Appropriating the Alps

How Japan got its local alpine ranges – and why some are for real.

On the way down from climbing Ishizuchi-san in mid-March, I happened on a faded sign about the mountain’s climbing history. As in the case of so many other Japanese peaks, the first ascent is ascribed to the semi-legendary mountain mystic En no Ozunu. This was back in the seventh century. Countless pilgrims have followed him since and the sound of their conches still re-echoes over the mountain paths in the summer months.

Mountaineers of the 1920s in the Shirouma snow valley.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Modern mountaineering started during the 1920s, when an inspirational teacher by the name of Kitagawa Jun’ichirō formed a “travel club” at Shikoku’s Matsuyama High School. For “travel”, one may read “mountaineering”.

On Jonen-dake in the 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

In 1925, Kitagawa-sensei upped the ante by publishing his collected mountain writings under the title of Shikoku Alps (Shikoku Arupusu). This was just fifteen years after Kojima Usui, the main mover and shaker behind the Japanese Alpine Club, had conferred the title of “Japan Alps” on the central ranges of Honshū.

The Ushiro-Tateyama range.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

On the face of it, Kitagawa had staked a bold claim. While some peaks in Honshū’s Hida and Akaishi ranges do exceed three thousand metres – and Mt Fuji would rank around twenty-eighth among the major summits if set down among Switzerland’s Bernese Alps – no part of Shikoku exceeds even two kilometres above sea level.

On the other hand, he had picked the perfect moment to award the alpine brevet to Shikoku’s modest peaks. Historians could light on 1925 as the meridian year of what they call “Taishō Democracy”, implying an unusual openness to newfangled and foreign concepts. And, whether or not by chance, promoting local mountain ranges as “Alps” also reached its apogee around then.

The Kurobe gorge.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

By coincidence, Gakujin, Japan’s second oldest mountaineering magazine, dedicated its March 2026 edition to exploring these local “Alps”. In the introductory article, Katō Yoshiki writes that the habit of “mitate” – here defined as comparing a local beauty spot with a prestigious foreign equivalent – goes back far into Japan’s past.

Lake Biwa’s famous Eight Views of Omi, for example, channel the even more famous Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, a classic theme in Chinese poetry and landscape painting from the eleventh-century Song dynasty. A similar logic sits behind Japan’s local “Mt Fujis”, whether or not they particularly resemble their great original.

Mountaineer on Myojin-dake, 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Arrogating the Alps to Japan was a bit different, historically speaking. An English mining engineer was the first to make the comparison, writing it up in a guidebook for foreigners. Then Walter Weston, a mountaineering missionary, picked it up in the titles of his first and second books about the Japanese mountains.

But few Japanese had read these foreign-language books at the time. So it was only in 1910, when Kojima Usui decided to call his collected writings “Nihon Arupusu”, at the urging of his publisher, who was looking for a grabby title, that most of his compatriots realised that they had their own Alps on the doorstep.

On Tsubakuro-dake in the 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

There were, of course, objections. In the end, though, people picked up the alpine “mitate” and ran with it. The first of the regional alps might have been those coined by the Japanese Alpine Club members Nakamura Seitarō and Saegusa Inosuke when they described their traverse of the “Etchū Alps” in a 1911 issue of their club’s journal. But these Alps centred on Tateyama and were thus part of what would soon be accepted as the Northern Alps.

It was in the Taishō era (1912–1926) that the regional alps really started to proliferate. Quite soon, people were talking about the Yamato Alps (the Ōmine mountains), the Tohoku Alps (mainly the Asahi range, but also Iide and Zao), and the Kyūshū Alps (mainly the Kujū Mountains, but also Aso).

Snow gully on Tsurugi.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

In 1927, the soon-to-be famous solo climber Katō Buntarō went one step further. When he made his first winter forays into his local mountains, he not only rebranded them as the “Hyōgo Alps” but renamed their individual peaks after the highest summits in the Japan Northern Alps, thus piling one “mitate” on top of another:

I refer to the mountain range along the border of Hyōgo, Tottori and Okayama prefectures as the Hyōgo Alps. I rename Mount Mizunoyama (1,500 meters above sea level) as Hyōgo-Yari, Mount Mimuroyama as Hyogo-Norikura, and the southernmost mountain at 1,344.6 meters as Hyōgo-Ontake. Since the summit of Mount Hyōnosen is entirely within Tottori Prefecture, I've decided to call the mountain in front of it Hyōgo-Tateyama. I'm not entirely sure of the exact height of this Tateyama, but it's probably around 1,280 meters…

Winter on Norikura.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Foreigners too got back into the game. In their journal Inaka, published between 1915 and 1920, the mainly gaijin members of the Mountain Goats of Kobe referred to their local “Kobe Alps”, although probably with tongue in cheek.

