from the wind.

In plastic slippers – boots must be left at the entrance – we pad past an impressive Heian-era Buddha into the museum’s largest exhibition hall. And at once we encounter great art. The sculptor Kaikei’s four heavenly kings stand out from anything else in the museum. Occupying the place of honour at the end of the hall, his Peacock King too will stick in memory, although it may demand a greater amount of cultural adjustment to appreciate.

Kaikei's Peacock King.
Image by courtesy of the Koya-san Reihokan Museum.

Almost forgetting the cold, we sit through a well-produced series of videos in an adjacent room that explain the background to the sculptures. I try to grapple with the historical context. Kaikei’s working life (c.1183–1236) overlapped the start of the Kamakura period, when a military junta imposed its will after a destructive civil war…

But what did this era look like to the artists? Did they deplore the collapse of Heian civilisation, or were they hailing a new age of stability? Or both. In the end, genius is genius, even if context matters too. Michelangelo might never have existed. But, if he did, then he could only have been a Renaissance man…

Deeply chilled – at least, in my case; the Sensei seems to be made of sterner stuff – we put on our boots and slip-slide out into the street. The snow has stopped falling, and some weak sunbeams are probing through the clouds.

Over the road is the Kongōbu-ji, the institution that heads up the four thousand or so temples of the Shingon faith. 

Skirting a snowball fight between some children by the belfry, we make for the main building. Again, we exchange boots for plastic slippers and skitter our way past a row of stately rooms.

In one of them, a bilingual sign tells us, Hideyoshi’s men forced his own nephew, Hidetsugu, to commit suicide – this was in August 1595 – as the prelude to having his entire line wiped out, women, children and all. They played politics for keeps in those days. Two decades later, much the same treatment was meted out to Hideyoshi’s own family. The Buddhist term inga-ōhō might have been invented for such cases. 

With relief, we proceed along a series of galleries that overlook a garden. An array of rocks rise up through the snow like peaks through a cloud sea. The stones are said to have been brought from Shikoku, where Kōya-san’s founder Kūkai was born in 774. That could make them kin to those strange rock pillars that I saw on Tsurugi-san the other day…

While I’m photographing the garden, the Sensei has slipped away. I find her sipping a welcoming cup of tea in a reception hall at the end of the tourist route. 

To remind us that we are still in a temple, an effigy of Kūkai presides benignly over the far end of the room.

Daylight has all but faded by the time we return to the Fukuchi-in, where we find our room already warm and cozy, our hosts having thoughtfully left a gas stove running. We take care with the heating: fires have repeatedly devastated Kōya-san, and the most destructive of them all started at this very shukobō in the winter of 1521. (I am obliged to Philip Nicoloff's book on Sacred Kōya-san for this historical detail.)

The Fukuchi-in’s corridors, however, remain unheated and it isn’t until I’ve visited the rotenburo, soaking up the geothermal heat while watching the sunset clouds scrolling by, that I feel sufficiently reanimated to examine the treasures they harbour.

Hidden in an alcove, and quite unexpected in a temple, is a collection of polished mineral sections from all over Japan. And even less to be expected is the suit of samurai armour lurking in a gloomy corner.

On closer inspection, it has a blue crucifix mounted on its helmet. A placard explains that this equipage belonged to the “Christian samurai” Takayama Ukon (c.1552–1615), who was eventually exiled for his faith. But, before that, he was a loyal supporter of Nobunaga – who came within an ace of reducing Kōya-san to ashes during his campaigns to unify Japan.

The characters for Kōya mean no more and no less than “high place”. But I’m starting to realise that this is a place which has fathomless depths too.

After a simple but exquisite supper of shōjin ryōri, we retire to our room. There’s a TV there. There's wifi too, so we could equally well commune with our phones. Or we could dip into the bilingual breviary placed unobtrusively by the teapot, somewhat like a Gideon Bible. When I open it at random, the word “Yama” catches my eye. But not at all in the expected sense:

Once Yama, the legendary King of Hell, asked a man who had fallen into hell on account of his evil deeds in life, whether, during his life, he had ever met the three heavenly messengers. The man replied: "No, my Lord, I never met any such persons."

Yama asked him if he had ever met an old person bent with age and walking with a cane. The man replied: "Yes, my Lord, I have met such persons frequently." Then Yama said to him: "You are suffering this present punishment because you did not recognize in that old man a heavenly messenger sent to warn you that you must quickly change your ways before you, too, become an old man."

Yama asked him again if he had ever seen a poor, sick and friendless man. The man replied: "Yes, my Lord. I have seen many such men." Then, Yama said to him: "You have come into this place because you failed to recognize in these sick men the messengers from heaven sent to warn you of your own sickness …"

Before I can acquaint myself with the third heavenly messenger, I hear the merest hint of a snore from the futons. The Sensei is already asleep. It’s been a long day...

A meizanologist's diary (119)

24 January: forty-seven centimetres of snow have fallen on the Sensei’s hometown in the last couple of days, enforcing on us what Scottish climbers are pleased to call a “fester”. 

Recalling that a former head of the Mt Fuji Weather Station has lent us a DVD of Nikkatsu’s Fuji-sanchō, we settle in for a video evening.

