Mountaineering in Japan (2): "rocking to and fro"

Continued: Walter Weston's guide to alpine activities in Japan during the 1930s.

Flora: The flora of the Japanese Alpine regions is rich and varied, especially in the Northern mountains, with magnificent cryptomeria, various cypresses, giant birch, beeches, maples, oaks, &c.

The profusion and variety of Alpine flowers are of great beauty and interest. The most noticeable districts are: in the North Shirouma (Ō Renge) and Goshiki-ga-hara, near Tateyama Onsen and in the South, Kita-dake and Senjo-dake. At 9,000 feet may be seen Cyprepedium yatabeanum and the great purple C. Macranthon. Potentilla gelida is found on most of the highest summits, up to 10,500 feet; the splendid Shortia uniflora, a dark lily, Fritillarius kamschatensis, and the most magnificent Aquilegia akitensis at 10,000 feet. The Japanese soldanella has a far great range than the ordinary Alpine one, from 3,000 to 10,000 feet, both north and south.

Fauna: Of the fauna one sometimes comes across a large black bear, and chamois, this of less attractive build than the European variety. The golden eagle, the gorgeous copper pheasant in the lower forests, and nightingale are found, with absurdly tame ptarmigan on the higher ridges. In the clear streams of the granite ranges several varieties of trout are plentiful.

Fuji-San from Lake Yamanaka
Illustration from Walter Weston, The Playground of the Far East.

Fuji, Fuji-San, Fuji-yama, or (in poetry) Fuji-no-yama, although not geographically belonging to the mountain groups known as the Japanese Alps, occupies, as a mountain peak, such a unique position orographically, that in every sense it stands by itself in a land of mountains.

It rises, about 50 miles west of Yokohama, in one unbroken sweep from the shores of the Pacific Ocean to a height of some 12,395 feet, nearly 3,000 feet higher than any other peak in Japan proper, and overtopping all hills in its neighbourhood by upwards of 10,000 feet.

The ascent, in summer, presents no difficulty, as on each of the four recognized routes there are a number of huts used by pilgrim and others, at which simple accommodation may be had; the slope never exceeds 35 degrees and in some cases motor or other vehicles ply up to a height of 6,000 feet or over, through the forests or beyond.

The routes mentioned are Yoshida, N.E., Subashiri and Gotemba, nearly parallel, E.; Omiya, S.W. The first three are most convenient for travellers from Yokohama and Tokyo, while Omiya is mostly used by pilgrims starting from the famous shrine after which it is named, and is better situated for those coming from the direction of Kobe and Kyoto. It offers more shade than other routes, and it is a good plan to ascend by this and to cross the mountain so as to descend to Yoshida or Gotemba. In the cases of all these points there is communication with the railway (Tokaido line) by means of motors or buses.

An average time for the ascent will vary from eight to ten hours. An interesting walk midway to the summit is the Chūdō-meguri, the "circuit half-way up," the track passing round the mountain at a height varying between 6,500 and 9,500 feet. It is best taken by going to the left westwards, from about the 6th hut on the Gotemba route.

Guides or porters, belonging to guilds which have headquarters at the starting points named, can be engaged in advance, at a specified fee of $4 or so for the whole trip. There is also a small regular charge for a night's lodging when needed at the huts, but food should be taken by the traveller, though Japanese tea is always procurable.

Fuji can also be climbed outside the summer months, but for this special arrangements must be made. In good spring weather, when the mountain is but half-covered with snow, the ascent is full of interest and charm, and offers no particular difficulty to an experienced mountaineer.

In winter it is a more serious undertaking, and is best taken from Yoshida, although it can be done from other points. Proper Alpine outfit is indispensable, and ample food is needed. The weather is apt to be variable, few huts are open, and no skilled guides, as such, are available.

The ascent of Fuji in winter is essentially one regarding which the advice of the Japanese Alpine Club should be sought. A certain amount of winter skiing is to be had, usually, on the lower slopes.

Since the "Alpine" regions of Japan were introduced to the notice of the mountaineering world, chiefly by "foreign" mountaineers some forty years ago, radical and far-reaching changes have taken place. Mountaineering as a recreation has become perhaps the most popular of outdoor sports, and the youth of Japan has welcomed it with characteristic energy and thoroughness. Among its most active adherents are members of the Imperial Family, of whom Prince Chichibu has done excellent work in the European Alps, both in summer and in winter. The native enterprise has shown itself in the opening up of new routes, the provision of climbers' huts, the training and organization of guides, and in the improvement of the maps of special districts. In the whole "Alpine" region there are over 150 huts where previously none existed beyond a few scattered shelters mainly used by the staff of the Imperial Forestry Bureau, or by hunters and fishermen.

The Japanese Alpine Club: the Japanese Alpine Club, largely managed by climbers of experience in Europe and the Canadian Rocky Mountains, has a membership of some 800, while nearly all the principal universities and many of the larger high schools, have, like Oxford and Cambridge, mountaineering clubs of their own.

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of the J.A.C. is the publication of a handbook for climbers, on the lines of a well-known Swiss model, entitled Yama Nikki ("a Mountain Diary"), probably the most thoroughly complete volume of its kind in existence. The information it contains as to routes, huts, the addresses of the various guides associations, equipment, &c., are full and invaluable, as are its important counsels on the varying conditions and differences of summer and winter climbing respectively. All the principal skiing localities, of which there are many, are indicated, and the necessary precautions to be adopted in procuring the use of the huts in them. While many of the summer routes lie mainly in the valleys, these are usually to be avoided in the winter owing to the danger of avalanches. It is unfortunate that this invaluable volume is printed only in Japanese, but the information it contains should by all means be consulted with the aid of one competent to read and to translate its contents. The officials of the Club are always most ready to assist fellow-mountaineers in every way. The Department of Imperial Railways itself organizes lectures and other means of popularizing mountaineering travels, and at the Central Railway Station in Tokyo may be found the headquarters of the Japanese Tourist Bureau (J.T.B.) which offers exceedingly useful information regarding travel transport, &c., all over the country.