On similar lines, a 1924 guidebook from the “Kinki Mountaineering Research Association” introduces not only the Kobe Alps, but also the Rokkō Alps (here referring to a spur ridge off the Jigokudani East Ridge) and the Suma Alps. The book also lists the Yamato Alps, the Hiei Alps, the Kōnan Alps and the Taki Alps. The Nikkō Alps and the Kubiki Alps emerged at around the same time.

On the way to Otensho-dake, 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Soon, and without apparent irony, even the lowly Kamakura hills were to acquire alpine status, although none top two hundred metres. This deficiency didn’t stop Fukada Kyūya, the emerging mountain writer, from writing a guide to them for the magazines Modern Sports and Fujin no Tomo in 1934. At the time, there was even a signpost pointing to the “Kamakura Alps” outside his house.

By 1937, though, Fukada was having second thoughts: “I used to think that calling them [the Kamakura hills] the Alps was incomparably twee,” he wrote in an essay on mountain views, “but these days I'm starting to feel this frivolous imitation is unacceptable”. Nevertheless, that same year, his friend Kawabata Yasunari, a fellow member of the so-called Kamakura literati, wrote an article about a hill walk for the Osaka Asahi Shinbun – under the title of “The Kamakura Alps”.

Shirouma in the snow season.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

So when it comes to the Shikoku Alps, it’s no surprise to learn that Kitagawa Junichirō was not the first to arrogate them. According to Gakujin, the haiku poet, journalist, calligrapher, art critic, noh dancer and mountaineer Kawahigashi Hekigotō referred to them as early as 1915. This was in a book on mountain landscapes, in which he lamented that "the name 'Alps' has gradually come to be abused, so that the Ishizuchi mountain range has been called the 'Shikoku Alps', and the Rikuzen-Iwaki mountains the ‘Abukuma Alps’.”

Fast-forwarding to the present day, we can see that Kawahigashi was right to be concerned. Drawing on both official and unofficial sources, Gakujin has written up no fewer than fifty local “Alps” in its March 2026 edition. These range from the О̄shū Alps up in Iwate to the Kankai Alps down in Kumamoto. Only in Hokkaido could no local Alps be found – and, of course, in the Shin’etsu, given that this region is already chokka with the original Northern Alps.

Such is the profusion of local Alps in Japan – the Gakujin editors say there might be more than a hundred in total – that some fundamental questions arise. Such as what qualifies as an alp in the first place. If you go back to the original Latin word “alpēs”, etymologists like to derive it from the adjective “albus”, meaning white with snow, or perhaps from an older pre-Latin root word for “mountain”.

But that is not how the word was traditionally used in the modern Europe languages. Whether in the French “Alpe”, the German “Alp” or the dialect “Alm”, the meaning traditionally indicated a high summer pasture for sheep, goats or cows. I was reminded of this back in March when we climbed a local Echizen mountain with no alpine pretensions at all.

Looking over a connecting ridge to the attractively snowed-up bulk of Echizen’s Heko-san, the Sensei observed that on the other side of this mountain a road leads almost to the summit. And that, in summer, the cattle are driven up there to pasture for as long as the grass stays sweet. Well, that is the very definition of a traditional alp.

Camping at Kamikochi in the 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Come to think about it, even Kamikōchi, the gateway to the Northern Japan Alps, was once an alp. According to Professor Fynn Holm, its flat valley floor served to pasture up to four hundred cattle for about half a century. The ranch was closed in 1934, partly because the overly aggressive bulls kept charging the tourists – Walter Weston and his wife Frances were among those who had narrow escapes, along with their guide Kamijō Kamonji.

So it’s true. Japan absolutely does have real Alps. If you want to find them, just follow the cows.

References

Katō Yoshiki, “Nihon Arupusu to go-tōchi no arupusu” (“The Japan Alps and the local alps)”, Gakujin, no 945, March 2026.

