Tales of past and present (5)

Continued: a talk about foreign explorers of Japan's mountains, then and now.

The Great Tokyo Earthquake marked a kind of boundary in history. It’s difficult to generalise what effect it had on mountaineers, Japanese or foreign. That said, it’s hard to find any full-length book written by a foreign mountaineer in Japan after 1923, at least in English.

Murray Walton (centre) with companion and guide at Yarisawa.
Illustration from Scrambles in Japan and Formosa.

The prominent exception is Scrambles in Japan and Formosa published in 1934 by W. H. Murray Walton (b. 1890). Murray Walton climbed Niitaka-yama on Taiwan, the “new highest mountain” in the Japanese Empire, traversed the Southern Japan Alps from end to end, and made climbs in the Central and Northern Alps too. 

Daihasenzan, a mountain of Taiwan.
Illustration from Scrambles in Japan and Formosa.

Like his acquaintance Walter Weston,  Murray Walton was a missionary and was fascinated by the Ontake religion, visiting the mountain three times. He knew and climbed with several prominent MGK members (for example, the Reverend W H Elwin, and the American diplomat Eugene Dooman) but doesn’t mention the club in his book. On the other hand, he was a proud member of the JAC for at least 15 years.

A seance on Ontake.
Illustration from Scrambles in Japan and Formosa. 

After Murray Walton, foreign climbers in Japan go very quiet. Was that due to the earthquake or Japan’s growing international isolation? Or did foreigners simply stop writing books? It seems that the drop in activity was real. Kojima Usui, who wrote the foreword to Murray Walton’s book, says this: “In recent years there have been, however, fewer foreign residents interested in mountaineering. Their enthusiasm too seems to be decreasing.”

One possible explanation comes from the scholar-diplomat Edwin Reischauer, who as the son of missionaries, was brought up in Japan. As he recalls in My Life Between Japan and America:

During the 1930s, when the police were becoming increasingly suspicious of all foreigners as potential spies and one was constantly subjected to police interrogation while traveling, my birth in Japan served as a form of passport. A policeman, after dutifully questioning my identity, what I was doing, and where I was going, all of which was already recorded in his notebook, would then frequently ask me about my attitude toward the Japanese government or the current aggression Japan was engaged in on the continent. 

Indeed, the enthusiasm of foreign mountaineers took a long time to rekindle. In the 1950s and 1960s, Japan saw an enormous resurgence of hiking and alpinism, especially after the first ascent of Manaslu in May 1956.

May 9, 1956: first ascent of Manaslu by a JAC expedition.

But where were the foreigners during this so-called Manaslu boom? In English, at least, I can’t find much writing about the Japanese mountains during these decades. 

Well-thumbed copy of the JNTO guide, with a roughly contemporaneous carabiner.

And there was certainly no up-to-date guidebook to Japan’s mountains for foreigners, although the official Japan National Tourist Office guide did its best to include mountain-related advice. My copy, dated February 1975, recommends the Ochūdo-meguri on Mt Fuji as “a delightful summer excursion”. I hope that bit has been updated in more recent editions, or somebody is in for a shock.

A first sign of renewed foreign interest in Japan’s mountains came from Oscar Benl (1914–86), a professor of Japanese literature, who translated Inoue Yasushi’s Hyōheki into German as Die Eiswand in 1979. Benl studied at Tokyo University before the war, and submitted his doctorate on the ideals of Zeami, the noh master, in 1943.

Professor Benl also translated works by Murasaki Shikibu, Yoshida Kenkō, Shiga Naoya, Ibuse Masuji, Kawabata Yasunari, Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Funabashi Seiichi and Abe Kōbō. He was Germany’s retort to Donald Keene. Why did he pick Hyōheki in particular? (He translated Inoue’s Tempyō no iraka (The rooftile of Tempyō) and Ryōjū (The hunting gun) too). Perhaps it was because his first academic post was in Munich, the capital city of German alpinism. But this is just a guess…

(Continued)

Tales of past and present (2)

Continued: A talk about the foreign explorers of Japan’s mountains, then and now.

So times had changed. We’re now in the Taishō era (1912–26). In these years huts were built, paths were made and guide associations formed. Now everybody could go to the mountains. JAC members started to do pioneer work abroad – notably Maki “Yūkō” Aritsune (1894–1989) on the Eiger’s Mittellegi Ridge in 1921, and on Mt Alberta in 1925.

Maki Yuko returns from the Eiger with his guides, September 1921

What were the foreigners doing at this time? Well, some joined the JAC – the club’s records must be very interesting on this topic. According to Hamish Ion, a mountain historian, within a year of the JAC’s foundation there were eleven foreign members (not all of them English) two were Anglican clergymen, like Weston, two were university teachers, and the rest were businessmen in Yokohama, Tokyo and Kobe.

