A meizanologist's diary (137)

2 April (cont.): ideally, one shouldn't visit the Miidera just as its famous cherry trees come into full bloom. I mean, the temple has hundreds of Important Cultural Properties, and how can you pay due attention to them with all that sakura in your face? Nevertheless, the Miidera lies on the way home and my Japan Rail Pass turns into a pumpkin at midnight. So it’s now or never…

Miidera, or the Onjō-ji, features as the eighth destination in Alex Kerr’s latest book, Hidden Japan: An Astonishing World of Thatched Villages, Ancient Shrines and Primeval Forests. Since the temple is “hidden in plain sight”, the taxi driver has no difficulty in finding it – it would have been an easy walk from the station, but every minute counts now that we’re halfway through the afternoon.

Without a millisecond to waste, I walk through the Daimon Gate – repurposed from Hideyoshi’s Fushimi Castle – and up the stone steps to the courtyard in front of the Kondo. This great hall was built in 1599 with funds donated by Hideyoshi’s widow. Regime change seems to have done this temple no harm at all.

The Kondo, Kerr writes, is “one of the most splendid Momoyama buildings in existence …expansive and strong, yet delicate and light.” 

Alas, the late afternoon shadows, not to mention the distracting highlights of the flowering trees, reduce the otherwise graceful hall to a black hulk. So I give up on architectural appreciation, shuck off my shoes, and go inside.

Halfway round our clockwise shuffle around the hall, we come to a dark corner. And there, as if carefully segregated from the fine and polished examples of classical statuary all about, are seven figures that look as if they were roughly hewn out of a discarded log. The labels identify each one as a “dragon king” (or queen), yet each wears a gentle and engaging smile.

Image courtesy of Miidera1200 (Instagram)

I make a slight bow in their direction. This is by way of an apology. In One Hundred Mountains of Japan, the English version of Fukada Kyūya’s Nihon Hyakumeizan, mention is made of a wandering monk called Enkū (1632–1695), said to have been the first to climb Kasa-ga-dake in the Northern Alps: “This is the monk,” says the translation, “who with a hatchet carved an image of the Buddha that latterly became famous.”

One image? That should have read thousands. Enkū himself vowed to carve 120,000 religious effigies during his lifetime, and he may well have done so. Ten a day could have sufficed, one scholar has calculated. At any rate, something like 4,320 of his sculptures survive. These include the seven in front of me, which were rediscovered as recently as 1963, in a dusty niche above the Miidera’s revolving sutra repository.

As this history suggests, both Enkū and his works fell into obscurity after his death. It was only in the 1930s that scholars started to take an interest in him, and not until the late 1950s – just before Fukada started writing Nihon Hyakumeizan – that big museums began to exhibit Enkū’s statues.

As a result, Enkū’s origins are difficult to establish. He grew up in Mino Province, in the southern reaches of what is today’s Gifu Prefecture. When he was seven years old, his mother may or may not have perished in a great flood. Later he took religious orders in the Tendai sect and set out on mountain pilgrimages in all parts of the realm.

A visit to Hakusan in June 1679 seems to have been particularly revelatory. While Enkū was meditating beneath a waterfall, the Hakusan deity appeared to him and announced “Here lives Shaka.” From this time forward, says Julian Daizan Skinner, a modern Rinzai Zen master, “his work is considered to take on a new depth and excellence.”

Curiously, it was in the very next month that Enkū came here to the Onjō-ji and received the "Succession Lineage of the Buddha-nature Eternal Vajra Castle" from the hands of the Great Abbot Dōei himself. This, and we seem to be on firm historical ground here, was on July 5th of the seventh year of Enpō (1679). The Hōryū-ji in Nara had bestowed a similar honour on him some years before.

As Alex Kerr notes, Enkū did not often seek out the great prelates of Kyoto and Nara. He preferred to make the rounds of country villages, offering his services as a traditional healer or performing ceremonies to end a drought. However, Kerr suggests, he may have made an exception for the Miidera on account of its “mystical Mikkyō teachings”. Enkū visited the temple again in August 1689 and received a further transmission, this time from the Abbot Son’ei.