The opening sequence, showing a survey team struggling through a high-altitude blizzard, makes us grateful to be sitting in a warm living room. 

Then the scene switches to a meeting at the finance ministry, where a meteorological agency staffer named Katsuragi (Ashida Shinsuke) is putting the case for building a radar station atop Mt Fuji to give advance warning of incoming typhoons.

Once Katsuragi has his budget allocation, Umehara (Ishihara Yujiro), an engineer from Mitsubishi Electric, and his team take on the challenge of designing and installing the radar. 

Huge amounts of material have to be moved up the mountain, forcing the traditional packhorse drivers to master the art of high-altitude bulldozer driving.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of the entire cast, the radar station is completed on time. 

As the grand finale, a bold pilot, straining his helicopter to its limits, flies in the dome that will house the radar. And soon the new installation successfully meets the test of a real typhoon…

It’s a ripping yarn, well told. The Sensei is impressed with the all-star cast, which even includes a few female luminaries such as Hoshi Yuriko to leaven up an otherwise all-guy gig. 

And thanks to plentiful on-location filming, Japan’s top mountain is allowed to do a great job of starring as itself. 

In fact, the camerawork alone would be sufficient reason to see this film. The location shots underscore the volcano’s vast size and the varied challenges of working there – the summit’s thin air, the storms and the shifting slopes of scoria. There’s even a cameo appearance by a brockenspectre.

Fuji-sanchō came out in 1970, a bare six years after the radar station was completed. Thanks to this promptitude, it feels credibly authentic. The helicopters, bulldozers and other featured hardware must be identical to the kit actually used during the building campaign. 

Even so, after an hour or so of highly convincing re-enactions, we had to remind ourselves that Fuji-sanchō is just a movie. The movie, in turn, drew on a 1967 novel of the same name – whose author, Nitta Jirō, had been the actual leader of the radar station project a few years earlier. So the underlying events have been twice filtered through the prism of fiction.

In the end, it’s probably futile to try disentwining fact from fantasy. If Fuji-sanchō isn’t exactly documentary, then it shows what history should have been like. And it does that very entertainingly. It's no surprise to learn that Fuji-sanchō did well at the box office too.

So anybody who feels any nostalgia for that mid-Shōwa spirit of high-altitude derring-do should not hesitate to sit down and soak this movie up, all 126 action-packed minutes of it. Especially if you happen to be snowed in for an evening or two.

A meizanologist's diary (118)

22 January: the hotel’s hyperborean temperatures help me go for an asa-ichi alpine start. Out on the street, the wind knifes through several layers of fibrepile. This is no day to be up a mountain; it will be challenge enough to work out how to get home from Shikoku.

Flakes of snow swirl through the predawn air as I walk past the deserted factory of the Sadamitsu Foodstuffs Company to catch the 7.09 am westwards. 

At Awa-Takeda, the efficient station clerk says that the Sensei’s hometown is cut off by heavy snow – no trains are running from either Kyoto or Maibara. However, he suggests, you could always take the long way round, via Tokyo and Nagano. The first step, though, is to get back to the mainland.

It’s not often that the Shinkansen becomes an instrument of enquiry. Yet, starting with the pink Sakura from Okayama (but no Hello Kitty this time), we’re about to make a transverse section through a classic Japanese winter weather pattern – the continental high/Pacific low snow-making machine.

As far as Osaka, the sky stays bright and windy, although the scattered clouds are “streeting” just as they do on their snow-spawning march over the Japan Sea. 

The first sign of trouble starts at Kyoto. Mt Atago is lightly dusted, and you can see the snow squalls sweeping over the Kitayama hills. Even so, it’s hard to believe the regular announcements that heavy snowfall is causing delays on the Tokaido Shinkansen…

Then the sunlight fades and, running past Biwa, the Hikari noses into the first snow showers. Soon the train slows to half its normal speed in a near-whiteout. This is heavier weather than on yesterday’s mountain.

Mt Ibuki, famed for its snow accumulations, goes by invisibly in the murk, but soon afterwards we run out into the sun again. At Gifu-Hachiman, there’s no more snow on the ground and only the streeting clouds testify to the strong winds aloft.

The Hikari streaks through Shizuoka with such despatch that there’s hardly time to appreciate Fuji trailing its classic winter banner cloud. And by Tokyo, even without the help of Hello Kitty, we’ve made up all but five minutes of the delay.

Within half an hour, I’m on a Hayataka heading north. We pass a lightly dusted Mt Asama under clear skies, running into the first snow showers well north of Nagano. 

At Nao-etsu the clouds break up enough to show their tops catching the last rays of sunset. The train arrives at the Sensei’s hometown only a few minutes late.

Snow flurries down again as I shiver in the bus queue. Even the municipal tyrannosaurus seems a bit under the weather this evening…

A meizanologist's diary (117)

21 January: I report back to the Sadamitsu Taxi company at 7.15 am. At a quarter to eight, the boss comes in and convenes a works council. No, they can’t drive me to Tsurugi-san's summer trailhead, as the road up there is too icy for their two-wheel-drive Toyotas. But they can go as far as the bridge at Kuwadaira (Mulberry Flats) at 600 metres. That’ll do fine, I say, and a young driver ushers me to his car.