Foreign women too joined: Mrs Frances Weston and Mrs Emily Elwin became members before 1923. Also, two lady missionaries were introduced by your founder member Takano Takazō and Kondō Shigekichi (1883–1969), who had studied at Glasgow University.

Interestingly, when Mrs Weston went back to England, she wasn’t able to join Britain’s Alpine Club – instead she had to join the Ladies Alpine Club founded in 1907 by the hard-driving Mrs Elizabeth Aubrey LeBlond, the pioneer winter alpine climber and mountain photographer. Officially, of course, the JAC did not admit women until 1949 – but this was still a quarter of a century ahead of Britain’s Alpine Club (1974) and the Swiss Alpine Club (1980). This too was pioneer work.

H E Daunt, the "Bell Goat".

Some foreigners also founded their own association: the Mountain Goats of Kobe, who often trained on Rokkō-san. I’m not sure when the MGK started (some say 1911 as the Ancient Order of Mountain Goats), but its house journal Inaka first came out in 1915 and continued for almost a decade. It was edited by a Kobe resident and oil company employee, H E Daunt. 

Daunt was a golfer before he was a mountaineer. As a member of the Kobe Golf Club, the first Japanese golf club, opened in 1913, he won the Japanese amateur championship in 1915. In May 1919, he helped to design Korea’s first-ever golf course, describing his experience in Inaka (1923). Visiting Seoul at the invitation of the South Manchurian Railway Company in May 1919, he helped Mr Inohara, the general manager of the Chosun Hotel, set out the course.

Is it perhaps an exquisite coincidence that there are just 18 volumes of Inaka, like the 18 holes of a golf round?

As you can see, Inaka was well produced – it was printed by a local newspaper company. Alas, even single volumes of Inaka are very rare and expensive - complete sets are even rarer: I only know of two: one in London and one in Kobe – I hope one day it will be reprinted or at least a selection of articles. There is some good stuff in there, for example, an eyewitness account of the 1915 Yake-dake eruption by J Merle Davis, an American missionary, in Inaka Vol II, 1915.

The eruption of Yake-dake in 1915.

By the way, many, perhaps most, of the leading MGK members were also members of the JAC. And for a number of years after the first world war, H E Daunt edited the English-language supplement of Sangaku, the JAC’s journal.

The MGK were not the only show in town. At one point, more than a third of the members of the Kobe toho-kai (神戸徒歩会) were foreigners, and its journal Pedestrian carried articles in English as well as Japanese. The Kobe toho-kai was founded in 1910 as the Kobe Waraji-kai (神戸草鞋会).

Of course, clubs are never the whole story ...

(Continued)

Tales of past and present (1)

A talk about the foreign explorers of Japan’s mountains, then and now.

Thank you Ishizuka-san and members of the Ryokusōkai for inviting me to speak here at the offices of the storied Japanese Alpine Club – the original idea was to talk about translating Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan), but translations can be a dry subject, and so with your help, we settled on the topic of foreign mountaineers in Japan – what they did in the past, what they are doing now, and what they might think of doing in the future.

When I started looking at this topic, I realised that this is a huge field. Quite simply, even if we restrict ourselves to the early days, more foreigners explored the mountains of Japan than can possibly be mentioned, even cursorily, in a one-hour talk. The literature itself is quite sizeable – for example, I haven’t yet managed to lay my hands on a copy of Shōda Hito'o’s magisterial Ijintachi no Nihon Arupusu (Strangers in the Japan Alps).

So – my apologies in advance – I’m afraid that this talk will by no means consult all the available sources; it will skate selectively over the surface. And it will raise more questions than it gives answers. But let us wade in there anyway.

The past
When it comes to the past, there’s no question where we should start. In today’s company, we have to begin with Walter Weston (1861–1940) – here he is with Shiga Shigetaka: together they were the JAC’s first honorary vice presidents.

Shiga Shigetaka and Walter Weston.

By the way, I was embarrassed to read in the Ryokusōkai’s newsletter that certain senior members of the JAC entrusted Weston with a valuable picture scroll, which they intended as a gift to the British Alpine Club’s president. But, when he went back to England, Weston apparently mislaid this handsome present. This is regrettable in the extreme, and I can only bow deeply in apology on behalf of my countryman.

Kamijo Kamonji (left) and Walter Weston (right).

To this audience, Weston is so well known that there is no need to rehearse his story in detail. He first came to Japan in 1888. His book Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps (1896) was based on climbs in 1891–93, during which he climbed Yari-ga-take with the pioneer guide Kamijō Kamonji (1847–1917). Then he went home and, in April 1902, he got married.

Kojima Usui and Yari-ga-take surmounted by a surveyor's marker.