Fynn Holm, “Uniquely Japan, Uniquely Alpine: The Transformation of the Kamikōchi Mountain Valley into an Alpine Landscape, 1892–1938”, Environmental History, January 2023.

Katō Buntarō, “Hyōgo Tateyama tozan” in Tandokkō (Solo climbs), Sangaku Meicho Series, Futami Shobō, September 1970.

Illustrations are from Nihon Arupusu, edited by Nakama Teruhisa, with contributions by various members of the Japanese Alpine Club, Shinkōsha, Tokyo, June 1930. For the provenance of this copy, see A meizanologist’s diary (44).

Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (3)

Review concluded: Andrew Bernstein applies a historian’s eye to the world’s most famous stratovolcano.

During the Edo period (1603–1868), Mt Fuji started to attract a following that went far beyond its religious devotees. Thanks to Edo’s growing influence on popular culture – and what has changed in our own century, we may ask – millions of Japanese came to see the mountain as a familiar image in pictures, books and ceramic glaze. And, in time, even on bathhouse walls.

A six-panel screen showing Mt Fuji by Kano Tan'yu.
Image by courtesy of Christie's.

Meanwhile, the feudal authorities started to arrogate Fuji’s prestige to themselves. At the “heart of Edo castle”, the bakufu’s official painter Kanō Tan'yū (1602–1674) placed Mt Fuji in the centre of a diorama that covered a set of sliding doors in the shogun’s retiring rooms.

If Mt Fuji was a nascent symbol of state, its theology was now too important to leave to the discretion of temple priests and the Fujikō houses. The neo-Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan (1583–1657), an advisor to four shoguns, weighed in with an attack on the legends invented by Buddhist priests about Mt Fuji and the foreign-influenced tale of Kaguya-hime. 

The goddess Konohanasakuya-hime in flight.
Rendition by Evelyn Paul, c.1912, for a book on Japanese myths.

The mountain’s true deity, Hayashi asserted, was Konohanasakuya-hime, a fire goddess who first appears in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki (although not in connection with Mt Fuji, which these chronicles omit to mention).

In time, the nationalist stirrings fomented by Razan and fellow thinkers would culminate in an officially sponsored cultural revolution. Soon after it came to power in 1868, the Meiji government launched a campaign to disentwine Buddhism and Shinto, the so-called haibutsu kishaku movement that aimed to "abolish Buddhism and destroy Shākyamuni". On and around Mt Fuji, temple buildings were torn down, and sculptures removed or vandalised.

In 1874, the Shintoist official placed in charge of the Fuji Sengen shrines personally led an expedition to remove any Buddhist icon that remained on the mountain. Yet some statues from the Yakushi hall on the summit were rescued and brought down to Fujinomiya, where, as Bernstein documents with a photograph, they still preside over the sake vats at a brewery.

Buddhist statues brought down from Mt Fuji and now
displayed at the Takasago Brewery, Fujinomiya.
Courtesy Butsuzo World blog. 

While the government’s muddled and inconsistent anti-Buddhist campaign soon fell by the wayside, its effects were lasting. The Sengen shrines at the mountain’s foot remain “thoroughly Shintoized” to this day. And the Fujikō schools were ultimately forced into a Shintoist framework, accelerating their decline in a modernising age.

Meanwhile the government had discovered that, as a means of inculcating the desired virtues in the populace, it was much more effective to indoctrinate them at school than to meddle with their forms of worship.

Mt Fuji in a Taisho-era songbook for schools (1911).
Courtesy of Shoka Shinto (唱歌深層) blog.

Thus it was that Mt Fuji started appearing in school textbooks well before the Imperial Rescript on Education was promulgated in 1890. A songbook issued in 1881 includes a set of lyrics on “Fujisan” that states, as quoted by Bernstein, “Foreigners gaze up admiringly. So do Japanese. [Fuji] is our pride.” A reading primer published in 1900 shows a picture of Fuji accompanied by the words “A big mountain. This is Japan’s greatest mountain”. And so on. 

At several removes, perhaps, the Ministry of Education also presided over Nonaka Itaru’s (1867–1955) bid to turn Mt Fuji into a mountain of science. The ministry was the ultimate employer of Wada Yūji (1859–1918), the professional meteorologist who encouraged Itaru in his attempt to overwinter on Mt Fuji while making hourly weather observations. 

