Appropriating the Alps

How Japan got its local alpine ranges – and why some might even be for real.

On the way down from climbing Ishizuchi-san in mid-March, I happened on a faded sign about the mountain’s climbing history. As in the case of so many other Japanese peaks, the first ascent is ascribed to the semi-legendary mountain mystic En no Ozunu. This was back in the seventh century. Countless pilgrims have followed him since and the sound of their conches still re-echoes over the mountain paths in the summer months.

Mountaineers of the 1920s in the Shirouma snow valley.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Modern mountaineering started during the 1920s, when an inspirational teacher by the name of Kitagawa Jun’ichirō formed a “travel club” at Shikoku’s Matsuyama High School. For “travel”, one may read “mountaineering”.

On Jonen-dake in the 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

In 1925, Kitagawa-sensei upped the ante by publishing his collected mountain writings under the title of Shikoku Alps (Shikoku Arupusu). This was just fifteen years after Kojima Usui, the main mover and shaker behind the Japanese Alpine Club, had conferred the title of “Japan Alps” on the central ranges of Honshū.

The Ushiro-Tateyama range.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

On the face of it, Kitagawa had staked a bold claim. While some peaks in Honshū’s Hida and Akaishi ranges do exceed three thousand metres – and Mt Fuji would rank around twenty-eighth among the major summits if set down among Switzerland’s Bernese Alps – no part of Shikoku exceeds even two kilometres above sea level.

On the other hand, he had picked the perfect moment to award the alpine brevet to Shikoku’s modest peaks. Historians could light on 1925 as the meridian year of what they call “Taishō Democracy”, implying an unusual openness to newfangled and foreign concepts. And, whether or not by chance, promoting local mountain ranges as “Alps” also reached its apogee around then.

The Kurobe gorge.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

By coincidence, Gakujin, Japan’s second oldest mountaineering magazine, dedicated its March 2026 edition to exploring these local “Alps”. In the introductory article, Katō Yoshiki writes that the habit of “mitate” – here defined as comparing a local beauty spot with a prestigious foreign equivalent – goes back far into Japan’s past.

Lake Biwa’s famous Eight Views of Omi, for example, channel the even more famous Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, a classic theme in Chinese poetry and landscape painting from the eleventh-century Song dynasty. A similar logic sits behind Japan’s local “Mt Fujis”, whether or not they particularly resemble their great original.

Mountaineer on Myojin-dake, 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Arrogating the Alps to Japan was a bit different, historically speaking. An English mining engineer was the first to make the comparison, writing it up in a guidebook for foreigners. Then Walter Weston, a mountaineering missionary, picked it up in the titles of his first and second books about the Japanese mountains.

But few Japanese had read these foreign-language books at the time. So it was only in 1910, when Kojima Usui decided to call his collected writings “Nihon Arupusu”, at the urging of his publisher, who was looking for a grabby title, that most of his compatriots realised that they had their own Alps on the doorstep.

On Tsubakuro-dake in the 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

There were, of course, objections. In the end, though, people picked up the alpine “mitate” and ran with it. The first of the regional alps might have been those coined by the Japanese Alpine Club members Nakamura Seitarō and Saegusa Inosuke when they described their traverse of the “Etchū Alps” in a 1911 issue of their club’s journal. But these Alps centred on Tateyama and were thus part of what would soon be accepted as the Northern Alps.

It was in the Taishō era (1912–1926) that the regional alps really started to proliferate. 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).

Snow gully on Tsurugi.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

In 1927, the soon-to-be famous solo climber Katō Buntarō went one step further. When he made his first winter forays into his local mountains, he not only rebranded them as the “Hyōgo Alps” but renamed their individual peaks after the highest summits in the Japan Northern Alps, thus piling one “mitate” on top of another:

I refer to the mountain range along the border of Hyōgo, Tottori and Okayama prefectures as the Hyōgo Alps. I rename Mount Mizunoyama (1,500 meters above sea level) as Hyōgo-Yari, Mount Mimuroyama as Hyogo-Norikura, and the southernmost mountain at 1,344.6 meters as Hyōgo-Ontake. Since the summit of Mount Hyōnosen is entirely within Tottori Prefecture, I've decided to call the mountain in front of it Hyōgo-Tateyama. I'm not entirely sure of the exact height of this Tateyama, but it's probably around 1,280 meters…

Winter on Norikura.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Foreigners too got back into the game. In their journal Inaka, published between 1915 and 1920, the mainly gaijin members of the Mountain Goats of Kobe referred to their local “Kobe Alps”, although probably with tongue in cheek.