In August of the same year, Kojima Usui, made his famous ascent of Yari – inspired by Shiga Shigetaka’s Nihon Fūkeiron (A theory of the Japanese landscape). Then, in 1903, Kojima discovered that Weston had come back to Japan – actually it was his climbing companion on Yari, Okano Kinjirō, who thought of looking in the Yokohama phone directory. Okano and Kojima met Weston for tea, over which they discussed the idea of an alpine club and an alpine journal in Japan – and the rest is history. In October 1905: the JAC was founded.

For his achievements, Weston is sometimes called the father of Japanese alpinism. But was he really?

Foreigners were climbing in Japan before Weston was even born – a whole generation earlier.

Let us rewind to September 4, 1860: Rutherford Alcock (1809–97), the British emissary, is setting out with seven British colleagues and about a hundred Japanese officials, agents of the bakufu and their attendants with thirty horses. Alcock’s dog, Toby, is going along too.

An illustration from Rutherford Alcock's The Capital of the Tycoon.

Alcock’s main aim was political: to assert his right to travel freely under 1858 treaty. But it wasn’t just about politics. Before he became a diplomat, he had been a surgeon and he liked to have men of science around him. In the party was the botanist and gardener John Veitch (1839–1870). On Mt Fuji, Veitch “discovered” the shirabiso and named it for himself: Abies veitchii.

John Veitch and the tree he named for himself.

On September 11th, they all reached summit of Mt Fuji, where a certain Navy Lieutenant Robinson mistakenly calculated an altitude of more than four thousand metres. Later, alas, at the Atami hot springs the dog Toby strolled over an erupting geyser with fatal consequences. Veitch too died too young, at the age of 31 in England, but you can still visit a garden that he helped to create there…

At "Hakoni": from Rutherford Alcock's The Capital of the Tycoon.

As only diplomats could move freely at that time, they naturally accounted for the earliest wave of mountaineering by foreigners. Six years after Alcock’s climb, a Swiss diplomat led the second gaijin ascent of Fuji. 

The Swiss delegation in Edo: contemporary print.

This was Caspar Brennwald (1838–99), who later helped to found a trading company that still exists today. The Swiss planned to bivouac on the summit but met with a thunderstorm that forced them to seek shelter in a pilgrim’s hut.

         Carl Johann Maximowicz and some of his specimens.

On the heels of the diplomats came the scholars. The Russian botanist Carl Johann Maximowicz (1827–91) arrived in Japan late in 1860 and, during the next two years, walked from Hokkaido to Kyushu, taking in mountains such as Unzen, Aso and Kujū on the way. Along the way, he must have found a lot of interesting plants: he sent home 72 chests full of specimens – some of which can still be seen in museums today. Another naturalist, the German Wilhelm Dönitz (1838–1912), climbed Nantai and Fuji in 1875, although he was more interested in spiders and millipedes than flowers.

Benjamin Smith Lyman with his team of surveyors.

Geologists and geographers were no less active. In 1874, Benjamin Smith Lyman (1835–1920), an American mining engineer and surveyor, explored the Daisetsuzan while seeking the source of the Ishikari River. He also surveyed the oil fields in Niigata, partly at his own expense when the government’s funds ran out. By the way, I have never seen a detailed account of Lyman’s journey up the Ishikari River – even the biography by Kuwada Gonpei doesn’t have one. What a pity: it must have been a fascinating journey, and one that can never be repeated.

The following year, Heinrich Naumann (1854–1927), a German geologist attached to the Kaisei Gakkō, climbed Asama. His temper too was said to be volcanic, which cut short his stay in Japan. Otherwise he would certainly have climbed more mountains. But he did get to name the Fossa Magna.

John Milne and an illustration from his book on Mt. Fuji.

Another geologist, John Milne (1850–1913) visited Iwate, Chokai, Gassan and Aso during his spell in Japan as a foreign advisor, which lasted from 1875 to 1895. He wrote two papers trying to explain the curvature of Mt Fuji’s slopes, a question which still hasn’t been fully answered to this day. Wisely, he gave up on that line of enquiry and concentrated on earthquakes. Today, he is known as “father of the seismograph”.

Ernest Satow and his guidebook. 

Of course, I should have mentioned Ernest Satow (1843–1929) before. As a diplomat, he was among the first foreigners to explore the Japanese mountains – during his first posting from 1862 to 1883, he traversed Okutama, visited Fuji, Asama, Haruna, Akagi, and Nikko-Shirane, crossed Tanzawa, climbed Ontake, Yatsugadake, Hakusan, and Tateyama, and made first British ascents of Nōtori and Ai-no-take in the Southern Alps. And he was a keen amateur botanist, even writing a paper on the cultivation of bamboos.