A cinematic rendition of the Nonakas' sojourn on Mt Fuji.
Poster advertising Toei's 1967 movie Fujisancho.

The epic story of Itaru’s struggle for survival on the blizzard-wracked summit in the winter of 1895, loyally supported by his wife Chiyoko (1871–1923), has provided fodder for movies, school textbooks and blogs to this very day.

In “A global mountain on a human planet”, his second-to-last chapter, Bernstein presents Fuji as the locus of modern industry and military firing ranges. In it, he describes how the papermaking and other manufacturies established at its base have come up against their ecological limits, whether by exhausting the groundwater that percolates out of the mountain, or by pouring long-lived pollutants into the surrounding ocean. 

Surprisingly little snow for the time of year...
Mt Fuji on January 21 this year (Project Hyakumeizan).

Fuji also serves as a waymark of climate breakdown. As a kind of synecdoche for the fix we’re in, no snow fell on the mountain during October for the first time on record in 2024.

Bernstein’s concluding chapter chronicles the two attempts to have Fuji inscribed as a world heritage site. The first try, during the 1990s, foundered because the volcano was to be submitted as a “natural” monument – leading to the objection that it was just one more stratovolcano among many on the Pacific Rim, and hence not especially heritage-worthy.

Heritage Fuji: from the official video....

As history relates, the mountain fared better as a cultural site. Promoted as “Fujisan, sacred place and source of artistic inspiration”, it acceded to world heritage status in June 2013. Inevitably, perhaps, the official webpage marking the inscription mentions hardly any of the “complex and contested history of the mountain”, to say nothing of the ecological and policy challenges brewing around it.

Yet, says Bernstein, “It is only by accounting for the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, that we can do historical justice to the multiple lives of Fuji and, one could argue, even more fully celebrate this famous but in many ways hidden peak.”

It’s fair to say that, in any other language than Japanese, nobody has ever celebrated the full panoply of Mt Fuji’s history more comprehensively than Professor Bernstein. And, given that on past performance, full-length English-language books about this mountain seem to erupt only once or twice a century, we will likely be reaching for this magnum opus for quite a few decades yet.

References

Andrew Bernstein, Fuji: A Mountain in the Making, Princeton University Press, September 2025.

H Byron Earhart, Mount Fuji: Icon of Japan, University of South Carolina, October 2011.

Frederick Starr, Fujiyama: the Sacred Mountain of Japan, Chicago: Covici-McGee, 1924.

Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (2)

Review continued: Andrew Bernstein applies a historian’s eye to the world’s most famous stratovolcano.

In the early historical period, Fuji lay far beyond the ken of Japan’s movers and shakers. That changed as Japan’s political centre of gravity moved east, first in the Kamakura period (1185–1333) and then, with finality in the Edo period (1603–1868). For would-be writers and travellers on and around Fuji, it helped too that a series of destructive flank eruptions ended in the second half of the ninth century.

Kaguya-hime ascends Mt Fuji.
Print by Toyohara Chikanobu (courtesy of Artelino).

Bernstein deftly charts the parallel shifts in religious belief in his second chapter, entitled “From Angry God to Parent of the World”. In time, the angry male deity, who had to be appeased with apologies and promotions in court rank, gave ground to more emollient personalities such as Kaguya-hime, a princess from the moon. A monk called Matsudai brought Buddhism to Fuji’s summit in 1149, when he set up a temple there, and in the following centuries pilgrims started to ascend the mountain regularly by several different routes. 

By 1707, religious beliefs surrounding Mt. Fuji were so well established that not even that year’s highly destructive flank eruption could shake them. In his chapter on the fallout of the Hōei event, Bernstein sets out the feudal government’s efforts to deal with the famine and devastation caused by the resulting ashfalls – which buried nearby villages and dumped up to eight centimetres of ash more than a hundred kilometres away.

Mayhem caused by the Hoei Eruption in 1707.
Print by Katsushika Hokusai (courtesy of Japan Forward). 

These efforts were hampered by the dual structure of the Tokugawa regime, in which the central Edo-based authority presided more or less uneasily over semi-independent regional fiefdoms. In prosperous times, the system worked well enough to sustain the shogunate for two and a half centuries. But, as Bernstein points out, a disaster on the scale of the Hōei eruption would test any political system to its limits.

