Retreat of the snow monsters

Back in the 1980s, Project Hyakumeizan was astonished at the snow monsters on Hakusan. More soberly known as “juhyō” (tree ice), these are the fantastic figures wrought by the trees encrusted with the snow and hoar-frost swept in by the blizzards from the Japan Sea. You can still see them up there, but perhaps not for much longer.

Ice monsters on Hakusan, Advent Sunday 1981

The problem is the climate. Ice monsters will all but vanish from Japan by the end of the century unless climate change slows, warns Fumitaka Yanagisawa, a professor emeritus at Yamagata University’s Research Institute for Ice Monsters and Volcanoes of Zao, as reported in the Asahi Shimbun.

Using historical records, Professor Yanagisawa has established that juhyō previously flourished in a wide arc stretching from Hokkaidō in the north to Ishikawa’s Hakusan massif in the south. But this range has has been shrinking, both from southern end and, less obviously, from the north – where, in Hokkaidō, the mountains are no longer high enough to support the special conditions in which juhyō thrive, namely temperatures of minus 10–15 degrees, two to three metres of snow, and strong northwesterly or westerly winds with a speed of 36 to 54 kph, among others.

Yōteizan, Hakkōda, Zaō, Hachimantai, Azumaya, Hakusan, even humble Makihata – many of the mountains named by Professor Yanigasawa as current and former juhyō habitats also belong to the One Hundred Mountains of Japan. Indeed, the snow monsters put in an occasional appearance in Japan’s most famous mountain book:

I first visited Zaō when word of its frozen trees was first reaching the outside world. At that time, the only shelter above Takayu hot springs was the Kobold Hut belonging to the former Yamagata High School. After that visit, I went to the massif to ski every winter. After the war, however, I have not returned, fearing the crowds that must now overwhelm it …

It would be a pity if the juhyō were to join the Kobold Hut* and a pristine Zaō as half-forgotten footnotes in the history of Japan’s mountains …

References

Sakata, Tatsuro, Climate change quietly slaying Japan’s ‘juhyo’ ice monsters, Asahi Shimbun, 12 March 2023

Alan Taylor, Juhyo: The Snow Monsters on Japan’s Mount Zao, The Atlantic, 22 January 2020

*It seems that the Kobold Hut has survived to this day, now owned by Yamagata University: see this blog post.

Sakura diary (1)

13 April, Narita: as soon as the tyres squawk onto the runway, I realise this trip is ill-timed. Over there, a whole row of them enfold the airport’s fuel tanks in their luminous billows. Later, as the Shinkansen hurtles westwards, they flicker past the windows like a faulty neon tube. On arrival in Fukui, they throng the streets and riverbanks, or light up the tawny hillsides with intermittent puffs of pallor. In the manner of a frontal assault – people do call it the sakura zensen – the cherry blossom rolls northwards. Resistance is futile.

14 April, Fukui: if we can’t avoid them, we may as well view them. I accompany the Sensei up Asuwa-yama, the hill on the edge of town. Under the flowering trees, pensioners take selfies with their smart phones. This is a weekday, so crowds are moderate. Tomorrow, on Saturday, the police will be out trying to unscramble the gridlocked roads. Such congestion is traditional:-

花見駕籠がくて衝突桜狩
Hanami-kago gakute shōtotsu sakuragari

The sedan chairs jostle as they vie to view the blossom (Yūsei, 1680)

I’ve nothing against cherry blossoms, of course – without them, after all, there’d be no cherry trees. It’s just their in-your-face evanescence that’s objectionable.

Now, here we go again – the breeze swirls the petals round us like a snow squall. So stagey. It's as if somebody's trying to re-enact those famous opening lines in Tale of the Heike: “The proud endure not; they are a mere dream on a spring evening and, no less, the mighty must fall, as blossom drives before the wind ….”

Actually, the aim of our walk has nothing to do with the mighty. We're on our way to a teacher's house. The name of William Eliott Griffis (1843-1928), a Meiji-era yatoi, will live forever in connection with Fukui. In 1871, not long after graduating from Rutgers University, the young American came to the feudal school as a science teacher on a salary of $2,400. The Fukui authorities even built him a Western-style house.

Embarrassingly, though, Griffis's actual stay was almost as transient as the sakura zensen's. The year after his arrival, he decamped to a more prestigious job in Tokyo. Although this irked his hosts, Fukui seems to have forgiven him, and the house was recently reconstructed. At the Sensei’s suggestion, we drop in to inspect it.

Surfing the exhibits, a minor meizanological discovery is made – Griffis may have been the first foreigner to climb Hakusan, the 2,702-metre dormant volcano that looms to the city’s east. At least, that was his ambition, as he phrases it in a letter to his sister Maggie dated August 20, 1871. The full story is found in his collected letters.

Outside the house, the museum curators have erected a hardboard cut-out of Griffis, complete with a puritanical hat, leaving a hole where his head should be for visitors to poke their faces through. A cheeky young soul does just that as we walk past. Yes, after more than a century, I think Fukui and Griffis have at last reached a satisfactory accommodation.

A home mountain stirs in its sleep

Volcanic earthquakes detected under Hakusan

NHK Kanazawa reports that, on 20 April, more than 40 small earthquakes occurred under Hakusan - the volcano in Japan's Hokuriku district best known as the home mountain of the Hyakumeizan author. One tremor of magnitude 2.2 occurred near the summit at 1.30 am. Bursts of seismic activity are not unusual under long-dormant volcanoes: on 1 December 2014, more than 150 small tremors were detected in the same area.

The title of this magazine article reads: "X-day for the looming Hakusan eruption".
Well, maybe not quite yet....

According to Wikipedia, the bulk of Hakusan dates back to eruptions that happened 30,000-40,000 years ago. In those days, the edifice may have been higher than Mt Fuji. In a kind of coda to the main action, Ken-ga-mine, a subsidiary summit, welled up as a lava dome about 2,000 years ago. Hakusan most recently erupted in 1659. Eruptions were also recorded in 1554, 1042 and 706 – the earliest one taking place just over a decade before Monk Taichō made the mountain's first ascent.

In yesterday’s episode, the type of low-frequency tremors that signal the movement of magma or volcanic gases was absent, suggesting that an eruption is probably not imminent. So it’s unlikely that the 1,300th anniversary of Taichō’s ascent, which falls this summer, will be marked or marred by a volcanic outburst.