From a contemporary review of the Satow and Hawes guidebook. 

But he made two more signal contributions to mountaineering in Japan. First, he was the literal father of Takeda Hisayoshi (1883–1972), who became a founder of the JAC and an expert on Japan’s alpine plants. And, secondly, with another Englishman, he compiled a guidebook: A Handbook for Travellers in Central & Northern Japan – first published in 1881.

As we shall see, guidebooks are important: they influence where later travellers go and what they see. This one exerted an even more durable sway – it contains a section by William Gowland (1842–1922), a mining engineer, who was the first to talk about high mountains “that might perhaps be termed the Japanese Alps”. And Shiga Shigetaka probably borrowed material from Satow’s guide for his Nippon Fūkeiron – especially the chapter that inspired Kojima’s ascent of Yari.

Mr and Mrs Weston at Kamikochi in 1923.

That brings us back to Weston. For his travels in Kyushu and Honshu, he used the Satow and Hawes guidebook, now known as “Murray” after its publisher, which he later helped to update. He also used trains where he could – according to Weston himself, there were already more than 3,600 kilometres of railways. So, even in the 1890s, his mountaineering had quite a modern flavour, sped on its way as it was by a detailed guidebook and efficient public transport. All that was lacking was modern maps. 

So what happened after the Japan Alpine Club was formed? For a start, JAC members took over the role of pioneers. Kojima Usui identified a “Golden Age” of mountain exploration that lasted until the Army Surveyors published their maps of all the Japan Alps, removing the last shred of mystery from the mountains.

Thus, when Walter Weston traversed Ōtenshō-dake in August 1914, he was following in the footsteps of Kojima and his JAC colleagues, not the other way round. The titles of his two mountain books say it all: “Mountaineering and Exploration…” (1896), followed by “The Playground of the Far East” (1918). By the way, while travelling towards the Northern Alps by train, he was surprised and appalled by the sight of the new oil rigs along the Niigata coast. 

View of oil rigs on the Niigata coast. 

So times had changed…

(Continued)

A meizanologist's diary (68)

27 March (cont’d): perhaps by default, the Sensei and I increasingly practise the art of Slow Mountaineering. For like it or not, we’re never going to make it down to the Masutomi hot springs in forty-five minutes, as could Yamaki-san in his youth. Instead, we amble down the road, soaking up the afternoon sunshine and listening to the first tentative birdsong ripple through the bare woods. The Sensei even tries whistling back to a nightingale.

Taking a short cut across a bend in the road, we happen across the old path down to Masutomi. This guides us to our next appointment – with Kogure Ritarō, no less. Not the man himself, of course, but his monument, which stands on a slight eminence amid an aery grove of silver birch trees. The slanting sunlight floods in through the leafless branches.

It was a memorial service for Kogure here, records Fukada Kyūya in Nihon Hyakumeizan, that brought him to Mizugaki. We can imagine that Fukada and Kogure were well acquainted – Fukada joined the Japanese Alpine Club in June 1935, the very same year that Kogure became the club’s president. This explains why Fukada calls him the “doyen (dai-senpai) of our mountaineering community” in his chapter on Kinpu-zan, the sixty-eighth of his Hundred Mountains.

By the time Fukada wrote those words, Kogure was no longer there to appreciate them. He died in May 1944, during his ninth year of office as the Japanese Alpine Club’s president. It was a difficult time to be a mountaineer, let alone head up Japan’s pre-eminent mountaineering association. The fine bronze relief on the monument – by Satō Kyūichirō says Fukada – shows a face worn down by the cares of office.

This is not the youthful Kogure, with his bristling beard, striding out in August 1913 for an epic traverse over still unknown ways through the Japan Alps. In the above cartoon by the artist and fellow JAC member Nakamura Seitarō, Kogure and his companion, Tanabe Jūji, look like an ill-assorted pair, thrown together by chance because they lodged in the same Tokyo boarding house. Yet outward appearances may deceive.

For unlike most of the born-and-bred townsmen and professionals who made up the ranks of the early JAC, both Kogure and Tanabe started life in the deep countryside – Kogure in Gunma and Tanabe in Toyama. And both were brought up in villages that still adhered to the mountain faiths. Kogure even went on a pilgrimage to Mt Fuji at the age of thirteen.

Later in their lives, both men turned away from long and arduous forays through the big mountains. Instead, they turned their attention to the Chichibu region, closer to home and quieter than the increasingly crowded thoroughfares of the Hida range. This is why Kogure’s monument looks out towards Kinpu-zan, a peak that he said “could hold its head up in the company of any mountain in all Japan”.

It wasn’t just Kogure and Tanabe, of course. The idea of shorter, cheaper and lighter-weight excursions made sense to a growing number of Tokyo-based salarymen and women too. In 1919, a club was founded especially for them; Kogure joined up too, as did other eminent JAC members such as Takeda Hisayoshi. 