In the event, the shogunate took two unprecedented steps. It expropriated more than half of the territory of Odawara, the feudal domain lying to the south of Mt. Fuji, effectively nationalising the relief and recovery efforts. And it imposed a nationwide tax to pay for these activities. But the relief, when it came, was distributed unevenly, causing some groups to suffer more than others.

Even so, the magistrate in charge of the disaster zone, Ina Tadanobu (d. 1712) played his part with such sincerity and dedication that grateful citizens later established shrines in his memory. A local legend has him making unauthorised distributions of rice from government storehouses and taking the resulting punishment on his own head. But here we stray outside the realm of history into terrain that would later be exploited for novelistic effect. And that is quite another story…

Pilgrims on Mt Fuji: print by Katsushika Hokusai.
Colourisation by ChatGPT. 

About a generation after the Hōei disaster, an oil merchant from Edo named Jikigyō Miroku (1671–1733) fasted to death on Mt Fuji’s eastern flank. Bernstein opens his fourth chapter, on “Holy Fuji”, with an account of this incident. Jikigyō’s sacrifice ushered in the heyday of popular pilgrimages to the mountain – perhaps too popular, in the eyes of the government, who found them subversive of social order. In the end, though, the officials failed in their attempts to rein in the Fujikō groups.

By the mid-nineteenth century, women too were climbing ever higher on the mountain as they pushed against the traditional restrictions; disguised as a man, a female pilgrim from Edo attained the summit as early as 1838.

As Bernstein points out, economic forces helped women to press their case. After all, the more pilgrims the better, given that they represented “an important source of income for the communities around Fuji, especially those on the northern and eastern sides of the mountain, where cold weather and the fallout produced by the Hōei eruption made large-scale agriculture difficult.”

The upshot was an economic rivalry between the various pilgrimage centres that, to some extent, has lasted to this day. The fourth chapter chronicles the Edo-era origins of such disputes in some detail. After the second world war, the age-old rivalries of Shizuoka and Yamanashi flared again when the Sengen Shrine at Fujinomiya (Shizuoka) laid claim to the ownership of Fuji’s summit area. This controversy and the ensuing lengthy court case, settled only in 1974, are set out in the book’s seventh chapter.

The “fact that the mountain symbolized a supposedly unified nation," comments Bernstein, "made it a flashpoint in battles over the form that nation should take.” And perhaps more so than ever in modern times.

(Continued)

Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (1)

Book review: Andrew Bernstein applies a historian’s eye to the world’s most famous stratovolcano.

“I once looked around for materials for a book on Fuji,” wrote Fukada Kyūya in the relevant chapter of his most famous book, “but found so much that I finally gave up the project.”

Where the Nihon Hyakumeizan author feared to tread, we are grateful that Andrew Bernstein has waded in. After pursuing his project both on and off the mountain for over a decade, he has given us Fuji: A Mountain in the Making. Published by Princeton University Press in September last year, this is a long-awaited vade mecum to the volcano’s history.

For history is the operative word here. To do full justice to Professor Bernstein’s achievement, it’s worth taking a moment to revisit his predecessors. Full-length books on Japan's and possibly the planet's most famous mountain are surprisingly far and few between in the English language. The first was probably the Chicago-based ethnographer Frederick Starr’s Fujiyama: The Sacred Mountain of Japan, published in 1924.

Starr’s book touches on the mountain’s presence in art, poetry and folklore, as well as its physical geography – vegetation gets a whole chapter to itself. But the prime focus, as the title suggests, lies on Mt. Fuji as a locus for pilgrimages. Indeed, for reasons never quite explained in the book, Starr made his own Mt. Fuji climbs garbed in the traditional cotton robes of a pilgrim.

After Starr, English-reading fans of Japan’s top mountain had to wait almost nine decades – until 2011 – when Harry Byron Earhart came out with Mt Fuji, Icon of Japan. As one would expect from an emeritus professor of comparative religion, this book’s emphasis also lay on the mountain’s history as a destination for worship. Earhart, like Starr, accompanied pilgrims on more than one ritual ascent, getting perhaps as close as any foreign writer could to the spirit that inspires them.

By contrast, Andrew Bernstein (pictured left) is a professor of history. Taking a chronological approach, he zooms out widely to show how people of all kinds – not just poets, painters and pilgrims, but politicians and papermakers too – have variously placated, portrayed, promulgated and exploited Mt. Fuji through time. “Any history privileges some views over others,” he writes in his introduction, “but by treating Fuji as an actor in, and product of, both the physical world and the human imagination, I hope to dispel some of the ‘magical haze’ that surrounds the volcano.”

