Images and ink (55)

Image: Frontispiece from Upon that Mountain (1943) by Eric Shipton.

Ink: Eric Shipton's thoughts on "Large Expeditions" particularly those of the 1930s to Everest, from Chapter Eight of Upon that Mountain. 

Finally, the disadvantage of large expeditions lay in the fact that the necessity of raising big funds made it difficult to control publicity. The expeditions became invested with a glamour foreign to the fundamental simplicity of the game. It was quite natural that mountaineers should wish to climb the highest peak in the world, or at least be interested in the project. But unfortunately Everest’s supremacy among mountains appealed to the popular imagination of a record-breaking age, and gradually the expeditions began to receive a press publicity out of all proportion to the value of the undertaking, and certainly out of keeping with what used to be regarded as "the best traditions of mountaineering”…

I knew a man with a strong claim for a place on the expedition who said that he wanted to climb Everest so as to make a big name for himself, which would enable him to use his influence in the cause of world peace. A worthy ambition, no doubt, but surely it would have been more profitable to devote his energies to the study of political economy rather than to proving himself a mountaineer with an exceptionally large lung capacity or whatever it is that enables a man to climb to great altitudes. This is one example among many of an extraordinary distortion of values which has its roots in the opening of a short-cut to fame. Were it not so laughable it might well be resented by those who find in mountaineering a deep aesthetic pleasure.

Images and ink (54)

Image: Everest in winter, by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure.

Ink: The Magic Mountain (1924) by Thomas Mann, translated by H T Lowe-Porter.

One afternoon in February, the gentlemen arranged an excursion to Monstein, some hour and a half from the village by sleigh. … The cold was severe, the mountains misty. The road, a narrow, railingless shelf between mountain wall and abyss, rose steeply into the fir forests. They disentangled themselves from their wraps and climbed out in front of the little Monstein inn, that called itself a Kurhaus, and went on foot a few steps further to get the view south-west toward the Stulsergrat. The gigantic wall, three thousand metres high, was shrouded in vapours. Only one jagged tooth reared itself heavenward out of the mist — superterrestrial, Valhallan, far and faint and awesomely inaccessible. Hans Castorp admired it immensely, and summoned the others to follow suit. It was he who with due respect dubbed it inaccessible — and afforded Settembrini the chance of saying that this particular rock was considerably frequented. And, in general, that there were few spots where man had not set his foot. That was rather tall talk, retorted Naphta; and mentioned Mount Everest, which to date had icily refused to surrender to man’s importunity, and seemed likely to continue to do so. The humanist was put out. They returned to the Kurhaus, before which stood other unharnessed sleighs beside their own.

Blank on maps

Review: unclimbed peaks and untravelled river gorges of the eastern Himalaya, as presented in photography and prose from Nakamura Tamotsu.

Other explorers may claim to have filled in “blanks on the map”, or to challenge “the last frontier on Earth”. But when Tamotsu “Tom” Nakamura uses those stirring phrases to introduce his latest book, he has the photos to back them up. In Unclimbed Summits and Three Parallel Rivers – East of the Himalaya, Blank on Maps, he pays pictorial tribute to mountains and river gorges that few have seen who live outside these remote regions.

The first part of the book focuses mainly on unclimbed mountains in eastern Tibet, especially the hard-to-access border regions. Most of the images were taken by Nakamura himself during his forty or so expeditions to the region, with some additional contributions by other eminent alpinists and travellers. 

Would-be seekers of first ascents should be riveted by these images. Nakamura estimates that 375 peaks of significant height remain unclimbed in the regions covered by his book, about two thirds of them located in the 750 kilometre-long Nyainqentanglha range lying to the north of the main Himalayan crest.

Thanks to the photographers’ compositional skills, the chosen summits stand out on the page with a rare clarity and substantiveness. They are the kind of images that invite you to trace out a climbing line up their ridges, faces and couloirs. 