And there, we see, is the club’s name, the Kiri-no-tabi-no-kai (“Wanderers of the mist”) immortalised in bronze, alongside those of the monument’s other sponsors – which include the Japanese Alpine Club, its local Yamanashi section, the prefectural mountaineering federation, and the Masutomi hot springs …

The Masutomi hot springs! If we want to get there before the sun sinks below the opposite ridge, we’d better get going. Last year’s leafmould rustles under our boots as we walk down to the road. I’m still thinking about Kogure, though – he and Tanabe were early exponents of a movement known as “contemplative mountaineering” (静観的登山). Now how is that different from Slow Mountaineering I find myself wondering …

The irresistible rise of the mountain clubbists

By convention, Japanese alpinism started on 17 August 1902, when two salarymen from Tokyo scaled Yari-ga-take, a 3,180-metre peak in what would soon be rebranded as the Northern Japan Alps. Three years later, after a nudge from the mountaineering missionary Walter Weston, one of the salarymen – Kojima Usui – went on to found an alpine club, the first in Japan and all of Asia.

 A Sangaku-kai party on the Ushiro-Tateyama traverse in 1910

It’s a compelling story and true as far as it goes. But how does it correspond with what actually happened? When writing history, it is always wise to heed Mark Twain: “In the real world,” he jibed, ”nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.”

And, indeed, some of the facts in the first paragraph do need to be kick-tested. First, Kojima Usui was surely not the first of Japan’s new middle-class town-dwellers to inspect the future Japan Alps. For instance, we learn from Japan’s most famous mountain book that Kōno Toshizō and Okada Kunimatsu made the first recorded ascent of Shirouma (2,932 metres) as early as 1898.

And, in the same year, students at the Fourth Higher Normal School – the forerunner of today’s Kanazawa University – formed a “travel club” (旅行部). This, somewhat subversively, the scientist and alpine historian Matsumoto Yukio deems to be the first club convened in Japan to undertake mountain activities.

Student alpinists: members of the Matsumoto High School
mountaineering club, founded in 1920

All this means that, when Kojima Usui and his colleagues did found their own alpine club, in October 1905, they found a receptive audience. Within a year, the new club had several hundred members, including a good cross section of Tokyo’s cultural and scientific elite. The latter made themselves prominent in the articles published in the first edition of “Sangaku”, the club’s journal, which included articles by Ogawa Takuji, Yamasaki Naomasa, Tanaka Akamaro and Takeda Hisayoshi.

Founded on the model of Britain’s Alpine Club, its Japanese counterpart started out simply as the “Sangaku-kai” (‘Mountain Club’). But, in early 1909, it shifted to its current name of “Nihon Sangaku-kai”, which is usually Englished as the “Japanese Alpine Club”.

Meanwhile, mountain clubs were mushrooming all over the realm. Some of the more eminent ones were the Hida Sangaku-kai in 1908, the Nagoya Aizankai in 1909, the Kobe Sōai-kai in 1910, the Shinano Sangaku-kai in 1911, the Hokkaidō University Ski Club in 1912, and a “mountain club” at the Tokyo Dai-ichi High School in 1913 that almost immediately morphed into a “travel club”. It was with this same club, as an “Ikkō” student in the 1920s, that Fukada Kyūya, the future Hyakumeizan author, gained some early mountaineering experience.

The Dai-Ichi High School students before setting out
from Nakabusa Onsen in July 1913

In its very first year, the Dai-ichi High School’s mountain club was involved in a celebrated incident. Between 20 July and 8 August 1913, some forty of its members, mustered into four groups, traversed the high ridges from Nakabusa Onsen via Tsubakuro and Yari-ga-take to Kamikōchi – a route pioneered only a few years before by Kojima Usui himself.

The fourth group, led by one Oki Misao, came down into Kamikōchi on 4 August, then climbed Yake-dake and Mae-Hodaka on the next two days. On the evening of the 6th, understandably ebullient with their haul of peaks and passes, they settled down to a celebratory “kompa” in their lodging house at Kamikōchi.

The students had just launched, uproariously, into their school song when a knock was heard at the door. And there stood a one-eyed foreigner, who addressed the company in clear if somewhat unidiomatic Japanese: “My wife and I would like to go climbing tomorrow. We all love the mountains. But would you kindly pipe down.”