The headquarters of the Japanese Alpine Club (in Japanese, Nihon Sangaku Kai) are 307 Fujiya Building, Kotohiracho, Shiba ku, Tokyo.

Apart from Fuji-San, there are fifteen peaks in Japan proper of 10,000 feet or over, while six others vary from 9,879 feet up to 9,950 feet. The altitudes here to be mentioned are based on the Survey of the General Staff of the Japanese Army, as revised in 1932 and found in the Yama Nikki ("Mountain Diary") of the J.A.C.

With regard to the height of Fuji-San, and perhaps also some other quiescent volcanoes, Professor John Milne, in his illustrated monograph on the mountain, has suggested that owing to the contraction of the eviscerated crater on the summit and other causes the actual height may vary slightly from time to time. His observations during a stay of ten days on the top of Fuji-san showed that during prolonged and excessive wind the upper part showed quite definite signs of rocking to and fro. This phenomenon is familiar to lighthouse keepers under such conditions in very exposed situations.

In now giving the details of mountain routes in the principal ranges of the Japanese Alps it should be pointed out that as three-fourths or four-fifths of the area of the country is composed of mountains and hills, it is only possible to deal with a selection of some of the most representative and interesting expeditions.

References

From Walter Weston's chapter on “Japan”, in Sydney Spencer (editor), Mountaineering: The Lonsdale Library Volume XVIII, London: Seeley Service & Co, 1934.

Tales of past and present (4)

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

Among the many foreigners to fall under Mt Fuji's spell, Frederick Starr (1858–1933) may have been the most enigmatic. Starr was a lecturer and professor at the University of Chicago for more than thirty years. 

Frederick Starr

As an anthropologist and ethnographer, he first came to Japan in 1904 because he’d taken an interest in the Ainu. In addition to studying them, however, he wrote up a short biography (1916) of Matsuura Takeshirō, who explored Ezo (now Hokkaidō) in the mid-nineteenth century.

During subsequent Japan trips, Starr started collecting charms (ofuda) and votive slips (senjafuda or nōsatsu). This earned him the nickname of Ofuda-Hakase (お札博士). It also led him to Mt Fuji. He walked around its foot in 1913, climbed to the summit in 1917 and 1919, and in the same year walked the Ochūdo-meguri – all this in the cotton robes of a pilgrim.

In 1924, Starr published his book, Fujiyama: The Sacred Mountain of Japan – even now, this is one of the few full-length books about Mt Fuji by a foreign author. In the frontispiece photo, we see him with Shibata Reiichi (1840–1920), the twelfth leader of Shintō Jikkōkyō, a Fuji-centred sect which traces its origins back to Fujidō, founded by Hasegawa Kakugyō (1541–1646). 

Frederick Starr with Shibata Reiichi.
Illustration from Fujiyama.

This suggests that Starr went to considerable efforts to research his book, which aimed to reveal “an attitude of mind” towards Mt Fuji and perhaps all sacred mountains. But the book is dedicated not to Shibata but to Sogabe Ikko. 

Portrait of Sogabe Ikko.
Illustration from Fujiyama.

Sogabe had guided Starr on all his ascents of Mt Fuji – the two had met at a study group, the Nōsatsu-kai. Sogabe loved Mt Fuji and had climbed it almost a hundred times, we are told, and he probably provided Starr with some of his more unique material. Sogabe had started writing his own book on Mt Fuji in 1919, with a view to summing up his lifelong researches into the mountain.

"Lake Gamanaka (sic) seen through the rift in clouds".
Illustration and original caption from Fujiyama.

Sogabe was generous with this knowledge. On August 31, 1923 he called on Starr, saying that he would like to show his manuscript to Starr. They agreed to meet again a month later and spend the whole day poring over Sogabe’s manuscript.

That meeting never took place: on September 1, the great earthquake destroyed Sogabe’s house along with most of Tokyo and Yokohama. Sogabe was burned to death while trying to rescue his manuscript from the fire that ensued. 

Monument to Frederick Starr, Mt Fuji Subashiri Route.

Starr survived the earthquake, his hotel in Yokohama having survived the initial shock, and lived on until 1933. There is a monument to him above the Sengen Shrine on the Mt Fuji Subashiri route. Yet so many questions remain unanswered. Who was Sogabe? What kind of a book was he trying to write? And should we see Fujiyama as an attempt by Starr to rescue something of Sogabe's legacy?

(Continued)

Endpapers of Frederick Starr's Fujiyama.

Tales of past and present (3)

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

Of course, clubs are never the whole story – just as Kojima’s companion on Yari, Okano Kinjirō, never joined the JAC, so some foreigners had no interest in joining a club. One such lone wolf was Thomas Orde-Lees (1877–1958). 

Today we would call him an ‘adrenalin junkie’. After serving in the Royal Marines, he signed up for Shackleton’s disastrous Antarctic expedition. This sailed from London, in August 1914, just as Walter Weston was about to traverse Ōtenshō-dake.

Having survived the four-month wait to be rescued on Elephant Island, Orde-Lees joined the Balloon Corps on the Western Front. By the end of the First World War, he was an officer in the Royal Flying Corps, where he became an advocate for the use of parachutes. To prove their effectiveness, he once jumped from Tower Bridge into the River Thames.

Parachute pioneer: Orde-Lees plummets from Tower Bridge.

After the war, he came to Japan to teach parachuting techniques at the Imperial Navy’s Kasumigaura airbase. It was during this assignment that he thought of climbing Mt Fuji in winter – under the impression that he would be the first to do so. Clearly, he was ill-informed: that honour already belonged to Nonaka Itaru (1867–1955), who had reached the top as long ago as February 1895. And, very probably, other foreigners had preceded Orde-Lees too.