That’s no accident, since most of the photos were taken by climbers, principally Nakamura himself. To folks who have travelled in these parts, Nakamura will need no introduction, distinguished as he is by honorary memberships and acknowledgements from numerous alpine and geographical associations including a Piolets d’Or Asia Lifetime Achievement Award. For others, it may be worth mentioning that Nakamura has communed with mountains intensively in both his younger and more recent years - he jokes that the gap in between makes him a "kiseru climber".

He went up to Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo in 1953, an institution noted for its strong business and economics orientation and a storied mountaineering club. He joined the latter because, in his own words, "I thought it would be boring to go to university and not do anything. So when I thought about what to do, I played baseball in junior high school and was in the swimming club in high school, but I wasn't very good at it. So when I found out there was a mountaineering club, I decided to join without thinking too much about it, thinking that I could walk (laughs). Another reason was that I loved traveling since I was a child."

In these early years, Nakamura climbed intensively in the winter, with attendant epics: he once spent ten days in a snow hole in a bid to climb the Chinne on Tsurugi in winter and on another trip an avalanche swept him four hundred metres down the mountain. In fact, he spent so many days in the mountains that it took him an extra year at university to graduate. During that “fifth year”, he joined Yoshino Mitsuhiko and Nakamura Yukimasa in the first ascent of the Takidani Grepon in the Japan Northern Alps, a climb which several decades later your reviewer did not entirely succeed in repeating. 

After graduating in 1958, Nakamura joined Ishikawajima Heavy Industries, where a predecessor from his university mountaineering club was an accounting manager. A few years later, IHI took an enlightened view when Nakamura needed several months’ leave of absence to join Yoshizawa Ichirō’s 1961 expedition to the Andes, where they made the first ascent of Pucahirca Norte, one of the last unclimbed six-thousanders in Peru, as well as various first ascents in the Cordillera Apolobamba.

After that, career and family took precedence over expeditions. Nakamura embarked on a series of overseas postings for IHI, starting in Pakistan and working in China, Mexico and New Zealand before being assigned to Hong Kong in 1989 at the age of 55. 

The new business location was fortuitous: as Nakamura was now within reach of the eastern Himalaya, he was able to launch his first expedition the very next year. This would be the first of forty or so forays into remote, restricted and previously untravelled regions of the eastern Himalaya over the next three decades. “Getting permits from the authorities was often problematic,” he has quipped, “but not as difficult as getting permission from my wife.”

All this is by way of explaining why the images in the first part of Nakamura’s latest book should fascinate those who would follow in his bootprints. The second part has a different character. Focusing on the Three Parallel Rivers of China’s Yunnan Province – the rivers in question ultimately flow into the Yangtze, Mekong and Salween – the photos document a region of extraodinary biological and ethnic diversity. 

Featuring river landscapes, people and settlements, the photos in this section will appeal to a broad readership. It’s somewhat strange, then, that English translations seem to be lacking for some of the information in the Japanese-language captions to the images in this section. This stands in contrast to the book’s first part, where English-language captions seem, if anything, to be prioritised under the illustrations. 

None of this detracts from the book’s visual impact, which is reinforced by the excellent print quality afforded by one of Japan’s longest-standing publishers of mountain-related literature. When I had finished leafing through the book’s more than two hundred pages – most of them illustrated with photos or maps – I fell to wondering what other unique images Nakamura-san may hold in his archives, and whether he might one day publish more of them for an English-speaking readership. 

References

Tamotsu Nakamura, Unclimbed Summits and Three Parallel Rivers: East of the Himalaya, Blank on Maps, Kyoto: Nakanishiya Shuppan, April 2021, 224 pages (Japanese and English, parallel text).

"Exploring the last frontier of the eastern Himalaya”, interview with Nakamura Tamotsu on the Hitotsubashi University website, 2017 (Japanese language only).

Tozan-shi (6) – Japan discovers the Himalaya

How a cultural warrior inspired climbers to explore the Greater Ranges

Conveniently for mountain historians, it was in 1900 that a Waseda professor finished translating Marie de Ujfalvy-Bourdon’s Voyage D'une Parisienne Dans L'himalaya Occidental, the first book on the Himalaya ever to be published in Japan.