Mr and Mrs Weston with the Dai-Ichi High School
mountaineering club, Kamikochi, August 1913

No hard feelings ensued from this symbolic collision between the alpine pioneer and the new Taishō era of mass mountaineering. Next morning, the students lined up at the Kappa-bashi bridge, together with the Westons, for a group photograph. And, via the travel club’s yearbook, the same photo was transmitted down the generations to the alpine historian Matsumoto Yukio, the grandson of one of the students lined up at Kappa-bashi on that August day in Taishō 2…

References

Okubo Masahiro, Horiguchi Mankichi and Matsumoto Yukio, Nihon no Shizen Colour Series, Nihon no Yama, Heibonsha, 1988.

All images are from 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)

“Tozan-shi” (1): the golden age

An outline history of mountaineering in Japan – the early years

Japanese alpinism was born on 17 August 1902. This was the day when two Tokyo salarymen scrambled to the top of Yari-ga-take, a 3,180-metre peak in what one of them would soon rebrand as the “Northern Japanese Alps”. 

Kojima Usui, founder of the Japanese Alpine Club

Nothing much was novel about climbing a high mountain in Japan – pilgrims, hunters and even tourists had been doing that for centuries. Only the motivation was unusual. One of the salarymen, a young bank clerk named Kojima Usui, put it like this: 

I had long thought of climbing Yari-ga-take.

Why was this?

Because Yari is high, Yari is sharp, and Yari is steep.

These were the words with which Kojima started his “Inspection of Yari-ga-take” (鎗ヶ嶽探検記), a nine-part write-up that ran in Bunko, a literary journal he helped to edit. Readers may have sensed a modern vibe – to climb a mountain simply because it is there. 

A year later, Kojima and his climbing companion, Okano Kinjirō, were invited to tea with Walter Weston, an English missionary who had also climbed Yari. This meeting sowed in Kojima’s mind the idea of forming a Japanese alpine club. With help from his growing circle of friends, this association came into existence as the Sangaku-kai (“Alpine Club”) in October 1905 – it added “Japanese” to its name some years later.

Japan’s newly affluent middle classes had already started fanning out into the mountains for recreation. As early as 1898, for example, Kanazawa’s Fourth High School established a “travel club” (ryokō-bu) to organise excursions into the nearby hills. And in the same year, Kōno Toshizō and Okada Kunimatsu made the first recorded Japanese ascent of Shirouma-dake (2,933 metres). 

Like any mountaineering club, the Japanese Alpine Club brought like-minded people together, some hundreds of them in just its first year. And like many another new institution in Meiji Japan, it sought to imbue its members with a sense of modernising purpose: 

The poets Byron and Wordsworth, and other great scholars such as Tyndall and Humboldt, went climbing in the Alps, and forty-nine years ago, the British Alpine Club was founded. In this way, the mountains have become a new frontier, a place to exercise noble spirits, firmness of will, and strength of body and mind.

These words appeared in the first edition of Sangaku, the new club’s journal. This too was patterned on an English model, that of the Alpine Club’s Alpine Journal, a copy of which Weston had shown to Kojima at their fateful tea party.

Now opened what Kojima termed “Japan’s golden age of mountain exploration”. In 1906, the year after the Sangakukai was formed, Kojima led a party over the ridges between Tsubakuro, Jōnen and Chō-ga-dake in the Northern Alps. One of their aims was to verify that a mountain called Otenshō-dake really existed. 

For accurate maps had yet to be published, although the Army surveyors were busy doing the groundwork. Thus, mountain travel was still spiced with the tang of exploration. In writing up this trip, Kojima was the first to use the word “jūsō” (縦走) to describe a long traverse across high ridges, now a standard term in the Japanese hiking lexicon.

There was even a golden year within the golden age. According to Kojima, this was the exceptionally productive season of 1909. In July, Sangaku-kai members climbed rugged Tsurugi, a first for amateur mountaineers. On the summit, they found the survey marker erected two years previously by the Army surveyors.

Such encounters were frequent, given that all of Japan’s high mountains had been climbed before. So there was base alloy in this golden age. Kojima had borrowed the term from the early European alpinists, who’d fought their way to the top of icy unclimbed peaks. In Japan’s golden age, by contrast, there were no first ascents left to do. 

Still a golden age is what you make of it. In the same memorable summer, Udono Masao, a civil servant on leave from Korea, achieved what was almost certainly the first crossing of the Dai-Kiretto. No monk or Army surveyor had ever ventured onto this bracingly exposed ridge between Kita-Hodaka and Minami-dake in the Northern Alps.

This age of exploration lasted until the century’s mid-teens. That was when the Army surveyors finished publishing their 1:50,000-scale maps of Honshū’s remotest mountains, stripping them of their mystery. Kojima’s very own golden age ended in 1915, when his bank posted him to its Los Angeles office. By the time he returned, in 1927, Japanese mountaineering would be utterly transformed.

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.