Like Nonaka before him, Orde-Lees failed on his first attempt, after he and a companion met with a “hurricane”. This was in January 1922. On February 10 they came back, dragging a home-made sledge made from the wreckage of a crashed aeroplane. 

Overnighting at the Tarōbō hut, they climbed the mountain on snowshoes as far as the sixth station and thereafter on home-made crampons screwed to the soles of their boots. The ice-axes came from a shop called Mimatsu at 8 yen apiece and they used parachute harness tape as a makeshift alpine rope.

Avro 504K, as cannibalised by Thomas Orde-Lees.
Image courtesy of Kovozavody Prostejov. 

The climb to the summit took twelve hours. To mark their high point, they tied to a rock near the summit hut the “aluminium foot-rest from the rudder-bar of an AVRO aeroplane …”

Avro 504K: arrow indicates the "aluminium footrest from the rudder-bar".

So there is a small mystery – has anybody ever found that “aluminium foot-rest” near the top of the Gotemba-guchi on Fuji-san? If so, I’m sure that it should be in a museum somewhere.

By the way, the account of these Fuji climbs was reprinted in Inaka vol 16, although it first appeared in the Japan Chronicle of February 19, 1922 – I doubt if Orde-Lees was a member of the MGK.

This was a somewhat frivolous digression. But there is a serious point to it. Orde-Lees’s Mt Fuji climb was a byproduct of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902–23). It was the military cooperation implicit in the Alliance that brought him to Japan. We like to think that our mountaineering floats somehow untethered above the lower world. But mountaineers are, in fact, swept along in the current of history like everybody else. 

Rock pinnacles on Myogi.
Plates from Douglas Freshfield's report on his Japan tour.
Courtesy of the Alpine Journal.

Speaking of that Alliance, between 1900 and 1923 no fewer than three of the British Alpine Club’s Presidents visited Japan, where of course the Japanese Alpine Club gave them a warm welcome. The most prominent, Douglas Freshfield (1845–1934) made a visit in October 1913 and climbed Myōgi. He too used Murray’s guidebook and consulted Walter Weston. Permit me to share some of his pictures…

(Continued)

Time to rewild Mt Fuji?

Japan's top Meizan would be less crowded if everyone started their climbs from the mountain's foot.

On March 17, the Shizuoka prefectural assembly voted to make everyone climbing Mt Fuji from the south pay a ¥4,000 fee. Starting next summer, the fee will apply to all climbers using the three trails starting on the Shizuoka side of the mountain – the Gotemba, Subashiri and Fujinomiya routes.

This brings Shizuoka into line with Yamanashi Prefecture, on the mountain’s eastern side. Yamanashi’s officials had already decided to double their existing climbing fee to ¥4,000 from the summer of 2025.

However, Shizuoka will not attempt to limit the number of climbers using its trails at any one time. By contrast, Yamanashi Prefecture seeks to limit the number of climbers on its popular Yoshida route to 4,000 climbers a day, although it’s not clear if it has yet applied this restriction in practice.

Both prefectures will attempt to deter “bullet climbers”- those who try to climb the mountain in one all-night push – by requiring climbers to have booked a hut if they start up the mountain between 2pm and 3am. Again, it’s unclear how this policy will be enforced.

If 90,000 people climb Mount Fuji from the Shizuoka side, as expected in the coming summer, the increased fee could raise just under ¥400 million, the Nikkei has reported. The money will fund staff to collect and manage the fees at each trailhead, provide multilingual guidance for tourists, and provide safety and environmental measures. But will it solve the problem of overcrowding on the mountain trails?

When Yamanashi introduced its climbing fee and other measures last year, the prefecture’s governor, Nagasaki Kotarō, said they were intended to curb “overtourism”. In the past, Nagasaki has also flirted with the idea of converting the Subaru Line road to the mountain’s fifth station into a light railway. This, he thought, would allow the authorities to better control visitor numbers.

Governor Nagasaki is probably thinking along the right lines – as a climbing fee alone is unlikely to curb visitor numbers, it might be more effective to restrict access to the mountain. But would a light railway make enough of a difference? Perhaps a more effective solution is to abolish all forms of transport – whether road or rail – to the mountain’s various fifth stations?

The aim would be to “rewild” Mt Fuji – or, at least, restore the mountain to its status before the first access road was built in 1964. Would-be climbers would then start low down the mountain – for example, at Fuji-Yoshida’s railway station (809 metres) rather than the terminus of the Subaru Line road at 2,300 metres. Or at the JR station at Fujinomiya (121 metres) rather than the Fujisan Skyline’s carpark at 2,400 metres.

You’d keep the roads, of course, but reserve them for rescue vehicles and supply trucks to the mountain huts and teahouses. A longer climb for would-be summiteers would thin the crowds, and generate new business for restored huts and teahouses further down the mountain. Meanwhile, Mt Fuji’s famous forests would get some relief from diesel fumes.

Rewilding should also solve the problem of “bullet climbing”. After all, few have the stamina to do an all-night push through more than two or even three vertical kilometres…

It would be the climbers themselves who would stand to gain most. Instead of experiencing Mt Fuji as an overcrowded, clapped-out Instagram destination, they’d start off through those dignified old-growth forests at the mountain’s base and come out above the clouds through their own efforts. Along the way, they'd rediscover the rewilded Mt Fuji as a real mountain. 

References

Asahi Shimbun (English edition), “Shizuoka joins Yamanashi to charge 4,000 yen for Mt. Fuji climb”, 18 March 2025.

Nikkei Shimbun, 静岡県、富士山入山料は4000円軸来夏から初導入, 13 December 2024.

A meizanologist's diary (83)

Meteorologist Wada Yuji
Image courtesy of Wikipedia

16 November: we’ve been summoned to Tokyo, on the early morning Kagayaki, by Wada Yūji (1859–1918). Not in person, of course, given those dates, but to take in an exhibition dedicated to him and his boss, the eminent Meiji-era meteorologist, Nakamura Kiyo’o (1855–1930).