Climbers on the summit ridge of Nanda Kot, 1936

Strictly speaking, nobody in Japan needed Mme de Ujfalvy-Bourdon to learn of these great mountains – they’d been there for centuries, shimmering in the awareness of monks and scholars. And as soon as ordinary folk could travel abroad, it was a monk who was among the first to translate such vague aspirations into action. Indeed, Kawaguchi Ekai (1866-1945) was already well on his way to Lhasa when the Japanese version of the Frenchwoman’s book came out.

But Kawaguchi’s exploits belong more to the history of exploration. For would-be climbers in the Himalaya, the key influencer – as we would call him today – was Kanokogi Kazunobu (1884-1949). 

More than most, Kanokogi (right) was a bundle of paradoxes. During the war with Russia, as a young naval officer and a practising Christian, he is said to have stopped his vessel, against orders, to rescue shipwrecked sailors from the enemy fleet. Later he renounced Christianity and signed up with the Yūzonsha, an ultra-nationalist group and a pulpit from which he inveighed against liberalism, democracy and individualism.

After his naval service, Kanokogi launched into an academic career, studying philosophy at Kyoto, then Columbia, where he wrote a master’s thesis on Nietzsche (1910), and finally Jena in Germany, where he married the German-Polish daughter of a philologist and wrote up a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of religion (1912) – you can still buy a reprint of this book today. By the time the First World War broke out, he was back in Tokyo teaching philosophy at Keio.

Along the way, the young philosopher had picked up a good knowledge of the Alps. In 1911, he’d set out from Jena on a walking tour of the usual Swiss tourist spots, distilling these experiences into a book entitled Alpine Travels (アルプス行). This recommended him to Maki "Yūkō" Aritsune, who signed him up as a kind of advisor or elder to the mountaineering club he was founding at Keio in 1915. As to where alpinism fitted into Kanokogi’s broad range of interests, a professor who has studied his thought says that

Kanokogi found respite from his anxieties concerning Japanese society in his frequent mountain-climbing expeditions. Yet even those escapes were related to his political outlook, for his love of the mountains, which he acquired in Germany, was inspired by a Nietzschean quest for enlightenment upon craggy peaks. Other German influences were also at play: contact with nature held an important role in volkisch thought, a hodgepodge of romanticism and nationalism that contributed to Nazi ideology. Kanokogi considered the mountains an appropriate environment to hone the qualities necessary in the future leaders of his totalitarian state. It was thus to prepare a generation of students for service as philosopher-kings that he founded alpinist clubs at Keio and at Tokyo Imperial University.

In 1918, Kanokogi resigned from Tokyo University, where he'd also helped to found a mountaineering club, and travelled to India. Given a miserly 15 day permit to visit the Kanchenjunga region, he managed to climb a minor peak of 4,810 metres – the first Himalayan ascent by any Japanese citizen. Then, before he could get in touch with Indian pro-independence activists – another purpose of his journey – he was arrested by the British authorities and deported back to Japan. Nevertheless, he’d shown young mountaineers that Himalayan peaks could be reached and climbed.

View of Nanda Kot, from the 1936 expedition

One who got Kanokogi’s message – at least, the mountaineering part – was Mita Yukio (1900-1991). As a founder member of the Keio mountaineering club, he joined Maki in pioneering winter climbing and ski mountaineering – indeed, it was Mita who skied through a blizzard to Tateyama Onsen to raise the alarm after Maki’s party got into trouble in January 1923.

Despite this tragedy, which resulted in the death of Itakura Katsunobu, Maki saw these excursions as training for the Greater Ranges: after his return from the Mittelegi Ridge in 1921 he visited Yamamoto Isoroku, soon to become famous as a proponent of naval air power, to ask if the oxygen masks used by military aviators might be adapted for Himalayan climbers.