On similar lines, a 1924 guidebook from the “Kinki Mountaineering Research Association” introduces not only the Kobe Alps, but also the Rokkō Alps (here referring to a spur ridge off the Jigokudani East Ridge) and the Suma Alps. The book also lists the Yamato Alps, the Hiei Alps, the Kōnan Alps and the Taki Alps. The Nikkō Alps and the Kubiki Alps emerged at around the same time.

On the way to Otensho-dake, 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Soon, and without apparent irony, even the lowly Kamakura hills were to acquire alpine status, although none top two hundred metres. This deficiency didn’t stop Fukada Kyūya, the emerging mountain writer, from writing a guide to them for the magazines Modern Sports and Fujin no Tomo in 1934. At the time, there was even a signpost pointing to the “Kamakura Alps” outside his house.

By 1937, though, Fukada was having second thoughts: “I used to think that calling them [the Kamakura hills] the Alps was incomparably twee,” he wrote in an essay on mountain views, “but these days I'm starting to feel this frivolous imitation is unacceptable”. Nevertheless, that same year, his friend Kawabata Yasunari, a fellow member of the so-called Kamakura literati, wrote an article about a hill walk for the Osaka Asahi Shinbun – under the title of “The Kamakura Alps”.

Shirouma in the snow season.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

So when it comes to the Shikoku Alps, it’s no surprise to learn that Kitagawa Junichirō was not the first to arrogate them. According to Gakujin, the haiku poet, journalist, calligrapher, art critic, noh dancer and mountaineer Kawahigashi Hekigotō referred to them as early as 1915. This was in a book on mountain landscapes, in which he lamented that "the name 'Alps' has gradually come to be abused, so that the Ishizuchi mountain range has been called the 'Shikoku Alps', and the Rikuzen-Iwaki mountains the ‘Abukuma Alps’.”

Fast-forwarding to the present day, we can see that Kawahigashi was right to be concerned. Drawing on both official and unofficial sources, Gakujin has written up no fewer than fifty local “Alps” in its March 2026 edition. These range from the О̄shū Alps up in Iwate to the Kankai Alps down in Kumamoto. Only in Hokkaido could no local Alps be found – and, of course, in the Shin’etsu, given that this region is already chokka with the original Northern Alps.

Such is the profusion of local Alps in Japan – the Gakujin editors say there might be more than a hundred in total – that some fundamental questions arise. Such as what qualifies as an alp in the first place. If you go back to the original Latin word “alpēs”, etymologists like to derive it from the adjective “albus”, meaning white with snow, or perhaps from an older pre-Latin root word for “mountain”.

But that is not how the word was traditionally used in the modern Europe languages. Whether in the French “Alpe”, the German “Alp” or the dialect “Alm”, the meaning traditionally indicated a high summer pasture for sheep, goats or cows. I was reminded of this back in March when we climbed a local Echizen mountain with no alpine pretensions at all.

Looking over a connecting ridge to the attractively snowed-up bulk of Echizen’s Heko-san, the Sensei observed that on the other side of this mountain a road leads almost to the summit. And that, in summer, the cattle are driven up there to pasture for as long as the grass stays sweet. Well, that is the very definition of a traditional alp.

Camping at Kamikochi in the 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Come to think about it, even Kamikōchi, the gateway to the Northern Japan Alps, was once an alp. According to Professor Fynn Holm, its flat valley floor served to pasture up to four hundred cattle for about half a century. The ranch was closed in 1934, partly because the overly aggressive bulls kept charging the tourists – Walter Weston and his wife Frances were among those who had narrow escapes, along with their guide Kamijō Kamonji.

So it’s true. Japan absolutely does have real Alps. If you want to find them, just follow the cows.

References

Katō Yoshiki, “Nihon Arupusu to go-tōchi no arupusu” (“The Japan Alps and the local alps)”, Gakujin, no 945, March 2026.

Fynn Holm, “Uniquely Japan, Uniquely Alpine: The Transformation of the Kamikōchi Mountain Valley into an Alpine Landscape, 1892–1938”, Environmental History, January 2023.

Katō Buntarō, “Hyōgo Tateyama tozan” in Tandokkō (Solo climbs), Sangaku Meicho Series, Futami Shobō, September 1970.

Illustrations are from Nihon Arupusu, edited by Nakama Teruhisa, with contributions by various members of the Japanese Alpine Club, Shinkōsha, Tokyo, June 1930. For the provenance of this copy, see A meizanologist’s diary (44).