We’re interested in these weathermen because both – but especially Wada – played a key part in the story of Nonaka Itaru and Chiyoko. This was the husband-and-wife team who survived more than two months in a small hut atop Mt Fuji in the winter of 1895 making weather measurements to within an inch of their lives. And had it not been for Wada's timely intervention, they would have burned through that last inch too.

From Yotsuya Station, we walk over to the Tokyo University of Science, where the museum is housed in a fine replica of a Meiji-era building. Nakamura Kiyo’o was the institution's second president, taking office in 1896, one year after he was appointed head of the Central Meteorological Observatory, the forerunner of today’s meteorological agency. 

It’s good that we have just taken a restorative cup of coffee at the station because we are about to get a masterclass on the art of scientific networking in mid-Meiji Japan.

It turns out that both Nakamura and Wada were students of Thomas Mendenhall (1841–1924), who came to Japan in 1878 to teach physics at Tokyo University – there they are in the commemorative class photograph below, taken probably in the same year. And both accompanied Mendenhall to Mt Fuji in the summer of 1880, when he conducted his famous gravity experiment from the summit of Japan’s highest mountain in order to “weigh the earth”.

Thomas Mendenhall and his students in Tokyo, c. 1878 (?)
Nakamura and Wada are sitting to Mendenhall's left
(Image courtesy of Thomas C. Mendenhall II via Wikipedia)

In 1895, a young dropout from pre-medical school, as Nonaka Itaru then was, visited Nakamura and Wada to discuss a preposterous scheme to overwinter on the summit of Mt Fuji. The meteorologists would probably have dismissed this madcap proposal out of hand, had not the meeting been orchestrated by the distinguished scientist Terao Hisashi (1855-1923), another of the “Mendenhall boys” and the science university’s first president. As it happened, both Terao and Nonaka were from samurai families in the old province of Chikuzen. 

So, instead of showing Nonaka Itaru the door, Wada suggested that his stay on Mt Fuji would be more productive if he took a full year’s worth of weather observations. And he further offered to lend him the instruments he would need.

From then onwards, the project was prosecuted with typical mid-Meiji verve. Itaru spent the summer building a hut, Wada helped him instal the instruments, and in October Nonaka reclimbed the mountain to start his observations. Soon afterwards, Chiyoko came up to join him, suspecting that her husband wouldn’t be able to manage on his own (where do women get these ideas, I wonder). Then things started to go horribly wrong, as detailed elsewhere on this blog …

Poster for the exhibition at the Tokyo University of Science

In the afternoon, we attend a meeting of the Fuyō Nikki no Kai. This is an association dedicated to researching the background to Nonaka Chiyoko’s eponymous “Journal of the Lotus”, which she started writing just weeks after she and her husband were rescued from their summit hut. They had in fact been carried down the mountain in a blizzard by an impromptu team of porters led by Wada Yūji himself. By now the fate of the Nonakas was so much a matter of public interest that the meteorologist later wrote a report on this episode for his ultimate superior, the Minister of Education, Marquis Saionji Kinmochi (1849-1940). 

After that, the story as often told – including here on this blog – takes a sombre turn. Itaru was never able to realise his dream of building a bigger and better weather station, perhaps because Wada was posted to Korea in 1899, depriving him of a mentor and a network. And Chiyoko died in her early fifties during the flu epidemic of 1922. But today’s meeting reminds us of Mark Twain’s jibe: “In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.”

Nonaka Itaru's storehouse built on the crater rim in 1912.
(Image source: historical report by the Mt Fuji Weather Station)

What prompts this thought is an official report which turns out to contain a rare photo of a storehouse that Nonaka Itaru commissioned to be built on Mt Fuji’s crater rim in 1912, more than a decade after he and his wife were dramatically rescued from their cramped and blizzard-wracked summit hut. The new storehouse was set up at Higashi Yasugawara, on the south-eastern side of the crater, exactly where Nonaka had once proposed to build a new and larger hut.

Three years previously, he’d built a spacious villa at Takigahara, a village at Mt. Fuji’s foot, so that future summit parties could use it as a staging post or even as an observatory when simultaneous readings were required at both the top and the foot of the mountain.

So it looks as if Itaru had both the ambition and the means to plot a return to the summit. Nor had he entirely lost contact with Wada – a photo we saw at the morning’s exhibition purports to show the two men together at a “7.5” station hut on Mt Fuji in 1912, the very same year that Nonaka built his summit storehouse.

In the end, though, it was the professionals of Japan’s meteorological service who built a more-or-less permanent weather station on the summit of Mt Fuji. Yet, when they did so, the meteorologists paid Itaru the compliment of adopting the wind-deflecting design of his storehouse for their own building. They also made use of Itaru’s storehouse itself. And they continued to treat him as an honoured guest in their new summit station. 

The full story is sometimes more complicated and nuanced than the storytellers would like to make it….

A meizanologist's diary (65)

24 March (cont), Tokyo: we come to the office of the NPO Mt Fuji Research Station for a cup of tea but find ourselves imbibing the raw materials of history. Round the table are members of the Fuyō Nikki no Kai, an association dedicated to researching the story of Nonaka Itaru (1867-1955) and his wife Chiyoko (1871-1923), who spent more than two months in the winter of 1895 taking weather measurements on the summit of Mt Fuji.

We are careful not to spill our tea. For on the grey metal office table in front of us is the manuscript of Nonaka Chiyoko’s journal, Fuyō Nikki, just as she set it down in the early months of 1896, with the couple’s high-altitude ordeal still fresh in her memory.

The manuscript of Fuyo Nikki, with editor's remarks

All of us lean in for a closer look. Despite their age, the pages show scarcely a stain or a mark – except, that is, for the scrawls of a red pen, perhaps applied by the editor of the Hōchi-shinbun, which published the journal in 17 instalments during 1896. And the paper still looks astonishingly fresh, as if Chiyoko had just laid down her brush and left the room.