We’re soon winding our way along a narrow road at the bottom of a vertiginous gorge. About halfway up the valley, the driver points out a cluster of houses around a hot spring ryokan. That’s the last place you can stay, he says.

He’s also quizzing me delicately about my experience and kit. I try to reassure him, and then he asks how I’m thinking of getting back. I have to admit this part of the plan is, ah, still under review. An element of Hello Kitty may be required. Although, in a gesture at professionalism, I have promised the Sensei I’ll turn back at 2 pm.

At 8.30 am, I wave goodbye to the taxi at Kuwadaira. From here, my hiking area map assures me, a good path leads straight up a ridge to the usual starting point for summer Hyakumeizan baggers. The course time should be no more than three hours and twenty minutes. 

Right beside me is a neatly revetted stone ramp, which must be the trail’s starting point. True, the path is somewhat overgrown, but it leads me over a rusty bridge and into the usual grove of cryptomerias. And then it vanishes into a bed of fallen leaves….

For a moment, I think of heading uphill on a compass bearing. But there’s no time for fossicking about in search of a possibly non-existent path. Returning to the road, I start walking up it. A sign says that it’s 15 kilometres to the Tsurugi ski resort. Well, OK, perhaps I can pick up the hiking trail where it crosses the road higher up.

Higher up, the hiking trail shows no signs of reappearing, and so I’m committed to the road, which must be twice as long as the vanished path. And the taxi drivers were right about the ice – the occasional patches are now merging together into a continuous glaze of frozen ruts. I try to keep to the less treacherous snow at the road’s edge.

The sky fades from blue to grey as I gain height. Once or twice, pairs of deer fleet away into the forest’s understorey. There seem to be plenty of them around. Now yesterday's newspaper had a story about an enterprising hunter in Mie who’s set up a cannery to sell prepackaged venison curry from culled deer …

While I’m sniffing an imaginary curry, the ski resort heaves into view. It looks no less defunct than Sadamitsu's cinema, although its buildings are still intact. The same cannot be said for the half-derelict building near the La Forêt lodge. I take note of it, however, as a potential bivvy spot.

By now, two cars have passed me going down, crunching their way over the rutted ice: their drivers have presumably summited and are now on the way home. The road is getting lonely, but since it’s only 12.30 pm when I reach the shrine at the foot of the final climb, there’s no reason to stop here.

Any hopes that the climbing path will be more amendable than the road are dashed. This mountain may be a soft touch in summer, but in winter it demands to be taken seriously. I put on crampons, unclip the ice axe and head up into the clouds. A flurry of snow comes down as I pass two distinctive rock pillars – chert, perhaps, or limestone. But no time for a closer look. The wind’s getting up and the clouds are lowering. Wooden steps lead up past a shuttered hut and suddenly my watch altimeter is reading above two thousand metres. This must be the summit.

Intriguingly, a line of footsteps continues across the summit plateau and heads towards a ridge that leads off southwards. Out of curiosity, I follow these tracks for a few minutes and then – bingo! – my watch reads two o’clock and it really is time to turn back. Snow is swirling thickly down, giving my crampons some extra bite on the frozen path.

Taking shelter in the shrine by the car park, I put on my windjacket and extra headgear, as reserved for Scottish-style “full conditions”. Then I set out along the snow-covered road. An overhead sign near the ruined lodge tells me it’s thirty-nine kilometres to Sadamitsu, which would make it around twenty to the onsen village in the gorge.

At 4.30 pm, the snow has stopped falling, the light is fading, and it’s time to take stock. I’m still above a thousand metres and there is no way to assume a taxi. As for hitchhiking, no car has passed since around noon, either upwards or downwards. I’m just settling in for a long walk, resigning myself to one of those Type Two Meizan experiences, when the wholly unexpected crunch of tyres on snow reaches my ears.

Minutes later, I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a warm four-wheel-drive van. My host appears to be a Mage of the Shikoku Mountains – he’s climbed Tsurugi seven hundred times (did I really hear that right?) and has a taste for solo excursions. But how did we not cross paths on the mountain? Because he’d traversed over Tsurugi to a refuge hut on another peak, before returning to his van – those must have been his bootprints that I’d briefly followed beyond the summit.

Before my host drops me off at Sadamitsu, I ask him about the path from Kuwadaira that I’d tried to follow in the morning. Oh, that one, he says, nobody has climbed it since the road was built, and it just faded away years ago.

Mystery of the missing path (arrowed).

After the white van drives off in the direction of Tokushima, I look in at the Sadamitsu Taxi Company, just in case they feel I’ve filed a constructive tozan todoke (climbing plan) with them. The young driver kindly offers to ring around to find a lodging. A shuttered business hotel is persuaded to open, sort of, and I’m under the futon by nine.

True, the aircon unit has seen better days, taking all night to raise the room temperature from eight to twelve degrees. But, heck, that’s still a lot warmer than bivvying in a derelict lodge up on the mountain. I fall asleep dreaming of venison curry.