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.

Tozan-shi (5) – Japan discovers the Alps

Among Japan’s earliest emissaries to Europe, who was the first to see the Alps? Was it Kurimoto Jōun (1822-1897), who stayed in Bern and crossed the Mont Cenis Pass while travelling on a diplomatic mission in 1867. Or, as Ohmori Hisao speculates, could it have been the four youths sent to Italy by a Christian daimyō in the tenth year of Tenshō (1582), who might just have glimpsed the distant Dolomites from some high tower in Venice?

Men in black: Kaga Shotaro and his guide on the Jungfrau, 1910

To mountaineers, the question is moot. For, alpinistically speaking, Japan’s discovery of the Alps had to await its first mountaineering boom, which took off in the Taishō era (1912-1926). True, Kaga Shōtarō (1888-1954), had scraped in at the very end of Emperor Meiji’s reign, when he made his guided climb of the Jungfrau in 1910, but it took a few more years for real momentum to gather.

Although Kaga was the first of his countrymen to summit a Swiss four-thousander, he was more tourist than alpinist – while holidaying in Switzerland, he was supposed to be attending an international exhibition in London, and he dropped his newly purchased ice-axe into the river at Lucerne before he even got to the mountain. But his feat found a ready audience at home, and a report duly appeared in Sangaku, the Japanese Alpine Club’s house journal.

View of the Bernese Oberland by Tsujimura Isuke

One who heard Kaga’s message, and at first hand, was the botanist and writer Tsujimura Isuke (1886-1923). In January 1914, Tsujimura made guided climbs of both the Mönch and the Jungfrau, thus making the first Japanese winter ascents of any Swiss four-thousanders. In an echo of Japan’s mountaineering past, Tsujimura’s party found Walter Weston’s business card tucked into the guest book at the Bergli Hut.

On the heels of these triumphs, nemesis followed. On the way down the aptly named Schreckhorn, Tsujimura’s party was avalanched. But he got to marry Rosa, the kind nurse who had looked after him in hospital. And the accident also made good copy for his fluently penned Swiss Diary (スウィス日記), which in turn promoted the Alps to the up-and-coming generation. “It was the Swiss Diary that taught me what the Alps were about,” wrote Matsukata Saburō (1899-1973), “and what beautiful realms of nature and human emotions are to be found there.”

Tsujimura Isuke

In the event, it was Maki “Yūkō” Aritsune (1894-1989), the son of a newspaper proprietor, who got there first. Arriving in England, nominally to study, he wasted no time in heading for Switzerland and making the first Japanese ascent of the Matterhorn, in August 1921. In September, he and a trio of elite guides from Grindelwald followed this up with the first ascent – by anybody – of the Eiger’s Mittellegi ridge.

In the same summer, the diplomat Hidaka Shinrokurō (1893-1976) danced on the summit of Mont Blanc, after making the first Japanese ascent. Later in his career, Hidaka was the last foreign diplomat to see Benito Mussolini alive.

It was the Mittellegi climb, though, that galvanised Japan’s mountaineering world. Coached at the Keio and Gakushūin universities by Maki, who’d brought back trunkloads of climbing gear from Europe, and inspired by his example elsewhere, student climbers rapidly upped their game, undaunted by the occasional casualty.

One of Maki’s most fervent disciples was the above-quoted Matsukata Saburō. The son of a former prime minister (by his third concubine) and a graduate of Gakushūin’s High School, he went on to study economics at Kyoto University. While a student there, in July 1922, he took part in the first ascent of Yarigatake’s gnarly northern ridge, the Kitakama.

Prince Chichibu's party traverses the Matterhorn, August 1926

In 1924, Matsukata moved to Europe to study and climb. In 1925, having picked up progressive ideas under Kawakami Hajime, his sensei at Kyoto, he published a book on Marx and Engels together with Kaji Ryūichi, another economist. In the same year, he joined the Swiss Alpine Club and, by basing himself at Grindelwald’s Hotel Adler, just like Maki before him, he positioned himself to team up with Matsukata in escorting Prince Chichibu – also notionally studying abroad – on his alpine climbs in August 1926.