Another document is more formally bound than Chiyoko’s working manuscript – and is written in a different, more cursive, hand. As Nonaka-san, the grandson of Itaru and Chiyoko explains, this is a fair copy of the newspaper articles, as personally compiled by Chiyoko’s father, Umezu Shien.

Umezu Shien's fair copy of Chiyoko's articles

Umezu must have been quietly proud of his daughter’s feat in climbing Mt Fuji unannounced and hence ensuring her husband’s survival. And as a literary man himself – he was a noh master in the entourage of one of Japan’s last daimyōs – he would have been particularly pleased that his daughter too could wield an inkbrush deftly.

We are both moved and motivated. Via various printed editions, the manuscript on the table was the starting point for Ohmori Hisao’s modern Heibonsha edition of Chiyoko’s and Itaru’s books - and the first to combine them - which in turn paves the way for the first English version of Fuyō Nikki and selections from Itaru’s Fuji-Annai (“Guide to Mt Fuji”). Please bear with us – you know these things take time. But we feel immensely privileged to have seen where everything started …

Umetsu Shien's autograph and title page

A meizanologist's diary (56)

12/13 January: many thanks to the station clerk who – after hearing me ask for a window seat on the Shinkansen’s right-hand side (“migi-gawa”) – intuits that I meant the opposite and books the seat accordingly. For, if you want a view of Fuji when heading into Tokyo on the Tōkaidō main line, it is a left-side seat that you’ll need.

Mt Fuji shows up to best advantage on a clear winter day, just as it does now. But, wait a moment, what’s with the snow? In the old days, by this time of year, the mountain was more or less flawlessly white above the fifth station. 

Early winter high on Mt Fuji, c.1992

But, right now, it looks as if you could walk up to the summit on dry ground if you picked your way carefully. Real winters are so last-century, it seems ….

Mt Fuji, Meizan of aerological science

Microplastics detected for the first time in mountaintop clouds

Researchers from Waseda and other Japanese universities have found fine particles of plastic – microplastics – in clouds, reports the Guardian. This study may be the first to have sampled clouds for this form of environmental pollution.

Using “string-type passive cloud collectors”, the scientists sniffed the air from the tops of Mt Fuji (3,778 metres) and Mt Ōyama (1,252 metres) in the nearby Tanzawa range, both mountains that figure prominently in Japan’s most famous mountain book. Samples were also collected at Tarōbō (1,302 metres), on Mt Fuji’s lower slopes.

The researchers then looked at wind trajectories to work out where the plastic particles came from. As you’d expect, the summit of Mt Fuji attracts a superior range of pollutants. This may be because the winds that blow over Ōyama and Tarōbō come mainly from China, while the top of Mt Fuji also receives airborne tribute from Southeast Asia.

The aerologists follow in a lengthy tradition. They collected their high-altitude samples at the Mount Fuji Research Station. This comprises the buildings of the old weather station, which a non-profit organisation repurposed for summer-only scientific observations in 2007. 

But the weather station itself could trace its origins back to the winter of 1895, when Nonaka Itaru and his wife Chiyoko held out for more than two months in a small hut, making weather observations at the very highest point of Mt Fuji.

In those days, of course, the clouds were entirely free of fine particles of plastic.

References

Yize Wang, Hiroshi Okochi, Yuto Tani, Hiroshi Hayami, Yukiya Minami, Naoya Katsumi, Masaki Takeuchi, Atsuyuki Sorimachi, Yusuke Fujii, Mizuo Kajino, Kouji Adachi, Yasuhiro Ishihara, Yoko Iwamoto and Yasuhiro Niida, “Airborne hydrophilic microplastics in cloud water at high altitudes and their role in cloud formation”, Environmental Chemistry Letters, August 2023.

 

“Screaming for relief”: a modest proposal for Mt Fuji

Less transport rather than more may be needed to deal with overcrowding

Only weeks have passed since this blog posted a disquisition on the century-long backstory of the funiculars, cable cars and railways proposed for Mt Fuji over the past century.

Since then, the online media have been erupting almost daily with articles about the present-day overcrowding on the mountain. Mt Fuji is “screaming for relief” says CBS; “Japan says swarms of tourists defiling sacred Mt Fuji” reports Reuters; “Is that sustainable?” asks the Japan Times, only a little less hysterically. 

To deal with the overcrowding, various nostrums are floating about. Charge a higher “peak fee” say some – at present, would-be Fuji climbers can fork over a ¥1,000 fee for “maintenance and conservation”, but only if they feel like it. Meanwhile, Nagasaki Kōtarō, the governor of Yamanashi Prefecture, would like to replace the Fuji Subaru Line roadway with a light railway, the better to control visitor numbers.

Fair enough, but Project Hyakumeizan wonders whether these worthy proposals go far enough. Supposing, he muses, all vehicles – whether buses or light railways – were prohibited on Mt Fuji, so that its suitors would climb the mountain all the way from its foot. 

From the town of Fuji-Yoshida to the top of Mt Fuji is a vertical distance of almost three vertical kilometres. Yes, visitor numbers would certainly fall. Few would make it above the fifth station. But those who did would again drink in the high-altitude serenity that befits a sacred peak.

You know, it might even be quiet enough up there to hear the mountain breathe a sigh of relief...

“Yamanashi governor proposes light rail system for Mt Fuji”

Now how’s that for timing? Just weeks after this blog published a lengthy disquisition on past plans to run a cable car or funicular up Mt Fuji, the Japan Times reports that Nagasaki Kotaro, the Governor of Yamanashi Prefecture, has revived his proposal to replace Mt Fuji’s Subaru Line road with a light railway. 

Speaking at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo on Tuesday 29 August, Nagasaki said that replacing the road with a railway would help to meet the conditions under which UNESCO designated Mt Fuji as a World Heritage site ten years ago.