Tradition has it that Enkū ended his days far from the big cities. Returning to his hometown in Gifu, he had a cave dug into the banks of the Nagara River and entered into his final meditation there – at the very same place where his mother had been swept away in a great flood so many years before.

By the time I leave the Kondo, the sun has set behind the bulk of Hiei-zan. At least the sakura are less distracting, now that the shadows have muted them. 

There’s just time for a last quick circuit of the temple grounds. Last of all, I pass the sacred spring which gives the Onjō-ji the name that everybody knows it by: Miidera, the temple of the three wells. 

Now it really is time to run for that evening Thunderbird. Only hours are left on my well-worn Rail Pass...

A meizanologist's diary (133)

28 March: the Sensei takes charge of the plan. We’ll drive up to the Sensuikyo parking lot at 800 metres or so, then tackle a ridge route up to Takadake, at 1,592 metres the highest of Aso-san’s Five Peaks. 

At mid-morning, we park the car soon after passing a stupa dedicated to world peace by a local monk.

It seems that Nichidatsu Fujii, who was from Aso City, built more than seventy of these giant reliquaries around the world, in Europe and America as well as in Asia. Alas, judging by current events, even that considerable number may not have sufficed.

A whiff of sulphur greets us as we get our kit out of the car. And just in case we haven't noticed, the sign at the trailhead gets straight to the point: “Release of volcanic gas (S02: sulfur dioxide) has been continuing around Mt. Aso. Be ready to protect yourselves individually with full understanding of the risk from volcanic gas.” 

A nearby row of memorials brings the message home: accidents can and do happen around here.

Our ridge is like the scaly back of some gigantic sea beast. We weave to and fro, seeking out a line before we realise there’s a series of painted yellow arrows to guide us. We’re working our way upwards on solid lava flows: nothing but knobbled black rock, except for a patch of withered yellow grass here and there.

The heat and the stench intensify as we struggle upwards. Flies buzz round us. And now we can see where the fumes are coming from – the roiling clouds of asphyxiating vapour spilling over a ridge crest to the right. Although Aso’s main crater is still kilometres away, it must sit exactly upwind of us.

Like the mountain in Dante’s Purgatory, the slopes ease a bit as we gain height. Gradually, Nichidatsu's stupa shrinks down into a white wen in the hazy depths below. 

When a headwall starts to loom above, we decide it’s too tiresome to tackle right now and sit down for lunch. I must be having a bad day: having forgotten my water bottle on our hosts’ kitchen counter, I now discover that my bento box has leaked into my pack. The lunch is still delicious though: Hirai, the local bentoyasan can only be recommended.

I must be looking debilitated: the Sensei passes over a “bakudan” (bombshell) rice ball to supplement the bento. This too goes down gratefully. After lunch, a cool breeze starts to blow, dispelling the sulphurous fumes, and we pick up the pace. 

When we arrive in the shadow of the headwall, the yellow arrows direct us rightwards, up a ramp like Mt Asama’s famous J-band. Judging by Canto IV of his Purgatory, Dante must have been here too:

Squeezed in between the tight walls of the pass,
we struggled upward through that broken rock,
using our hands and feet to climb the ground…

Illustration by Gustave Doré for Canto IV of Dante's Purgatory

A few hundred metres more takes us to the summit ridge. The breeze strengthens as we walk over to Takadake’s trig point – there doesn’t seem to be a shrine up here. Perhaps the scenery is too desolate even for a god.  Then we walk carefully over the boot-shredding lava edges to the descent path. 

All of us have visited Aso-san before – heck, I even cycled across the massif in my student days – yet it’s still impossible to get a grip on this volcano’s dimensions. Mote-like figures on a ridge between us and the steaming crater dramatise the gargantuan scale...