In the summer of 1925, Maki took Mita along with Hayakawa Tanezō and three Swiss guides to make the first ascent of Mt Alberta (3,619m) in the Canadian Rockies. By this time, Mita had graduated from Keio and had decided to join a trading company. He did well in business, ultimately rising to headup the Singapore branch of Iwai Sangyō, a forerunner of Nisshō Iwai and hence today's Sojitz.

Unsurprisingly for an alpinist of his calibre, Mita’s professional success did nothing to dull his Himalayan ambitions. A posting to India put the Himalaya within closer reach and, in the winter of 1931, he got as far as the Rohtang Pass (3,980m) with a party of 13 porters and sirdars. Alas, the weather prevented the planned ascent of a nearby peak of 4,500 metres, which Mita saw as a preliminary to attempting Kanchenjunga. And then his hard-won three weeks of leave were over.

Porting loads on Nanda Kot, 1936

In the end, Mita could do nothing more than look on as expeditions from Europe fanned out into the Himalaya. In 1931 alone, Paul Bauer led his second expedition to Kanchenjunga, and Frank Smythe succeeded on Kamet (7,756 m), the highest peak anybody had so far climbed. Mita reported on these and other expeditions to his colleagues in Japan, exhorting them to train for expeditions in the winter mountains.

Mita’s frustrations were widely shared. In June 1931, three former students of Kyoto’s elite Third High School had set up the Academic Alpine Club of Kyoto. Their aim was specifically to climb in the Himalaya. To do so, they first had to master a new set of techniques – setting climbing camps progressively higher up the mountain until the summit was in reach. The AACK first tested this “polar method” on Mt Fuji over the 1931 year-end. But after Japan left the League of Nations two years later, the country’s growing international isolation got in the way of everybody’s Himalayan ambitions.

High on Nanda Kot in 1936

In the end, it was neither the AACK, nor Mita Yukio, but a Rikkyō University expedition that bagged Nanda Kot in October 1936, helped by an experienced crew of Sherpas led by a veteran sirdar who’d been on both Everest with the British and Kanchenjunga with the Germans. The expedition leader, Hotta Yaichi, had been inspired and encouraged by Hasegawa Denjirō, a furniture designer by appointment to the Imperial court ,who’d gone to view and photograph Mt Kailas and Nanga Parbat in 1927-28. Nanda Kot was Japan’s first and only pre-war Himalayan summit.

After the war, Kanokogi was arrested as a war criminal, spending some months languishing in Sugamo Prison until released on grounds of ill-health. Meanwhile, the members of the AACK were rekindling their Himalayan ambitions. In October 1952, Imanishi Kinji, one of the club’s founders, led a reconnaissance expedition to Manaslu (8,163m). The following year, a party led by Mita Yukio made a serious attempt on the mountain’s northeast face, reaching a height of 7,750 metres. In 1954, yet a third expedition, led by the aforesaid Hotta Yaichi, was blocked by obstructive villagers and diverted to another mountain.

Finally, in 1956, the summit was reached via the mountain’s north side, making Manaslu “Japan’s eight-thousander”. Led by Maki Yūkō, this expedition was organised by the Japanese Alpine Club, like its predecessors, but it was nonetheless an AACK man, Imanishi Toshio (no relation to Imanishi Kinji), who was the first to top out. The academicians had at last made good on their prewar Himalayan dreams. 

References

Yamazaki Yasuji, Nihon Tozan-shi, Hakusui-sha, 1969 reprinted 1975.

Christopher Szpilman, "Kanokogi Kazunobu: Pioneer of Platonic Fascism and Imperial Pan-Asianism", Monumenta Nipponica, vol 68, no 2, 2013.

Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka, volume 103, Taiyō Bessatsu: Nihon no kokoro, Heibonsha 1998.

Kinichi Yamamori, "Japanese Mountaineering in the Himalaya before and after World War II", (translated, edited and supplemented by Tom Nakamura), The Himalayan Journal, no 73, 2018.

