A meizanologist's diary (128)

14 March (continued): The trees are shedding the morning's hoarfrost, loosing little snowslides that trickle down the gullies. Even on the descent, there’s a hint of nordwand to Ishizuchi’s headwall and it’s a relief to crampon my way out of its blue shadows onto the sunny col below.

 

Waiting there is a signboard, its characters faded in the sunlight. It’s ironic how such memorials have sprung up all over the Hyakumeizan mountains, even though their author always said he preferred his peaks without them.

This one, though, is going to kick off a cross-cultural encounter of a most unexpected kind. It tells me that modern mountaineering started in Shikoku when a teacher by the name of Kitagawa Jun’ichirō took charge of the Matsuyama High School’s “travel club” in 1923. In those Taishō times, such clubs often did more mountaineering than travelling – perhaps they were so called to ease the minds of students’ parents.

Kitagawa Jun'ichiro on a mountain.
Frontispiece from Shikoku Arupusu.

Two years later, Kitagawa-sensei put out a book. He called it Shikoku Arupusu – the Shikoku Alps. And his timing was perfect. Nineteen twenty-five marked the apogee of Taishō democracy: it was the year that all men (over 25) got the vote, not just wealthy ones. So innovations were all the rage just then.

A decade and a half before, Kojima Usui, the Japanese Alpine Club's founder, had paved the way. Urged by his bookseller to find a grabby title for a collection of essays, he called them the Nihon Arupusu – perhaps taking his cue from English friends. But the alpine brevet, he felt, should be awarded only to the tallest ranges of central Honshū.

It didn’t take long for this consensus to crack. And this from within the ranks of the Japanese Alpine Club itself. According to Katō Yoshiki writing in the March edition of Gakujin – I’d recently scored myself a copy at the Sensei’s local supermarket – it was two JAC members who named the “Etchū Alps” when writing up a traverse of these Niigata mountains in a 1911 issue of their club’s journal.

After that, everybody started appropriating the Alps. Quite soon, people were talking about the Yamato Alps (the Ōmine mountains), the Tohoku Alps (mainly the Asahi range, but also Iide and Zao), and the Kyūshū Alps (mainly the Kujū Mountains, but also Aso). By the 1930s, Katō Buntarō, best known for his solo winter climbs, was promoting the “Hyōgo Alps”.

With all this agitprop going on, even the rumpled terrain across the bay from Tokyo got itself aggrandised into the “Kamakura Alps. So it’s no surprise to learn from Katō’s article that Kitagawa wasn’t the first to appropriate the Alps for Shikoku. An earlier reference came from the haiku poet, journalist, calligrapher, art critic, noh dancer and mountaineer Kawahigashi Hekigotō in 1915. But he was deploring the alpinizing trend, not puffing it…

Back on Ishizuchi-san, I remember there’s a mid-afternoon bus to catch and snap a photo of the didactic signboard to look at later. Naruhodo, I murmur to myself, after resuming the descent, so Kitagawa-sensei was one of those punters who wanted to big up their local mountains by rebranding them as Alps...

It’s lucky that there are next to no bears in these mountains, as I’m going to have to push it a bit if I’m going to jump on that mid-afternoon bus. As for Kitagawa's thinking, I’m soon going to find out that I couldn’t be more wrong.

The snow starts to melt into a muddy slush below the Chūgū shrine. Back in the cable car, I catch my breath and watch the slanting ridgelines rise into the sky as the cabin starts down. A whiff of that alpine vibe returns – for what could be more Grindelwald-esque than looking out at the mountains from a swaying gondola…

Waiting for the bus along with the Osaka architect – again, we’re going to be the only two passengers – I’m wondering what Kitagawa-sensei would have made of the ropeway. It started up in 1968, just four years before he passed into the next life. And, when I do finally get hold of his book a week or so later (it has to be kuro-neko'd from Shikoku, of course), it turns out that he's written a stinging put-down for day-trippers and peak-baggers like ourselves:

I believe there are two Ishizuchi mountains. One is the Ishizuchi of mountaineering proper and the other is a kind of youth centre that the social affairs teachers take their charges up. This latter one is the peak where you climb three sets of chains, and where there is a shrine on top for the mountain’s god. If Ishizuchi’s true essence were limited to this minuscule sliver, then it wouldn’t have anything special to offer, and hence mountaineers would no longer find it worth climbing…

When it comes to school teachers, the adjective inspirational tends to be overused. But Kitagawa-sensei must have earned it – decades after his death, it was a grateful former student who arranged for his Shikoku book to be reprinted. In an afterword, the student wrote that:

[Kitagawa-sensei] engaged in heartfelt discussions of literature and philosophy with impressionable young people, criss-crossed the then completely unexplored mountains of Shikoku, and introduced them to others … In his classes, almost every week, he would talk about mountains, and endlessly discuss human nature through the works of Goethe, Schiller, Ippen and Chikamatsu. Having become addicted to mountains after an overnight trip to Ishizumiyama, I used to lose all track of time walking in the mountains and conversing with him. For us, mountain climbing was where we deepened our reflections on nature and humanity …

A deep reverence for the mountains reverberates through the sensei's book. One chapter focuses on summits that can be climbed within sight of Matsuyama. There’s a lengthy write-up of Ishizuchi-san and its history, of course. Then come accounts of traversing the “Shikoku Alps” and the “Five Mountains of Uwajima” in Kitagawa’s native prefecture of Ehime.