In this, he has succeeded magnificently. If Fuji: A Mountain in the Making were to be screened, it would need a Cecil B. DeMille to direct it. In three hundred or so pages, the book takes us from the volcano’s fiery origins right up to its recent accession to world heritage status. On the way, it surveys Fuji’s prehistory, the shifting religious beliefs surrounding it, the response to the 1707 eruption disaster, the mountain’s transformation into a symbol of state from the nineteenth century onwards, and much more.

The origins and etymology of Mt. Fuji’s name are somewhat hazy. The Sino-Japanese characters used to write it in early historical times imply that the volcano was seen as undying or eternal. Contrarily, however, the savants have ruled that the graceful cone we see today, the so-called New Fuji, dates back no more than about seventeen thousand years – long after humans first migrated to Japan. So, in this sense, Mt Fuji is a mountain that has grown up alongside its human admirers.

Bernstein’s first chapter starts with an elegant synopsis of the latest thinking about the mountain’s geology and also the people who lived on its slopes in prehistoric times. The way that stones are lined up at some of these sites hint that, even in that remote era, Mt. Fuji may have served a “ritual focal point”.

Mt Fuji as a symbol of Japan...
Image by courtesy of ChatGPT.

The haze thins a bit when we come to the historical period. Yet, surprisingly perhaps to those accustomed to thinking of Mt Fuji as a symbol of Japan, the mountain is nowhere mentioned in Japan’s oldest ‘myth histories’, the Kojiki (712 CE) and the Nihon Shoki (720 CE).

Instead, Mt Fuji makes its first written appearance in the Hitachi Fudoki, a regional gazetteer completed around 721 CE that deals with a province in eastern Japan. The portrayal of what would one day become Japan’s top mountain was far from favourable, showing it as an inhospitable curmudgeon in contrast to a friendly and liberal Mt. Tsukuba. I can’t resist here patching in the lively retelling of this legend from Nihon Hyakumeizan:

When the goddess Mioya went visiting other deities, she lighted one evening on Fuji’s summit. But that mountain’s guardian spirit would not let her stay, saying the day was unpropitious. Mioya flew into a rage and told the god of Fuji that, henceforth, his mountain would be locked forever in the embrace of frost and snow, winter and summer alike. With that, she whirled herself away to the east, to Tsukuba, whose guardian welcomed her warmly and prepared a feast. Delighted beyond measure, Mioya pledged this mountain would wax prosperous with the days and months.

Despite this unpromising start, Fuji had achieved something of an image upgrade by the time that the Man'yōshū, Japan’s oldest extant poetry collection, appeared about forty years later. In the Man'yōshū verses that Bernstein uses to head up his first chapter, the poet Takahashi no Mushimaro (fl. c. 730) sings of a “treasure of a mountain” and one that houses a god who defends the realm.

Even so, the Man'yōshū poems featuring Tsukuba outnumber those about Fuji by about two to one. The reason, Bernstein suggests, might be simply ‘out of sight, out of mind’: in those days, Fuji lay far beyond the ken of Japan’s movers and shakers…

(Continued)

Tales of past and present (7)

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

So what is going on now? A big difference today is the internet and social media – this may reduce the need for clubs, because you can find partners and get all the information about hiking and climbing conditions online, via Yamap and Yamareco. Anyway, I'm not aware of any international hiking and mountaineering club like the Mountain Goats of Kobe at the moment.

Foreigners are still climbing technical routes in Japan, perhaps more than ever now that guiding services exist. One key source of information is a website run by Tony Grant (right), who works for the British Council. He learned to rock climb in the UK, and followed that up with alpine climbing in Poland. When he came to Japan – this was nearly two decades ago – he started climbing with other expatriates, but then started investigating Japanese climbing guidebooks.

In the end, he started publishing his own route descriptions on Climb Japan!, his English-language website, and he has published two ebooks with a selection of classic routes – including Yari’s Kitakama One, Chūōryō and Nanryō in Tanigawa-dake’s Ichinokura-sawa, Shirouma Shuryō, and other favourites.