Hotta Yaichi, "The ascent of Nanda Kot", The Himalayan Journal, no 10, 1938.

Photos of the 1936 Rikkyō University expedition to Nanda Kot are from Yama to Keikoku's Me de miru Nihon no Tozanshi.

Notional summits

Getting to the top is sometimes a matter of interpretation ...

In her recently published Imaginary Peaks, Katie Ives finds that much of what we call mountaineering takes place in the head. Taking as her starting point a famous hoax – the faked-up Riesenstein range that appeared in a 1962 edition of a now defunct mountaineering magazine – she pursues this idea illuminatingly through the history of alpinism.

Project Hyakumeizan was particularly taken with the discussion of fact-checking in Chapter 23 – a subject that must be close to Ives's heart in her day job as editor-in-chief of Alpinist magazine. You’d think that, even if mountains themselves are hard to define, summiting them should be easy enough to pin down objectively. After all, what is hard to understand about the highest point?

For the highest summits in the world, the record-keeper was, for decades, the Kathmandu-based journalist Elizabeth Hawley (1923-2018). Such was the authority of her unofficial yet universally respected Himalayan Database that one alpinist declared “It doesn’t matter if you’re Reinhold Messner or Ed Viesturs; your summit never happened unless Elizabeth Hawley says it did.”

Yet, as Ives relates, in mid-2019 an international team of researchers “ascertained that many mountaineers didn’t actually reach the real apex of the mountains they claimed to have climbed”. Often, simply by mistake, they’d stopped instead at lower points that looked like summits.

The problem lies in the ambiguous topography of several eight-thousanders, Ives explains. On Dhaulagiri I, the summit landscape includes a metal pole stuck in the wrong place. Annapurna I’s “immense summit ridge” has numerous bumps, the lowest of which is just 26.8 metres below the tallest. And the uppermost ridge of Manaslu – “Japan’s eight-thousander” – has a right-angled bend that hides the real summit from view. Small wonder that most climbers stop short of that point.

By an exquisite irony, it now appears that Elizabeth Hawley’s successor, Billi Bierling, has fallen victim to just this topographic ambiguity. Bierling has directed the Himalayan Database since 2017, splitting her time between Kathmandu and her native Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which lies beneath what is unarguably Germany’s highest point, the Zugspitze.

Like Hawley, Bierling has a journalistic background. Unlike Hawley, though, she also practises the activities that she monitors. Besides her work with Swiss Humanitarian Aid, she leads treks and climbs big mountains. She is the first German woman to summit and safely descend Everest, and has topped out on eight-thousanders on seven occasions – including two visits to the summit ridge of Manaslu, the second of them without using bottled oxygen.

These climbs came up in an interview with Bierling that recently appeared in the quarterly customer magazine of a mountaineering goods retailer. “You stand on the ridge at Manaslu and have the feeling that you can't go any further. Up there, it's very hard to assess how far the cornice extends. And then you see the drone footage that an Australian climber took last fall, and you see that it does continue, even higher,” she commented.

To the question whether she reached the actual summit, she replied “No. As I can assess it today, both times I was not on the point reached this year by Mingma G and his team.” The Himalayan Database will adjust its parameters accordingly, she added: “Starting in 2022, we will … then accept only the main summit as the summit. In the future, anyone who turns back at the pre-summit will then be will be recorded as ‘pre-summit’.”

On a planet with much bigger problems, does any of this actually matter? Eberhard Jurgalski, who once worked with Hawley and now maintains his own mountain database, thinks that it does. For that reason, he worked with the researchers who highlighted the misleading summit claims on some Himalayan summits. As quoted by Katie Ives, he says that “This is history. Why not tell the truth to people?”. 

And, as Ives herself notes, after the 2016 US presidential election, both climbers and non-climbers have become particularly aware of fabricated stories and the dangers they pose. For as long as they remain so, the reliability of information will continue to concern people. And they will continue to value well-researched resources such as the Himalayan Database as "the reference point”, to borrow Billi Bierling's words.