A railway, Nagasaki explained, would help the authorities to better control visitor numbers at the Subaru Line fifth station, and transform it into something that blends with the natural landscape, emphasises the mountain’s spirituality and improves tourist satisfaction.

As a next step, Yamanashi prefecture will conduct a feasibility study for the light rail system and work towards informing and building consensus among stakeholders, including local residents, by the end of March 2024.

Like a fine wine, Governor Nagasaki’s plan has been maturing for a while. SoraNews reported that his plan was approved by Yamanashi officials in February 2021. 

And the plan to replace the Subaru Line road with rails has been simmering for longer still. As far back as September 2018, the Yomiuri was reporting that the Mt Fuji light railway “may become reality”.

If it does, please remember that you read it here first ....

References

Anika Osaki Exum, “Yamanashi governor proposes light rail system for Mount Fuji”, Japan Times, 29 August.

Oona McGee, “Mt Fuji railway project receives approval from Yamanashi officials”, SoraNews24, 9 February 2021.

Yomiuri Shimbun, “‘Mt. Fuji railway’ may become reality as panel to start discussion”, The Japan News/Asia News Network, 26 September 2018.

Ageing bulls

How Mt Fuji got its unique fleet of heavy-lift dozers

Sumimasen: I forgot to post on 11 August, Japan’s Mountain Day. For a blog oriented towards Japan’s mountains, this was culpable. While scrambling to catch up, I happened across a blog that did mark last year’s mountain-themed national holiday. 

How vending machines migrate to the top of Mt Fuji
(Photos courtesy of Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan)

The post came from Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan, who run the high-altitude vending machines that regale summer visitors to Mt Fuji’s crater rim. As the post explains:

Mt. Fuji was listed as a World Cultural Heritage in 2013 under the name "Fujisan, sacred place and source of artistic inspiration". This is why our vending machines are painted brown so as not to disturb the scenery.

Unlike snow ptarmigans, the brown vending machines do not turn white in winter. Instead, they migrate, returning to the lower world in August and climbing back to the 3,778-metre summit every July. This they accomplish not by flying – helicopters would cost too much – but riding on the freight deck of a converted bulldozer.

Mt Fuji’s famous “bulls”, as they are katakana’d, go back a long way. When a permanent summit weather station was established in the 1930s, the meteorologists depended on packhorses and their drivers to carry up their food and supplies. The horses could get to about 3,600 metres, struggling to go any higher in the thinning air. From there, human porters, the so-called strong men (強力), took over for the final stretch to the top.

This system endured for decades. But it reached its limits in the early 1960s, when work started on a giant weather radar for the summit station. Big Sikorsky helicopters hauled up the first batches of ready-mixed concrete, but Mt Fuji’s treacherous winds soon showed up their limits too. Large panels proved especially troublesome: when asked to sling these high-risk loads under their choppers, the pilots briefly went on strike.

Helicopters too had their limits 
(Photo from Dokiya Yukiko, Kawaru Fuji-san Sokkojo)

The solution, devised just in time to keep the building programme on schedule, was to doze a track to the top of Mt Fuji. Two-ton “bulls” pioneered the way, zig-zagging all the way up the mountain’s southern flank, and dumping their spoil into the Hoeizan crater. As the road was dug out, a team of four or five men would walk below the slowly advancing dozers, to “field” any rocks they dislodged and stop them bouncing down onto climbers or pilgrims.

A Cat from the classical age of weather station operations
(Photo from Dokiya Yukiko, Kawaru Fuji-san Sokkojo)

As the trail improved, successively heavier “bulls”, minus their blades and sporting a makeshift freight deck, could be used to freight food and supplies up the mountain. So the two-tonners gave way to three-tonners, and then to the mighty Caterpillar D4 and D5 models.

For this was surely the heroic age of the Cat. Three specially modified D8s called Pam, Colleen and Mary Ann went to Antarctica as part of America’s contribution to the International Geophysical Year in 1957-58, and a D2 was air-dropped at the South Pole, where it was supposed to dig in the new base there. Alas, the parachutes ripped away, and instead the dozer dug itself deep into the ice-sheet.

Heroic age: an IGY Cat parachutes to the South Pole
(Photo: Emil Schulthess)

But we digress. By contrast with the derring-do Down South, bull operations on Mt Fuji have been remarkably safe. This is not to say that driving one to the top of Japan’s highest mountain is without risk. According to the novelist Nitta Jirō, a bulldozer was once avalanched. And the more usual objective hazards include thunderstorms and stonefall.

One reason for the good safety record may be that the bull drivers know their mountain. It probably helped that the first of them were recruited from the ranks of the packhorse drivers (馬方), whose jobs were almost hereditary. One of these was Igura Norio, who started as a packhorse driver in 1937, and switched to the bulldozers in 1963.

Ironically, Igura records, it was thanks to the horsemen that bulldozers were introduced at all – when they used one to help construct a stable for their packhorses, it was they who discovered how well bulldozers could tackle Mt Fuji’s steep and cindery slopes. At first, the drovers-turned-bull drivers missed their amiable steeds. But, then again, the machines didn’t shy away in panic if a hiker suddenly loomed out of the fog, and nor did they collapse from high-altitude overwork.

Having done himself out of a job as leader of the packhorse drivers’ union, Igura ultimately became responsible for all supply operations to the summit weather station. And his son took over in this role until the manned weather station closed in October 2004, so ending more than seven decades of year-round human habitation on Japan’s highest summit.

Bulldozer trails on Mt Fuji, as revealed by early snowfall

The “bulls”, however, keep running. Now operated by a company called Fuji Concrete Service, they still take supplies up to the old summit weather station’s buildings, which now house atmospheric researchers during the summer months. They also deliver to the mountain huts, and take down the mail from Japan’s highest post office.

And, of course, the bulls keep Coca-Cola’s high-altitude vending machines flush with beverages. The most popular drink up there, says their purveyor, is "I LOHAS Tennensui", which consists of natural water from seven “carefully selected” water resources in Japan – including those of Daisen and Mt Aso, two of Japan’s older volcanic edifices.