Georg Simmel.
(Courtesy Wikipedia)

What follows is more of a surprise. Entitling the chapter simply “Simmel’s Alps”, and with barely a preamble, Kitagawa launches into a translation, or perhaps a recension, of a treatise on mountain aesthetics by the German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel (1858-1918).

As you’d expect, Kitagawa had a solid grasp of German. He’d had to master the language just to enter the elite law faculty of Tokyo University, from which he graduated early in the Taishō era. After that he worked for the Hokkaido government for two years, before returning to Shikoku and becoming a teacher.

So what was he looking for when he started tackling the convoluted prose of the German philosopher? Georg Simmel was no mountaineer, by the way; in fact, he rather disapproved of them – his approach to the Alps was via their aesthetics. His essay on Die Alpen begins by asking why artists even of Hodler's and Segantini's stature struggle to paint mountains convincingly, and ends by theorising how it is that the Alps inspire us. Perhaps it was something like this paragraph from Simmel's disquisition that had caught Kitagawa’s attention:

This is the paradox of the Alps: in the Alps, height is not relative or conditional, but unconditional and absolute. It is the absolute itself, transcending all relativity. Here we find our answer. When we gaze upon the Alps in their most sublime splendour, we find our own interpretation there, beyond the realm of life itself. This is the infinite gift that the Alps bestow on us.

So if other high mountains, or even not-so-high ones, could bestow the self-same gifts, it should follow that Shikoku too could have its own Alps…

But these glimpses into Kitagawa’s metaphysics are for another day. Back on the mid-afternoon bus, the driver puts on the brakes to let a tardy family of monkeys clear the road. Now we’re grinding our way down the gorge in low gear, and I’m still wondering if it was really legit for Kitagawa to appropriate the Alps like that. I mean, just because everybody else was at that time…

When, all of a sudden, out of the left-hand window, I see another of those didactic signboards. The bus is moving so slowly that there’s even time to read a few sentences. We’re passing the Median Tectonic Line (Chūō Kōzō Sen), the signboard says – the great slip-strike fault that, on its way from eastern Japan through to Kyushu, runs right across the northern foot of Kitagawa’s home mountains.

The MTL: like the alpine Insubric Line, only more so.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

It’s the second naruhodo moment of the day. There’s a similar fault, though mercifully less active than the MTL, that runs across the southern piedmont of our Alps back in Europe. We call it the Insubric Line, but like the MTL it’s the product of colossal tectonic forces. So might it not just be, geophysically speaking, that the Shikoku Alps are the real thing, a truly alpine range of mountains with folds, nappes, overthrusts, the whole geological Bündnerteller…?

As I said, it’s just the two of us on the bus, and the Osaka architect is sitting in front of me. So I have no reason to look over my shoulder but, if I did, it would be no surprise to see this bald, burly geezer leaning back, in antiquated tweeds or flannels probably, arms folded, and on his face there’d be this told-you-so smile and – hey – wouldn’t that be a mighty wink behind his Taishō-vintage spectacles?

A meizanologist's diary (127)

14 March: timing is everything when it comes to weather forecasting. While I’m throwing down a cup coffee and a cheese butty for breakfast, the clouds are still oppressing today’s intended peak.

It’s still grey and windy when I get on the bus up to Ishizuchi-san’s cable car station. Although it’s a Saturday, there’s only one other passenger aboard as we leave town. As I find out later, the other o-nobori-san, as they call us hereabouts, is an Osaka architect. He's kitted out with a technical-looking axe and a helmet. Goodness, I hope there'll be no call for those.

The bus wends its way almost at a pilgrim’s pace past the Kurose reservoir. Then we enter a deep gorge, where rafts of rock slant upwards to the south, as if in obeisance to a mighty force. Now the bus is moving almost too fast. On foot, the white-robed pilgrims would have had more time to appreciate this magnificent declivity.

The cable car too is uncrowded. The forecast must have turned people off. Yet the clouds are breaking up as the ancient contraption creaks into life, and we start to glimpse the sea to the north while we gain height.

In a journey of seven and a half minutes, the ropeway covers 1,814 meters and ascends approximately 1,300 meters. As the ropeway rises in elevation, the mountain’s vegetation changes, and the temperature drops—there is an average difference of 7 degrees Celsius between the upper and lower stations.