References

Katie Ives, Imaginary Summits: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams, Mountaineers Books, 2021

“We are the reference point”, interview with Billi Bierling by Stephanie Geiger, published in Inspiration 2-2022, the quarterly mountain magazine published by Bächli Bergsport, Switzerland (German and French language versions)

More to read

Alpinis.com: Researchers challenge historical records for 8000-meter peaks

Annex

“We are the reference point”
Insights from the Inspiration interview with Billi Bierling

Although (or because) mountaineering is a sport without much in the way of governing bodies, mountaineers can be obsessive about records of achievement (first this, fastest that etc). Billi Bierling’s interviewer points to that paradox with an illuminating question: why is the Himalayan Database needed at all? After all, nobody keeps a list of Matterhorn and Eiger ascents…

“Really, there’s no actual need for a database, and that’s why they don’t have one on the Matterhorn or the Eiger,” Bierling admits. But the Database is the only source when it comes to information about mountaineering in Nepal, she points out. It shows, for example, exactly how many people have died descending Annapurna IV.

Above all, it lists first ascents. Expedition organisers can find out if somebody from Uruguay, for example, has ever topped out on Everest (Only one Uruguayan has succeeded, as it happens, and this was as recently as 2019.) The Database also makes it possible to see trends: the success rate on Mount Everest used to be 10 percent; today it's 60 percent.

Unfortunately, another trend – the rise of social media and the possibility of making a living from them – have added to the incentives to cheat. As Bierling remarks: “Some respect for the mountains seems to have gone missing. Everything has become so easy. (…) Books and social media have made the mountains so much more accessible. But no one can turn back this clock. Quite a few people go climbing to build up their profiles.”

This, in turn, increases the pressure on Bierling and her colleagues to verify claims. “Someone once showed me a photo of the summit of Kangchenjunga, but the summit was reflected in the background on his ski goggles. So you could clearly see that he hadn’t been on the top,” she recalls. “A year later, he went back to the mountain and unfortunately died on the summit. This was tragic and I still feel infinitely sorry for him.”

“Tozan-shi” (4) – war and restoration

An outline history of mountaineering in Japan - the roads to Japan's eight-thousander and national federations

During the 1930s, military men such as Ishiwara Kanji envisaged a “national defence state” in which all economic and social activities would focus on achieving Japan’s strategic goals. As war approached, it was only a question of time before mountaineering too fell into the maw of this totalitarian machine.

Japan's eight-thousander: Imanishi Toshio summits Manaslu in 1956

In January 1941, an umbrella organisation was set up to supervise all Japanese mountaineering activities and clubs. One purpose of this Nihon Sangaku Renmei was to promote a theory of mountaineering for the good of the imperial state (kōkoku tozandō). 

Individual mountaineers were less easily regimented. Many kept silent, or simply gave up climbing. Among the clubs that faded from the scene during this period were the Kiri-no-tabi-kai, noted for its “contemplative” approach to the hills, and Club Edelweiss, one of Japan’s first alpine associations for women.

After hostilities ended, mountaineers made up for lost time. The pioneer of winter climbing on the Hodaka massif’s Byōbu-iwa, Shinmura Shōichi made a notable winter traverse between Tsurugi and Yari-ga-take in March-April 1947, snowholing all the way. 

Two years later, attempting another long winter traverse, Matsunami Akira and Arimoto Katsumi came to grief on Yari-ga-take’s Kita-kama ridge. The diary and farewell message they left behind in their last bivouac has become a classic of Japan’s mountain literature, inspiring novels by Inoue Yasushi, Nitta Jirō and Yasukawa Shigeo.

Another Byōbu pioneer, the medical researcher and Academic Alpine Club of Kyoto member Itō Yōhei founded a new mountaineering magazine, Gakujin, in May 1947. To this day, the magazine remains the main rival to Japan’s first and most prominent mountain monthly, Yama to Keikoku, which issued its first postwar edition as early as January 1946.
 