"No part of the country in so primeval a state"

Climbing Yari-ga-take in 1884 with Ernest Satow and Albert Hawes

Shimashima (accommodation at the Tsu-un Kwai-sha): Yari-ga-take (' Spear Peak') can be most conveniently ascended from this village. The way, a mere mountain path, strikes up the narrow wooded gorge of a torrent, crossing and recrossing it many times by log bridges. Here and there the bottom of the gorge being too narrow for both torrent and path, the latter is carried along platforms of small fir logs supported on struts above the stream.

View of Yari-ga-take
Woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi (1876-1950)

Occasionally very picturesque spots occur, where rugged precipices of rock dotted with creepers and sparsely perched trees, rise from the boulder-strewn ravine. After a distance of 3 1/2 or 4 ri the road rises steeply up a pass, leading now and then through dense growths of bamboo grass and beds of a stinging-nettle which greatly impede progress.

The top of the pass is 7,000 ft. above the sea level, but high forest-covered mountains prevent a view from being obtained, excepting to the N., and here it is limited to the fine snow peak of Mio-jin-dake, seen just across the valley, and at whose foot the sleeping hut is situated. On the other side of this pass the landscape becomes more extended, and Jo-nen-dake comes in view, while just below, the Adzusagawa, even here a large torrent, is seen rushing in several streams over its wide bed.

At various points there are traces of an old road, along which in former days considerable traffic crossed this pass to Yamada and thence to Takayama. Descending to the torrent, some time is generally lost in finding suitable places for fording it, especially in July, when the snows are melting freely.

The sleeping-hut stands on the bank of a small stream, and is reached immediately after crossing (elevation 4,950 ft.) It is about 7 or 8 hrs. walking distance from Shimashima, but is rather too far from Yari-ga-take for a convenient ascent and descent on the same day; that at the base of the mountain, 3 ri further on (Miyagawa no Koya) is the best starting point, but it is difficult to reach in one day from Shimashima unless the baggage be sent on in front.

The traveller should start from here at daybreak, and in addition to the guide, should take with him a strong coolie to carry him across the torrent, which has to be forded many times, occasionally in places almost waist-deep.

The route for about 3 hrs. lies alternately up one side or the other of the bed or banks of this torrent: on the left, fine, steep, craggy granitic mountains rise to a height of 7,000-8,000 ft., but on the right are tamer wooded hills. Grand mountains are these precipitous masses of granite, surpassing in wildness any to be seen elsewhere in Japan, their curiously steep forms being not unlike some of the ideal crags depicted by Chinese artists.

Perhaps there is no part of the country in so truly a primeval state (with the exception of some parts of Yamato) than this torrent valley in the heart of the Shinano-Hida range, hunters seeking bears and the sheep-faced antelope or lesser game, being its sole frequenters.

Yari-ga-take is still not yet seen, but now the path strikes up a tributary gorge to the left, and passing the second hut, leads up the mountain through a forest. At an elevation of 6,400 ft. a rude shed called Akasaka no Iwa-goya, a camping-place for hunters, is passed, and just above here the forest ceases, and the first snow-field is crossed.

Hence the road lies mostly over snow, but just below the summit, between the peaks, the route winds up and among huge bare masses of rock piled in indescribable confusion. From the irregular resting of some of these crags, so called 'caves' are formed, and in these hunters take up their quarters whilst watching for bears. Ptarmigan are common here.

Hence, a stiff climb up snow and over debris and a rather dangerous scramble up one side of the peak, land the traveller on a table of a few square yards of rock, the top of the 'spear' of the mountain. From the Miyagawa sleeping-hut to the summit is said to be 6 ri. The ascent can be accomplished in 7 hrs. and the descent in 4 hrs.

The peak of Yari-ga-take consists of a hard weather-resisting brecciated porphyry, which is traversed by numerous foliated siliceous bands inclined at high angles and frequently contorted. To this hard rock it owes its height, and to the siliceous bands its jagged spear-like form.

Beyond Shimashima the road recrosses the stream, which is here lined with willow-trees, and passing through a pleasant grove of red pines, emerges on to the Matsumoto plain. At Niimura (accommodation at the Tsu-un Kwai-sha) kuruma can sometimes be obtained. The road is practicable for them all the way, even from Shimashima, were there any to be had.

References

Excerpted from Ernest Mason Satow, CMG, and Lieutenant A G S Hawes, A Handbook for Travellers in Central & Northern Japan: Being a Guide to Tōkiō, Kiōto, Ōzaka and Other Cities; the Most Interesting Parts of the Main Island Between Kōbe and Awomori, with Ascents of the Principal Mountains, and Descriptions of Temples, Historical Notes and Legends, London, John Murray, 1884 edition.