So, if you ever patronise Japan’s topmost vending machines, and if you happen to raise a PET bottle of I LOHAS to your lips, please remember to toast the bulls and their drivers who hauled it up here.

References

Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan Holdings Inc, “A vending machine here!? On the top of Mt. Fuji, the highest location in Japan”, Corporate Blog, 1 August 2022.

Dokiya Yukiko (ed), Kawaru Fuji-san sokkōjo, Shumpū-sha, 2004.

Motoko Rich, “Mount Fuji’s Got Mail. A Bone-Rattling Bulldozer Ride Brings It Down”, New York Times, 13 August 2018 (as syndicated to the Seattle Times).

Nitta Jirō, Fuji Sanchō (novel), Bungei Shunjū, December 1967.

Operation Deep Freeze: 50 Years of US Air Force Airlift in Antarctica – 1956-2006, Office of History Air Mobility Command Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, October 2006.

Susono-shi Kyoiku-iinkai/Susonoshiritsu Fuji-san Shiryōkan, “Fuji-san sokkōjo: Nihon no kishō-kansoku wo sasaeta hitobito”, Tokubetsuten shiryōshū.

Funiculars on Mt Fuji (2)

Continued: could a light railway be built on Japan’s top mountain - in order to save it?

Growing international tensions put paid to the 1940 Tokyo Olympics as well as any further thoughts of building a railway on Mt Fuji. But the enthusiasm of the projectors was only briefly dampened. As early as 1946, the businessman Iwao Kōtarō (1894-1953) envisaged building a gigantic wind turbine on the summit. With blades spanning a hundred metres, this apparatus would generate power for a funicular dragged uphill by a “mole-type cable”.

Iwao’s proposal died with its protagonist. The debate, however, rumbled on. In its August 1949 edition, Yama to Keikoku, then as now Japan’s most popular mountain magazine, challenged its readers with the question “Fuji cable [car], yes or no”. Opinions were solicited from a panel of the great and good in Japan’s mountain world.

Leading off on the ‘yes’ side was Nonaka Itaru (1867-1955), who back in 1895 had won fame for himself and his wife Chiyoko by his attempt to overwinter atop Mt Fuji to make weather observations. This is what he said:

A Mt Fuji cable car was first envisaged by an Italian 50 years ago, and I thought that this would be most helpful for my winter sojourn up there. But the proposal did not come to anything, and since then there has been plenty more smoke, but no fire. The idea has always succumbed to the tyranny of practical thinking and died. And so it has been to this very day. But on this occasion, the three prefectures are working together, not contending with each other as in the past, and specific discussions are being held …

If the YamaKei feature is anything to go by, it seems that the scientific temperament generally favoured the idea of a cable car. Also lining up in support were Makino Tomitarō (1862-1957), known as the father of Japanese botany, and the distinguished geophysicist Tanakadate Aikitsu (1856-1952). Tanakadate said that, not only did he support a cable car, when the time was ripe, but he’d even toyed with the idea of getting a concession for one back in 1895-96, so that he could use it to fund Nonaka’s summit observatory.

As if to complete this triumvirate of scientific talent, Imanishi Kinji (1902-1992), the scholar-alpinist who famously challenged Darwin’s interpretation of natural selection, weighed in. Now that anybody could look down on the mountain from an aeroplane, he opined, it was “odd to keep thinking of Mt Fuji as a sacred summit”, adding that the more people who could make the ascent by cable car, the better.

By contrast, many of the literary types stood aghast. A leading opponent was Tanabe Jūji (1884-1972), the Wordsworth scholar who had let Yama to Keikoku’s founder use the title of his mountain memoir as the masthead of the new magazine. Mountains are not just about the summit view, he said. Rather, it is their general aspect that counts. And surely one could think of better places to put a cable car than Mt Fuji …

Uno Kōji (1891-1961), as one might expect from the author of a novella called Love of Mountains, was even more succinct: “As for the thought of putting a cable car up Mt Fuji, I am absolutely against it.”

In 1956, the conservationists won a partial victory when the Ministry of Health and Welfare stepped in. By designating the slopes above Mt Fuji’s fifth station as a candidate for a special protection area, the officials effectively put them off-limits to would-be railway entrepreneurs.

But the projectors too were appeased when permission was granted for a 30-kilometre-long road up to the fifth station on the Yamanashi side. This project became the Fuji Subaru Line, opening in the Tokyo Olympics year of 1964 – the annus mirabilis that also ushered in the Shinkansen, the Mt Fuji summit radar installation and the publication of Japan’s most famous mountain book.

May 1964: the Fuji Subaru Line road is opened with a parade of Subaru cars
(Photo: Subaru Web Community - see note below)

Soon enough, there were two roads – the south-side “Skyline” from Fujinomiya opened in 1969 – but even this couldn’t stop the train promoters: Fuji Kyūko, the local railway company, proposed one in 1964, aiming to facilitate “one-day mountaineering in high heels”. A decade later, however, it withdrew its project application for fear that it “might unexpectedly disturb the delicate balance of nature at high altitudes”.

Of course, the mountain roads were already doing just that. More visitors meant more litter and more sewage, while the exhaust fumes from the nose-to-tail bus convoys added to the pollution that assails the forests on Mt Fuji’s lower slopes.

So what about replacing the road with a railway? That was the aim of Nagasaki Kōtarō, who in 2019 was elected governor of Yamanashi, by tradition a construction-friendly prefecture. In his view, a light railway, powered by green energy, could be built over the existing Subaru Line route. This would do away with road traffic, at least on the mountain’s east side, and it would also make it easier to manage visitor numbers.

Compelling as these arguments may be, they have their critics. Unsurprisingly, one of them hails from Mishima, on the opposite side of the mountain. You could equally well curb the hordes of climbers by limiting bus journeys, points out Watanabe Toyohiro, an environmental scientist quoted in the Mainichi Shimbun.