In March 1948, Itō made the first winter ascent of a face route on Byōbu. For Itō, as for all his fellow AACK members, winter climbing was simply training for the Himalaya. In the midwinter of 1952/53, he led an expedition to Hokkaidō’s remote Shiretoko Peninsula and, in the autumn, joined the club’s attempt on Annapurna IV. They didn’t summit, but the AACK had made good on its pre-war commitment to Himalayan climbing.

Winter mountaineering was the natural preserve of the university clubs, notably Waseda’s, as the multi-day time commitment tended to exclude the salaryman climbers. These unfortunates had to make do with the cliffs of Tanigawa, which lay within weekend range. But one of them, Okuyama Akira,  was determined to give the academicians a run for their money.

Frustrated by a seeming stagnation in technical climbing standards, Okuyama mused about creating an elite climbing association, drawing the best climbers from clubs all over Japan. In January 1958, the new group took shape as the RCCII, its name harking back to the original Rock Climbing Club of Kobe, the outfit founded in 1924 by Fujiki Kuzō. The RCCII made its first mark in June the same year when they climbed an overhanging face on Tanigawa-dake, using expansion bolts for the first time in Japan.

Meanwhile, the AACK was sniffing around the foot of Manaslu, an unclimbed Himalayan eight-thousander. In October 1952, Imanishi Kinji, one of the club’s founders, led a small party to walk clockwise around the mountain, seeking a way up. Two more expeditions, now under the auspices of the Japanese Alpine Club, were unsuccessful before Imanishi Toshio (no relation) was finally able to step onto the summit in May 1956.

This triumph touched off a “Manaslu boom” in domestic mountaineering. Inevitably, as more people surged into the mountains, the accident rate boomed too. The growing casualty rate – the annual death toll from accidents almost doubled between the late 1950s and early 1960s – threw the mountaineering world’s lack of cohesion into stark relief. In fact, no central organisation had existed since the war to represent Japan’s thousands of mountaineering clubs in their dealings with the government and the public. 

What Japan needed was a European-style federation, along the lines of the Club alpin français. Or so argued Kondō Nobuyuki, a former Waseda man, mountain writer and Japanese Alpine Club member. But efforts by JAC-affiliated officers to gain influence within early attempts at a national federation met with resistance, particularly from folk who saw their club as elitist and unrepresentative.

When established in April 1960, the Japan Mountaineering Association (日本山岳協会) was conceived as the representative body for all Japan’s mountaineers. Nested within the Japan Sports Association (JSPO), it would concern itself with all domestic mountaineering matters, leaving the responsibility for overseas expeditions with the Japanese Alpine Club.

The new federation made its debut during a volatile spring. A few months after the JMA made its debut, the riots against the US-Japan Security Treaty reached their climax. Mountaineers of a left-wing persuasion felt that the new JMA was too reminiscent of the monolithic wartime Nihon Sangaku Renmei. So they countered it with an alternative structure of their own.

With support from a member of the Japanese Communist Party, as well as from the mountain writers Fukada Kyūya and Tanaka Sumie, the Japan Workers’ Alpine Federation (Nihon Kinrōsha Sangaku Renmei) was established in mid-1960. Its political affiliations aside, Rōsan would ultimately function very much like the larger JMA, representing its members in dealings with the authorities, providing them with accident insurance, and sponsoring expeditions to the Greater Ranges.

Thus, to this very day, Japanese climbers, or at least their clubs, can choose between two national mountaineering federations. Probably few reflect that this bifurcated structure freeze-frames the country’s political polarisation in the early 1960s. 

References

Main sources are Wolfram Manzenreiter’s “Die soziale Konstruktion des Japanischen Alpinismus”, Beiträge zur Japanologie, Band 36, Vienna, 2000 – this is the first and so far only study of Japanese mountaineering history in any western language – and the Yama to Keikoku illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering (目で見る日本登山史 by 川崎吉光、山と渓谷社), Tokyo 2005.