Boot camp: Uramatsu Samitaro

Uramatsu Samitarō (1901-1981) was another of the gilded youths who climbed in the Alps during the 1920s – for, in that era, it was very necessary to be one of the former in order to indulge in the latter. Like Matsukata, he went to Europe as a student, but ended up spending four summers and three winters (or possibly three summers and four winters) in the Alps, reaching about forty summits in all.

To traverse the Meije, one of the more difficult peaks, Uramatsu teamed up with Matsukata. They were guided by Sam Brawand, who'd climbed with Maki on the Mittellegi, and Emil Steuri from Grindelwald. An epic ensued when a thunderstorm assailed the party on the summit ridge. Unfrazzled, Uramatsu went on with Brawand and Steuri to make the first ascent of the Wetterhorn’s South-West Ridge on 24 August 1928. The route is still graded D+. This time, the weather gave them an easier time on the summit ridge. As Uramatsu recorded in the Alpine Journal:

We lighted our pipes. I felt my thought was melting away into the endless Alpine sky. The valley of Grindelwald was flooded with the midday light. Eiger, Monch and Schreckhorn were sleeping under the blue sky. I was happy to be a mountaineer.

Matsukata could not share in this adventure, as he’d already gone home to Japan, where he took up a post with the South Manchurian Railway Company. But he and Uramatsu were still willing to stick their necks out. When the League of Nations came out with its Lytton Report in 1931, criticising Japan as the aggressor in Manchuria, the climbing duo, with a cousin of Matsukata’s, hastily translated the report into Japanese, hoping to produce a version that was less likely to inflame public opinion than the official one. Alas, their efforts to change the course of history proved far more evanescent than their mountain writings, some of which have become classics.

Kagami Yoshiyuki in full flight

Then there was Kagami Yoshiyuki, who went up to Cambridge University at the age of 18. Relatively unknown in the Japanese climbing world, he engaged the Swiss guide Gottfried Perren in 1929 to put a new line up on the southeast face of Mont Maudit. This the Alpine Journal recognised as the “Kagami Route”. A few years before, he’d traversed from the Dent d’Herens to the Matterhorn in record time, and climbed two-thirds of the way up the Matterhorn north face, more than half a decade before the Schmid brothers got there. He was equally proficient in skiing and, on the ice rink, he is said to have partnered both Sonja Henie, a top skater, and the singer Josephine Baker.

As Kagami’s record suggests, the leading Japanese climbers were now as proficient as the top alpine guides. Kagami climbed without guides too, as when he teamed up with Frank Smythe, a professional mountaineer, on a cold and dangerous attempt on the Eiger’s Southwest Ridge in January 1929. “I have seldom imbibed any fluid more gratefully than the hot tea from Kagami’s thermos flask,” recorded Smythe in his account of the adventure, “A winter tussle with the ‘Ogre’”.

By this time, of course, the Alps were almost passé in the minds of the next generation of Japan’s student climbers. Inspired by the first European expeditions to the Himalaya, they were now mulling ways to follow suit. But this is another story…

References

The prime source for this post is Ohmori Hisao’s chapter “Nihonjin to Yoroppa-Arupusu” in Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka, volume 103, Taiyō Bessatsu: Nihon no kokoro, Heibonsha 1998

Uramatsu wrote up his Wetterhorn climb in the Alpine Journal, 1930 edition, pp 260 ff.

F S Smythe describes his Eiger winter attempt with “Y Kagami” in Climbs and Ski Runs: Mountaineering and Ski-ing in the Alps, Great Britain and Corsica, William Blackwood and Sons Ltd, 1931

For Matsutaka and the Lytton Report, see Ian Nish, Japan's Struggle with Internationalism, Kegan Paul, October 2000, p 182. Matsukata is quoted as follows:

Around the beginning of October 1932, we were shut up in a room in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, absorbed in the task of translating the newly-published report of the League of Nations Lytton Commission on the Manchurian Question. The nature of the report was a matter of great concern for Japan at the time, and for three days we concentrated on the work from morning to night without once leaving the hotel, feeling that it was necessary to translate the document into Japanese as accurately and speedily as possible and to publish it.

Images are from Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka 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)

“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. 

