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 way down, 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 talents struggle to paint mountains convincingly, and ends by explaining 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 could bestow the self-same gifts, it must 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, I wouldn’t be surprised 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-era spectacles?