The ropeway's blurb writers have it right. From the top station, we step back into winter. Some centimetres of fluffy new snow cushion my footfall through the frosted trees. 

A broad path leads up to the shuttered lodges and the shrine at Chūgū Jōju, where a solitary o-nobori-san is paying his respects.

Then it's downhill to a broad connecting ridge, where an orange-barked himeshara (Stewartia monadelpha) lights up the winter woods. 

Long flights of wooden steps lead past a ruined refreshment booth – for the pilgrims, I presume – up to a col, where I emerge blinking into the sunlight. Looking back, I glimpse shreds of cloud drifting away from the eastward peaks.

Yet that view carries less weight than the volcano’s shadowy headwall rearing up ahead. Is this going to be steep or what? 

The snow hardens up as the ground rises, so that I have to kick steps to reach the stone platform of an intermediate shrine building. Here I catch up with all the other o-nobori-sans – everyone is putting on crampons or adjusting their gear with a kind of fastidious meticulosity.

There’s no need to read anybody’s mind – I only have to read my own. Nobody wants to break trail, and that’s why nobody is hurrying unduly with their preparations. Having tightened up my own crampons, with a kind of meticulous fastidiousness, I let three or four people go on ahead before setting out myself.

This ploy fails when the pair of students in front decide to turn back – which may be wise, since they have only chain-spikes on their boots and no poles or ice-axes to steady themselves. That leaves me as second in line behind the leader, who I’m already thinking of as the Sen’in (mountain wizard) as he kicks his way confidently across the untracked slopes.

Here and there, sections of half-buried metal stairway show us where to go. These we tackle with the uphill crampon digging into the icy snow, and the downhill one screeching on the steel gratings. I look up from the last of these passages to find that I’ve almost caught up with the wizard.

This is because he’s dealing with what looks like a wall of snow with extreme care, kicking his boots solidly into the traverse while protecting every move by plunging his ice-axe as deep into the slope as it’ll go. I follow in his bootprints and try to deepen them as I pass by.

There’s about a foot of new snow on top of an icy crust, and I see no reason why the whole slope shouldn’t avalanche. If it does, we’ll be hurled like human pachinko balls from tree to tree in the thickets below. The traverse to easier ground is probably only ten metres, yet it feels like a hundred. When I get across, the wizard is already far ahead; he seems to know where he’s going.

We zig-zag up to the ridge and suddenly we’re in the sun again. My crampons are grating on the flagstones of the path leading up to the summit shrine. 

The wizard is now coming down after paying his respects there. Without a word he disappears down a gap in the rocks. I take a look and see an iron chain, thick enough for an anchor hawse, hanging down into the depths.

By now, the wizard is striding across the ridge to Tengu-iwa, the “Goblin peak” that marks Ishizuchi’s highest point. He makes the traverse look like a stroll through Ginza 4-chome. How tiresome: now I’ll have to get across there too. Grabbing the chain with bare hands – the brown metal's quite warm now – I swing myself down to the ridge. There’s no path over the rocks, but white paint marks show the way.

My crampons are a lightweight type, with aluminium heel-pieces. They really shouldn’t be subjected to metal gratings, let alone rocky traverses. But there’s ice and snow in all the crevices, so I keep them on. The screech of steel (and aluminium) on andesite is starting to get on my nerves when, two thirds of the way over, I meet the wizard coming back.

There is a momentary contretemps: he needs to step across a sloping but holdless slab to where I’m standing. It follows that I’m in his way. So I step downwards to cross the slab at its bottom edge – it has a rill that will stop my spikes slipping off. “That’s not the way,” says the wizard. Too late; I’ve already made the move…

A stone lantern sits atop Shikoku’s highest point. Under a clear sky, I can see from one side of the island to the other, from sea to shining sea. Eastwards, the last clouds are still drifting past an array of high peaks. Ishizuchi-san, the savants say, is the crater wall of an old volcano. Yet the view from its peak is quite convincingly alpine…

A meizanologist's diary (126)

13 March: they say you shouldn’t travel on a Friday, but that wasn’t why the Sensei cancelled. 

The mountain weather forecast is still rating tomorrow’s weather as “c” for “unclimbable”. But, since I have a RailPass, I decide to go ahead anyway. After all, Ishizuchi-san is one of the vaunted Hundred Mountains. And it's the highest mountain in Shikoku....

When the train drops me at Iyo-Saijō, it’s difficult to be optimistic: a strong, cold northerly is driving the clouds against the snow-dusted peaks. Ishizuchi-san hides its head in the murk. It all looks rather grim.

I repair to the hotel, which probably saw its heyday in the mid-Shōwa era. The automatic door needs to be pushed aside by hand. In the room, a contemporaneous beer ad does its best to cover a large crack in a structural wall. But, since we booked for two, there’s plenty of space to strew my kit about …