Gargantuan? Adjectives crumble under the load of representing this scene. Other Japanese volcanoes - yes, even the boss of them all - fit into a surrounding landscape. Here, as far as the eye can reach, all you see is the volcano. 

A series of descending ridges bring us to the crest above the main crater. This vast declivity is still venting nonchalantly to itself, the fumes thinning and thickening almost as if the beast is breathing. Occasionally, a mushroom of vapour writhes silently upwards and drifts off with the wind. 

Still groping for an adjective to qualify this spectacle, I settle on "Dante-esque". Or should that be "Dantean"? Overused, admittedly, but like the poet's Inferno this scenery doesn't belong to the world we know. 

I stand there enthralled until a sulphur-laden gust blows my hat away. Probably one shouldn’t hang about here too long. Dilapidated shelters along the concrete-surfaced path bear witness to an eruption in 1958 that did for twelve of Aso-san’s visitors.

And over yonder, like a line of monuments, are the pillars of the Mt Aso Ropeway, now abandoned. After starting up in the same year as the eruption disaster, it managed to keep operating for half a century or so, in the face of corrosive effusions, ash falls and earthquakes. But the volcano won in the end.

The Sensei and our host are already far down the path. I hurry after them, putting as many metres as I can between ourselves and that monstrous crater at our back.

 

A meizanologist's diary (131)

24 March: resisting the temptation to pour myself another cup of strong and fragrant coffee from the hotel’s “bottomless” pot, I catch the 7.05 bus to the ski resort of Sugadaira. “People who have skied at Sugadaira,” wrote the Hyakumeizan author, "will remember two mountains confronting them across the valley: these are Neko-dake and Azumaya-san, without which Sugadaira would not be worth much.”

Fair enough, but when the bus drops me at a stop called “Davos”, after the Swiss resort, the only mountain I can see is “Davos Hill”, which still has a few ski tracks etched into its dwindling snow cover. Otherwise, the pistes have already lapsed into the somnolence of the “Zwischensaison”.

A roadside map suggests that Azumaya lies somewhere to the east. A long straight lane leads me in that direction, past deserted chalets and the rugby pitches of university summer camps. 

Orange drifts of last year’s larch needles cushion my footfall on the hard tarmac. After the trees end, snow starts to dapple the pastures on either side of the road.

At a farm’s gate, a sign on a wooden box invites me to fill in a tozan-todoke or mountaineering plan. Hmm, truth to tell, there isn’t much of a plan today. And the only map I have is on my phone, copied off the monitor of our home computer. But I file a todoke anyway.

The wisest course seems to be to follow the footprints. Most of these lead up a snowslope towards Neko-dake. It can’t be a mistake to climb a Cat Mountain. 

I pause at a rustic pavilion to admire the serried array of the Northern Alps, all floating luminously above the haze horizon.

Next comes a quiet grove of silver birches, their branches still bare. Mmm, interesting – these seem to be occupying the height band that beech trees would populate in our home mountains of Hokuriku…

Above the wood I catch up with a couple from Kanagawa – they must have started their four-hour drive in the graveyard hours to get up here so fast. Our arrival on the summit is announced by tolling on a ship’s bell that hangs from nearby post, somewhat away from the regulation-issue shrine. 

Like last night's hotel, this summit seems to be fairly eclectic in its cultural references.

As there’s also a panorama table, you could even call Neko-dake a fully equipped public facility. I sit in its lee to down some rolls and cheese. Although it's too early for lunch, mountaineers need to eat when they can. Thus it is that I’m lagging somewhat behind the Kanagawa couple as they set off towards Azumaya proper.

Just as the snowy ridgetop starts to narrow, the couple disappear like March hares down an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole. Reaching the spot, I’m in time to see them kick their way down the side of the ridge and along a ledge that runs underneath a giant rock. For folk equipped merely with instep crampons, with no ice-axes or poles, they’re moving with confidence.

To reinforce mine, I put on my own crampons, which have the full twelve points. Then I drop down the rabbit hole onto the snow ledge - in days gone by, this would have been a descent into the ancient crater, which lay on the present mountain's north side. 