“Tozan-shi” (3): parting of the ways

An outline history of mountaineering in Japan – divergent trends in early Shōwa

Some see the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1923 as a cultural and political watershed, dividing the liberal Taishō years from the growing tribulations of the early Shōwa era. Its impact on the lives of individual mountaineers was devastating. It marked an end to the mountain holidays of Mr and Mrs Takeuchi, it tossed the prolific alpinist Matsukata Saburō out of his bedroom window, and it buried the writer-mountaineer Tsujimura Isuke and his family in the ruins of their house near Atami.

Climbers of the Rikkyo University expedition on Nanda Kot, 1936 

Yet it’s difficult to see any obvious inflection point in mountaineering developments. After the end of Taishō’s reign, in 1926, hard-core alpinists just kept on doing what they always do: tackling ever harder and steeper routes. As in Europe decades earlier, they now moved on from ridge- and gully-climbing to more demanding rock faces. 

The summer of 1930 showed how this drive for “variation routes” was shaping up. In July, Ogawa Tokio made his debut on the sheer cliffs of Tanigawa-dake . The following summer, Ogawa went on to explore the even steeper terrain of Byōbu-iwa in the Hodaka massif. Winter climbers too made strides: between 1932 and 1934, a Waseda crew climbed several ridges in Takidani on Kita-Hodaka in the snow and ice season.

In the Southern Alps, a party from Kyoto University ventured onto the face of Kita-dake Buttress in July 1929. Ritsumeikan men put up some more new routes a few years later, but a direct ascent via the classic No. 4 Ridge had to await Oyabe Zensuke and his Tokyo Shōdai team in June 1935.

The emphasis on surmounting technical difficulties did not appeal to everybody. Some called for a more appreciative approach to mountain scenery. Itō Hidegoro, a pioneer of the Hokkaidō outback, sought to define this “contemplative mountaineering” as follows:

But, to avoid any misunderstanding, I’d like to make it clear that “contemplative” doesn’t mean walking just on low hills, or easy mountaineering, nor does it signify strolling about lost in thought or meditation like some poet or philosopher … Rather it is something that, as far as possible, should affect you to the depths of your being. Through the contemporary, specific experiences of mountaineering, we seek to approach the wider realm of nature.

The wider realm of nature was already attracting city dwellers in growing hordes. Acknowledging their needs, the government promulgated a law on national parks in 1931, later designating Unzen-dake and the Inland Sea as the first two. More significantly for mountaineers, though, the Shimizu railway tunnel was completed in the same year. This meant that time-pressed salaryman alpinists could do a climb on Tanigawa-dake at the weekend and still get back to Tokyo by Monday morning. 

The best-known salaryman climber was probably a young draughtsman who worked at the Mitsubishi marine diesel factory in Kobe. By the early 1930s, Katō Buntarō had made a nationwide name for himself as a winter soloist, mainly in the Northern Alps. In 1934, however, he started climbing with a partner. This, Fujiki Kuzō suggested, was because he had set his sights on a Himalayan expedition. 

If so, he was not the only one. After entering Kyoto University, the former stalwarts of the city’s Third High School set up the Academic Alpine Club of Kyoto. Their aim was specifically to pursue Himalayan goals. 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. In the end, it was not the AACK but a Rikkyō University expedition that bagged Nanda Kot in October 1936, Japan’s first and only pre-war Himalayan summit.

This was too late for Katō Buntarō. Together with his partner, he had fallen to his death from Yari-ga-take in January that year, while attempting a midwinter traverse of the mountain’s North Ridge.  One newspaper lamented Katō’s death as the loss of a “national treasure".  If this accident felt to some like the end of an era, subsequent events more than justified their forebodings. 

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. 

“Tozan-shi” (2): Taishō alpinism

An outline history of mountaineering in Japan – mountains for all

During the early years of Emperor Taishō’s reign (1912–26), the First World War helped Japan to triple its international trade. Rising prosperity fomented new ways of thinking. A professor at Tokyo Imperial University coined the phrase “Taishō democracy” to describe a new spirit of political liberalisation. 