A railway would also necessitate snowsheds, Professor Watanabe adds, blighting the landscape even more than the road does. And, finally, before a railway can be thought of, there remains a considerable backlog of projects to be completed as a condition of Mt Fuji’s selection as a World Heritage site, such as a new visitor centre.

To mark Mt Fuji's tenth year as a UNESCO cultural heritage site, the Yamanashi authorities have recently revived Governor Nagasaki's proposal for a light railway. Predictably, this move has triggered all the usual reflexes. All in all, we surmise, it may be quite a while before we see any light railway, or funicular or cable car, climbing the flanks of Japan's top Meizan. Still, one can always keep the debate alive….

References

Mainichi Shinbun, Fuji ni keburuka, ukande wa kie (“Cable cars on Mt Fuji float up and fade away”, Yama wa hakubutsukan (“Mountains are museums”) series, 10 February 2021.

Shimizu Masakatsu, "Opinion divided over possible railway for Mt Fuji", The Japan News/Yomiuri Shimbun, 21 June 2023.

Sugiyama Jun’ichi, Fuji-yuki no testudo wa jitsugen suru no ka – kako no rekishi was kanko vs shizen de semegiai (“Will a railway to Mt Fuji ever be realised – the past history is a clash between tourism and nature”), Business Media Makoto, 7 June 2013.

Yama to Keikoku magazine, Fuji keburu no zehi (“Fuji cable [car], yes or no?”), edition no 125, August 1949.

Note

For the opening ceremony of the Fuji Subaru Line on 27 May 1964, just before the Tokyo Olympics, the makers of Subaru cars provided 20 convertible Subaru 360 convertibles and 20 Rabbit scooters as parade vehicles. The Subaru 360s carried up some well known sumo wrestlers, including then ozeki Sada no Yama, Kitanofuji, Tsunenishiki, and Wakanaruto, escorted by about 150 other Subaru cars driven by members of Subaru clubs in the Kanto and Tokai regions. “On this day alone, the Fuji-Subaru line was filled with Subaru cars” says this post on the Subaru Web Community’s website. 

 

Funiculars on Mt Fuji (1)

Many have proposed railways and cable cars, but nobody has built one – yet.

Mt Fuji recently opened for its tenth summer season as a UNESCO world heritage site. Yet officials are already fretting about overcrowded huts and paths, to say nothing of the perpetual traffic jams at the fifth station bus terminals. Some might be musing that Mt Fuji would be better off with an efficient mass transport system.

If so, they are not the first to think such thoughts. Proposals for mountain railways on Mt Fuji go back more than a century. In 1908, Saburi Kazutsugu (1864-1924) suggested one from the Shizuoka side. Nobody at that time could have been better qualified to build it. As a railway engineer, Saburi could point to an impeccable track record, so to speak; he ended his career as president of the Korean Railway Company. 

He also had a convincing “hook” for the project, which he aimed to complete in time for a world fair commemorating the 50th year of Emperor Meiji’s reign. But that anniversary never happened, and nor did the railway.

Nobody was in the least discouraged. The Taishō period (1912-26) saw three separate proposals, starting with a mountain railway project in 1914, and two cable car schemes, in 1922 and 1924. Like Saburi’s, all these projects would have started on the mountain’s south-facing slopes.

Thus, it was all but inevitable that somebody would soon champion a route from the eastern side – as if to re-enact the age-old rivalry of the towns that presided over Mt Fuji’s two main pilgrimage routes: Fujinomiya in Shizuoka Prefecture and Fuji-Yoshida in Yamanashi.

Yamazaki Kamekichi
(Photo: Citizen)

The most ambitious east-side proposal came from Yamazaki Kamekichi (1870-1944), a precious metals tycoon and Tokyo politician. Yamazaki was accustomed to thinking big: among his other achievements, he founded what later became the Citizen watch company. In 1935, he sketched out a cable-drawn funicular railway that would start in Fuji-Yoshida and run in a tunnel, buried some 40 metres deep, all the way up to the summit.

To let passengers catch their breath on the journey, the funicular would also feature a stop at the fifth station. “Women and children should be able to make the ascent,” Yamazaki said, adding that foreigners too would find the service useful, as they rarely had time to climb Mt Fuji on foot. As for the mountain scenery, the tunnel would leave it undisturbed.

Yamazaki too had a hook: he meant to open his funicular in time for the Olympics scheduled for Tokyo in 1940. As for the engineering challenge, a mere funicular seemed eminently fungible when set beside the proposals for a Japan-to-Korea undersea rail tunnel that were floating around at the time.

Yamazaki’s plan found some unexpected supporters. One was Fujiki Kuzō, the journalist and pioneer rock-climber. When interviewed for a travel magazine, Tabi, he pointed out that Nikkō, Mt Kōya and Kyoto’s Atago-yama all had cable cars, so why not Fuji too? (The media of the day seem to have applied the word “cable car” indiscriminately to both aerial ropeways and cable-drawn funicular railways that ran in tunnels).

Others were less convinced. The heavyweights of the Japanese Alpine Club, who had helped to face down Saburi’s plan, now lined up against this one. Kanmuri Matsujirō, best known as the pioneer of the Kurobe River, expostulated that a funicular would open the way to “geisha girls and drunken revelry” on the summit. The club’s elder statesman, Kojima Usui, chimed in too: “Mt Fuji is not a matter of profit and loss: it is a national treasure and a natural masterpiece.”

In the end, the all-powerful Home Ministry spoke for all the naysayers: “One can hardly approve of slithering (‘sura sura’) up the nation’s most sacred mountain in a cable car, where traditionally people have sweated their way to the top, chanting ‘rokkon shōjō’ in order to purify their souls,” fumed an official.

And, with that, the Yamazaki plan was kicked into touch. And so too was an entirely separate – and rather prescient – proposal to build a road to the fifth station….

(Continued)