This route description may have helped to foment the first stirrings of modern alpinism in Japan. Shiga Shigetaka (1863-1927) is thought to have drawn on it in writing the chapter on mountaineering in his Theory of the Japanese Landscape (Nihon Fūkeiron), which appeared in October 1894. It was this book - and specifically this chapter - that inspired the young banker and journalist Kojima Usui to climb Yari-ga-take in 1902. This adventure led to Kojima's meeting, the following year, with the mountaineering missionary Walter Weston, who first suggested to him the idea of a Japanese Alpine Club. The rest, as they say, is history ...

Masters of the silver age (2)

Continued: How Japan's mountain photographers ventured into the Himalaya 

Ishizaki Koyo

Meanwhile, Japan’s mountain photographers were venturing abroad. Two, indeed, reached the Himalaya more than a decade before the country’s alpinists did.

Ishizaki Kōyō (1884-1947) is remembered today mainly for his delicate paintings in a traditional style, but his photography too was accomplished.
He started climbing mountains when he went up to Kyoto to study art, joining the Japanese Alpine Club in 1908.

It was Ishizaki who took the summit photo when, the following year, JAC members made the second ascent of Tsurugi in modern times, following in the footsteps of the Army surveyors two years before.

Summiting Tsurugi in 1909: photo by Ishizaki Koyo

In 1916, Ishizaki travelled to India with the aim of visiting sites associated with the Buddha. In Kashmir, he climbed Mahadev Peak (3,966 metres). Some of the resulting prints are hand-tinted, colour film being in its infancy.

Scene on Mahadev Peak, hand-tinted print by Ishizaki Koyo

Another Himalayan traveller, Hasegawa Denjirō (1894-1976), earned his living as a furniture designer, numbering the Imperial court among his clients.

Hasegawa Denjiro

He was successful enough to take what would now be called a long sabbatical. In 1927, he traversed the Himalaya into Tibet and photographed the holy mountain of Kailash. Returning via Kashmir, he did the same for Nanga Parbat. A collection of these photos was published in 1932 as A Himalayan journey.

The holy mountain of Kailash, by Hasegawa Denjiro

At home, the promulgation of the national parks from 1931 onwards opened up a new market for travel and scenic photography. Two noted landscape photographers of this era were Okada Kōyō and Yamada Ōsui.

Okada Koyo at work

In later life, Okada earned himself the nickname of “Fuji no Kōyō” for his devotion to the iconic volcano. One of his images provided the basis for the elegant engraving of Mt Fuji on the old 500 yen note (you can visit the mountain where the photo was taken over on Ridgeline Images) . Illustrations were also in demand from the new magazines starting to spring up from the late Taishō years. Asahi Camera appeared in 1926, followed by Japan’s first mountaineering monthly, Yama-to-Keikoku, in 1930.

Two views of Mt Fuji, by Okada Koyo

By now, photography had a mass following, thanks to light and convenient 4 x 6.5 format cameras with eight frames on a roll of film. In 1936, a “Camera Hiking Club” or CHC was founded in the Tokyo Shitamachi quarter. Photographers associated with this organisation included Funakoshi Yoshibumi, Miura Keizō, known for his skiing photography, and Kazami Takehide (1914-2003), who joined the CHC in 1936.

In 1939, Kazami, Funakoshi and other CHC members founded the Tokyo Mountain Photography Association, which morphed into the Japan Mountain Photography Association (日本山岳写真協会) in 1947 to reflect its increasingly national membership. Kazami’s career spanned a remarkable sixty years. He served in the Imperial Navy during the war, as a photographer. After being repatriated from New Guinea in 1946, he set up a photographic supplies shop in the Ginza. Etude of Alps, his first photo collection, was published in 1953, followed by Going to the mountains (山を行く) in 1957.

Pages from Kazami Takehide's "Going to the mountains"

The Alps, whether Japanese or European, were not enough for Kazami. In 1958, he accompanied Fukada Kyūya, the soon-to-be Hyakameizan author, and two other mountaineers on an expedition to the Jugal Himal. Their objective was the Big White Peak (7,083m), so-called by three Scottish lady climbers. They didn’t get up it, but Kazami achieved the expedition’s high point on the east ridge by taking turns to break trail with a Sherpa companion. There the brown plains of Tibet were glimpsed through the clouds.

The Big White Peak expedition team:
Kazami Takehide (on the right), next to Fukada Kyuya

Kazami’s first visit to the Himalaya resulted in two books, the expedition journal, for which Fukada wrote the text, and a photo collection on the Jugal Himal. Nepal must have appealed to Kazami; he went back there in 1960, the year he closed his shop and went fully professional as a photographer. His photo collection on Nepal’s mountains and its people was translated into English. After half a century, Japan’s Himalayan photographers had started to gain an international reputation.

Senjogahara, by Hasegawa Denjiro

Next: into the age of colour.