Another big change since the 1990s is the Nihon Hyakumeizan boom among foreign climbers. For many, the first inspiration came from Lonely Planet’s Hiking in Japan, published in 2001, which had a text box describing the Hyakumeizan concept – one of the authors was Craig McLachlan, a New Zealander who climbed all 100 mountains in the summer of 1997 and published a book about this feat.

The Lonely Planet Guide is long out of print, but that doesn’t matter. Thanks to blogging – in Japanese, English and German and probably other languages too – there is a wealth of information online. One of the first such websites on the scene was Wes Lang’s Hiking in Japan, which has all the information you need for each of the 100 mountains. And you'll find more excellent guidance in the links in this blog's sidebar, including David Lowe's Ridgeline Images, Emma Goto's hiking blog, Willie Banff's On Higher Ground, and Ben Hentschel's Meizan Memories.

Wes Lang tops out on his 100th mountain in 2008.

Wes teaches English writing at two universities in the Kansai – he lives on Ikoma-yama, of course, one of the highest places in the region – and he completed his round of the Hyakumeizan in 2008, the first American to do so. So his website is a key resource for Hyakumeizan hunters who don’t read Japanese.

But that wasn’t enough for Wes – feeling that there was a gap after the Lonely Planet guide went out of print, he teamed up with an English friend, Tom Fay, and compiled a detailed guide to hiking in the Japan Alps, North, South and Central. The book also covers the four main routes on Mt Fuji. It came out in 2019 and is now the only current guidebook in English to Japan’s high mountains.

As we have seen, guidebooks can be influential. The one by Satow and Hawes set Walter Weston on his way, while Lonely Planet fomented a mini-Hyakumeizan boom among foreigners. (By the way, some foreign mountaineers are already pursuing the 200 and 300 famous mountains). It’s too early to say what influence Fay and Lang will have, but please watch this space. Something will happen for sure. 

And this brings us to the future.

Some parts of the future won't look so different from the past, I would imagine. Earlier, I mentioned the foreign botanists who travelled the mountains in the Meiji era. Well, they still do.

For example, there is a very rare birch tree found only in the Chichibu mountains and nowhere else in the world. I read that botanists at Oxford University and Tokyo University are working together to preserve it – the seeds are being kept at several different places, including Kew Gardens in London – the very same institution where your founder member Takeda Hisayoshi came to study from 1910 onwards.

Then again, mountaineering is always being re-imagined. “Mais des rêves, il en faut toujours. Je les préfère aux souvenirs,” said Gaston Rébuffat (1921–1985)( But dreams we must have and, all the time, I prefer dreams to memories).

You could spend a lifetime climbing Japan’s classic routes and the Hyakumeizan. And, for most of us, that’s more than enough. At the same time, a few pioneers now and again dream up a completely new way to read the landscape. I’m thinking here of Tanaka Yōki, who completed the Hyakumeizan with “human power” only. Or Shimizu Tetsuya, who soloed all the Kurobe gorges and made a winter traverse of the Shiretoko Peninsula.

It will be interesting to see how foreign climbers too choose to exert their imaginations in the mountains of Japan….

References

A Japanese-language version of this talk was given at the Ryokusōkai on 29 March 2025 at the offices of the Japanese Alpine Club. It drew on the following sources, among others:

Freshfield, Douglas, “A Playground at the East End: Rambles in Japan”, Alpine Journal, 1914.

Ion, Hamish, “Mountaineering in Japan: British Pioneers and the Pre-war Japanese Alpine Club” in Hugh Cortazzi (ed), Britain & Japan Biographical Portraits, Vol IX, Amsterdam University Press, 2015.

Kuwada, Gonpei, Biography of Benjamin Smith Lyman, Tokyo: Sanseidō, January 1937.

Mizuno, Tsutomu, “Meiji shoki no Nihon ni okeru gaikokujin no tozan katsudo ni tsuite”, JAC Yama, 1976 (series).

Murray Walton, W. H., Scrambles in Japan and Formosa, Edward Arnold, 1934.

New York Times, "Saving a Rare Tree Worlds Away", 26 October 2015.

Nunokawa Kin’ichi, “Nihon no yama to gaikokujin” in Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka, Taiyo Bessatsu, no 103, Autumn 1998.

Nunokawa Kin’ichi (ed), Me de miru Nihon no tozanshi, Yama to keikoku-sha, November 2005.