After a short crossing on frozen snow above a shadowy slope, the trail leads back to the ridge. As there are plenty of trees to hang on to, the ice-axe is superfluous. I come up with the Kanagawa couple again on an intermediate col.

Now we’re zig-zagging up through the shadowy pine forest on the main peak, our crampons biting well into yesterday’s still-frozen bootprints. 

The summit ridge is a magnificent whorl of snow, from which a corner of the half-buried shrine peeps out. Fukada compares it to "the roof of a thatched hut, standing on four pillars but without walls, as if atop a garden pavilion". The Hyakumeizan author and his friends came up here on skis in mid-March: even now, these open easy-angled slopes must be ideal for ski-touring when there's enough snow.

I take a look along the ridge to see if anyone has continued traversing eastwards: no tracks, so this must be the terminus. It’s time to admire the view. A local climber kindly provides an orientation – judging by his proprietorial air, he must come up here often.

Westwards, the Northern Alps are gradually fading into the noonday haze. To the south, Asama looms large – the unflattering angle renders it as a gigantic slagheap. 

As for that teapot dome to the north, that’ll be Myōkō. Mmm, interesting – three big volcanoes all lined up as if on parade, although so far Azumaya has shown little sign of its kinship with the other two cones.

On the way down, I’m momentarily embarrassed. Since the relevant arm has fallen off the key signpost, I’m uncertain if I’ve reached the turn-off point. I’m starting to regret the lack of a proper map, not to mention GPS (I can’t say that Bre’r David didn’t warn me), when a woman happens by with her young son. She turns out to be Brazilian, but we have enough Japanese in common to sort matters. Yes, I am heading down towards the Torii Pass, where most of the climbers who arrived in cars seem to be coming from...

It was at this pass, by the way, that the mountain got its name. As told in Nihon Hyakumeizan, the story goes that, while returning from his eastern expedition, the warlord Yamato Takeru looked eastward from that spot and uttered a cry of longing ("Azuma-haya!") for his absent wife, the Princess Ototachibana (right)...

Alas, there's no time to pay homage to Yamato Takeru or his commemorative carpark.  Well above the pass, I break off southwestwards to slant across the mountain’s lower slopes. Immediately, the track I’m following dwindles to just a scatter of bootprints, perhaps from earlier in the day. This obviously isn’t the trade route.

At a col where the snow has melted to reveal bright ochre rubble, my nostrils start prickling with the scent of sulphur. And if any doubts linger that Azumaya was once a vigorously erupting volcano, they are dispelled by that view across a gully to the layers of crumbling lava shoring up the main peak’s headwall. Once upon a time, the savants say, Azumaya was a tall, conical stratovolcano, but an eruption blew away its summit cone, leaving behind only the gently sloping lower slopes...

... on which the snow’s now becoming too thin and slushy for crampons, so I strap them onto the pack to dry. The tracks, such as they are, lead across a succession of ridges and troughs, then sink down into the silver birch forest. There’s a mid-afternoon bus to catch if I’m to have any chance of supper with the Princess Ototachibana, so I start pushing the pace, occasionally plunge-stepping into the softening snow.

What about the bears, I start to wonder. Not without reason, you understand, as Azumaya ranks in the top tercile of bear encounters on the Hyakumeizan, as collated by Kumamap. Since my bear bell doesn’t seem to be chiming with sufficient vim, I have recourse to chanting “o-jama shimasu” ("please excuse the intrusion"). The gambit is borrowed from the playbook of the extreme Hyakumeizan athlete Tanaka Yōki, although he probably doesn’t go so far as to render the phrase to the tune of a well-known hymn. 

At which point, I pop up over the brow of a rill to encounter what appears to be a human mother with her daughter coming the other way. Escaping with no more than a weird glance from them, I continue my hasty descent in bear bell-only mode, arriving at “Davos” with ten minutes to spare before the 3.10 bus down to Ueda. With luck, I'll be in time for supper...