Japan's first mountaineering boom took place in the Taisho years
(Photo by courtesy of Hakuba Guides)

The academicians also took a leading role in what might be called “Taishō alpinism”. Kyoto’s Third High School established a mountaineering club in 1913, and other national high schools followed suit within the next few years.  Among the first universities to do so, Kyoto Imperial University and Keio both formed alpine clubs in 1915. 

It was a Keio man, Maki “Yūkō” Aritsune, who instigated the first ascent of the Eiger’s Mittelegi Ridge in Switzerland in September 1921. Four years later, he went on to make the first ascent of Mt Alberta in the Canadian Rockies, accompanied by five Japanese companions and three Swiss guides.

Galvanised by Maki’s example, student climbers were quick to explore steep terrain. Yari-ga-take’s rugged Kitakama ridge was first climbed in July 1922, by rival parties from the Waseda and Gakushūin university clubs, both founded two years previously. Practically every institute of higher education had a mountaineering club by the reign’s end.

Soon the students had company in the mountains. Regional mountaineering clubs for ordinary citizens were springing up all over Japan. Among the earliest was the Kobe Waraji (Straw Sandal) Club, founded in 1910, which later morphed into the Kobe Walking Society or KWS (神戸徒歩会). Its journal went by the name of “Pedestrian”, spelling out the English word in katakana.

Pedestrianism was not enough for Fujiki Kuzō. Inspired possibly by watching foreign friends scrambling on outcrops of Mt Rokko, the Kobe-based journalist set out to pursue steep, technical climbing. In 1924, he and other colleagues from the KWS founded the Rock Climbing Club. The concept was so new in Japan that it could only be rendered in katakana English. Thus the club’s name in Japanese is, quite simply, the ロック・クライミング・クラブ or RCC.

The following year, Fujiki published a manual on climbing techniques and, in August 1925, led an epoch-making trip to Takidani, a system of cliffs and gullies in the Hodaka massif. Symbolic of an emerging rivalry between town and gown, his party vied with a Waseda team for the honour of this first ascent. 

Meanwhile, the winter mountains beckoned. The first skis in Japan may have been imported by Matsukawa Toshitane, an army captain, as early as 1895. However, few of his countrymen learned how to use them until 1911, when Major Theodor von Lerch, an exchange officer from Austria, started to teach modern skiing techniques to his host army regiment up in snowy Tohoku.

After that, progress was rapid: the army’s first ski-tour, on Nambuyama (1,700 metres) near Takada, took place on 12 February 1911. And a week later, the country’s first ski club for civilians was founded, with von Lerch and Field Marshal Nogi Maresuke as honorary members. By the following year, the club had attracted 6,000 members.

Student climbers started to ski into winter climbs. A notable pioneer was Itakura Katsunobu, who melded skiing, rock- and ice-climbing into a new style of “dynamic mountaineering” – which he demonstrated in 1919 with a solo winter ascent of Yarigatake. His meteoric career burned out in January 1924, when he perished on a winter expedition on Tateyama led by Maki Yūkō.

Accidents were inevitable as more people pushed into the mountains. When four Tokyo University students died of exposure in the Chichibu mountains in July 1916, the ensuing media ruckus prompted a government agency to issue a forty-page leaflet of advice to tyro mountaineers. 

Better infrastructure and training were on the way. Now that maps for all of Honshū’s high mountains were available, guidebooks followed, some of them issued by hotel associations, railway companies and even the railway ministry itself. Climbing kit and clothing started to be manufactured in Japan, for sale in specialised outfitters.

Guiding too became a profession. As early as 1906, Kojima Usui had called for guides to be certified on the European model. In 1917, the first guiding association was founded, in Shinano Ōmachi, albeit not quite on the European model. More associations followed in the next few years, covering both the Northern and Southern Alps.

The first mountain huts opened, one in Yarizawa in 1917 and another under Jōnen-dake in 1918. As huts proliferated, so did properly made-up mountain paths. In 1916, the new trail that led upriver from Kamikōchi was deemed significant enough to be opened by a member of the imperial house.
 
After presiding over that ceremony, Prince Higashikuni then took the chance to climb Yari-ga-take. In doing so, he set the ultimate seal of approval on the new sport of alpinism, as first promulgated by Kojima Usui on the same peak just fourteen years earlier. 

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. 

“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.