Starr, Frederick, Fujiyama: the Sacred Mountain of Japan, Chicago: Covici-McGee, 1924.

Weston, Walter, The Playground of the Far East, John Murray, 1918.

And many thanks for a great deal of invaluable advice and guidance from Ohmori Hisao (Japanese Alpine Club), Iain Williams (Toyohashi Alpine Club), Wes Lang and Harumi Hood (Fukui Alpine Club).

Tales of past and present (6)

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

As remarked in the previous post, it took a long time for foreigners to recover their enthusiasm for the Japanese mountains. When they did, new highways and Shinkansen routes may have played a part: in the late 1980s and 1990s, the Japan Alps started to come within the regular weekend range of big city dwellers for the first time.

Paul Hunt atop Shiomi-dake (3,046.9 metres).
Illustration from Paul Hunt's Hiking in Japan.

In 1988, at long last, a new English-language guidebook came out. This was Paul Hunt’s Hiking in Japan. Hunt was well qualified to write on the mountains, having graduated in geology and later working as a meteorologist. He came to Japan in 1978 to work with a team exploring for oil in the Japan Sea (following in the prospecting footsteps of Benjamin Smith Lyman). In the introduction to his book, Hunt mentions several mountain-related associations including the JAC, the Friends of the Earth, and the International Adventure Club.

The guidebook that launched a thousand mountain trips ...

The International Adventure Club, Hunt says, is "a group of foreigners and Japanese who organize hiking, rock climbing, and skiing trips out of Tokyo. They have monthly meetings in Tokyo and issue a newsletter. They can be contacted through Dave Parry or Yuko Nakano…."

In Early Heisei or thereabouts, in the early 1990s, a number of foreign climbers must have phoned Dave or Yuko – indeed, I was one of them. This small group had a smattering of experience in the European Alps and we wanted to try out some routes in the Japan Alps – somehow we had got to hear about Takidani and Kita-dake Buttress. In my case, it was a photo in Nihon Tozan Taikei, volume 7, that set me going …

Alpine Workman (and civil servant) inspects the Dome in Takidani.

The next step was suggested by a Japanese friend who had recently joined us. His idea was for our alpine group to join the Japan Workers’ Alpine Federation (Rōsan, or the Nihon Kinrōsha Sangakurenmei). This we did, in early 1992, becoming one of about 70 clubs in the Shinjuku bloc, and after that we called ourselves – or at least I did – the Alpine Workmen.

Alpine Workman (and industrial engineer) on Tsurugi-dake, Genjiro Ridge.

From that time onwards, our club calendar was probably little different from any other Rōsan club: November: winter skills refreshment climb on Mt Fuji; from January, yama-skiing, March: snow training at Tanigawa-dake, perhaps with a climb of Kuro-one; Golden Week: gasshuku on skis, eg Tsurugi-dake, Genjirō-one; June, rock-climbing and sawa-nobori, August; alpine climbing gasshuku, perhaps on Tsurugi D-Face … and so on.

Alpine Workmen taking liquid refreshment in Akagi-sawa.

A sociologist might have had an interesting time with us. Our founder president was rising up the ranks of a well-known machinery maker, our secretary helped to run an American bank’s credit card scheme, while other members worked for MITI, universities, a law firm, an international food company, an oil company, and so on. As of mid-1995, the membership roll listed ten Japanese, two Brits, three Americans, two Canadians, two Kiwis and one German. At different times, we also had Australian, Danish and Dutch members.

But nationalities were much less important than specialisms. If you wanted to prospect a big river gorge, then Sawa Control was your man. If snowholes, then it was Matsuo the Setsudo Sensei. If big walls, young Ken or Allan, and so on. If there was one common theme, it might just be that most of us originated in the inaka (Shikoku, Oxfordshire, Christchurch etc). But even that wasn’t true for everybody – one of us came from New York, and her father had helped to build the Apollo Lunar Module at Grumman Aerospace. 

I used to think of us as being part of the “present”. Of course, that can’t hold any longer. Although the IAC itself has successor organisations in both the Kanto and Kansai, our own alpine association ceased to exist decades ago. So we are in every sense history, just like the Mountain Goats of Kobe, about whom we knew nothing at that time. 

So what is going on right now?

(Continued)

Tales of past and present (5)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Continued)

Tales of past and present (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, dropped out of the JAC after a mere decade of membership, 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)