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).

Musings on mountain names (5)

Even at the time, some frowned at the idea of naming the world's highest mountain after a surveyor...

In a previous post, we suggested that the former colonial powers were wont to bespatter the globe with mountain names that celebrated mainly dead white Caucasian males, such as Rainier, McKinley and Morrison.

But this may be to oversimplify. A reading of Craig Storti’s The Hunt for Mount Everest shows that not all colonialists strove to overwrite local mountain names. On the contrary, the British surveyors who first mapped India during the 1840s and 1850s were careful to respect and preserve the local, indigenous names of most geographical features.

And this rule held until the height of a certain Himalayan “Peak XV” came in as 29,000 feet or so. Thus, when Andrew Waugh, the chief surveyor, proposed to name this mountain after an irascible former boss, he ignited a controversy. A few weeks after Waugh’s announcement, Brian Hodgson, a former British emissary to Kathmandu, objected that he’d heard this mountain regularly referred to as Deodanga.

A further challenge came from the German explorer Hermann Schlagintweit, who had visited Nepal in 1855. He and his brothers had measured the same peak that Hodgson had (mistakenly) identified as the mountain today known as Everest, but claimed that the locals called it Gauri Sankar. And this was the name that they printed on their map of the region published in Berlin in 1862, a decision that was initially endorsed by Britain’s Royal Geographical Society.

Waugh then formed a committee to look into these counterclaims. Naturally enough, it found that the Gauri Sankar/Deodanga alternatives were “indefinite and unacceptable”, leaving the way clear for the official adoption of the Everest name. The case for Gauri Sankar was further undermined when it was found, in 1903, to apply to a completely different mountain, some 36 miles away from Everest.

In 1921, the first British expedition to what was by now confirmed as the world’s highest mountain entered Tibet. And they soon discovered that the local people already had a name for the peak. Remarkably, this name, or a variant of it, had already appeared on a map of China published in Paris as far back as 1733 by Jean-Baptiste Bourgignon d'Anville – on which the mountain is identified as “M. Tchoumour Lancma”. But, by 1921, the name of “Everest” was already too well established for “Chomolungma” to get a look in on western maps.

It is unclear what Waugh’s boss, the original owner of the Everest name, really thought of his successor’s blatant act of sycophancy. Wikipedia says that he at first raised an objection, on the grounds that “Everest” might be impossible to write in Persian or Hindi. But Storti says he was “gratified”. Both may be right: Everest's protestations may have been no more than perfunctory.

In any case, the mountain’s connection with the original Sir George Everest (1790-1866) is fading fast. Probably few who approach the mountain remember that he was Surveyor General of India, not to mention a member of the Neptune Lodge of Freemasons. And even fewer will recall that his name was once correctly pronounced as “Eev-rist” (/ˈiːvrɪst/) rather than “Everest”. Attached to the world’s highest mountain, the name has taken on a new life of its own.

References

Craig Storti, The Hunt for Mount Everest, Nicholas Brealey, 2021

Musings on mountain names (4)

In Japan too, an aversion to naming mountains after people has its limits...

Like the Swiss, the Japanese have historically hesitated to call their mountains after people. This reluctance seems to have extended to summits in the country’s overseas territories too. In Japan’s colonial era, Yushan on Taiwan, for example, was rebranded as “Niitaka-yama” (distinguishing it as the pre-war empire’s ‘New Highest Mountain’), but no Taiwanese mountain seems to have been renamed after any historical personage.

The massif formerly known as Nutakukamuushupe
(Photo from Wikipedia by courtesy of Koda6209)

The same principle holds in Hokkaidō. When modern maps were drawn up for this northern island, early in the twentieth century, Japanese-language names – but not those of people – overwrote some of the original Ainu names for mountains, rivers and other features. Not everybody approved, though. In the Tomuraushi chapter of One Hundred Mountains of Japan, the Hyakumeizan author Fukada Kyūya makes a plea for the original nomenclature:

The name too has a certain charm …. There are many fine Ainu names for Hokkaidō’s mountains. I find it deeply regrettable that these have been mangled by representing them through an arbitrary selection of Japanese characters which distort the original word.

Mountain nomenclature becomes even more complicated in the Daisetsuzan chapter. As Fukada records, the first modern maps of Hokkaidō identified the massif as Nutakukamuushupe, its Ainu name, with “Daisetsuzan”, the Japanese name, in brackets. Yet ...

It seems that “Daisetsuzan” wasn’t the only candidate for a Japanese name at that time. Writing under the name of Hokkaidōjin in a 1907 edition of the Japanese alpine club’s journal, somebody proposed that Hokkaidō’s highest mountain should be called “Shiroginu-yama”. But the Daisetsuzan name prevailed when the eponymous national park was promulgated, in 1934.

Again, Fukada regrets this “progress”:

For traditionalists like myself, the Ainu names have a familiar, even nostalgic, ring to them, but there’s no standing in the way of progress, I suppose. … As for the meaning, the indigenous people hit the mark exactly with their artless and direct way of naming features of the landscape. Two great rivers, the Ishikari and the Tokachi, do indeed rise in these mountains and flow around their feet.

Strange to say, it was also within the sprawling massif of the Daisetsuzan – or Nutakukamuushupe –that Japan’s modern mapmakers briefly overcame their reluctance to name natural features after real people. For on a plateau called Kumonodaira or “The Field of Clouds”, a name lifted from a mountain range on Honshū, are found a scatter of minor peaks that commemorate historical figures.

There is a Keigetsu-dake that commemorates an ascent by the poet Ōmachi Keigetsu (1869-1925), a Matsuda-dake for Matsuda Ichitarō, the first Japanese explorer of the Ishikari River during the 1850s, and Koizumi-dake for Koizumi Hideo (1885-1945), a teacher and pioneer of the massif. In like fashion, Mamiya-dake is named for Mamiya Rinzō (1775-1844), the circumnavigator of Sakhalin.

All these names are associated with explorers of the Daisetsuzan or at least visitors. As such, they seem to fit the landscape. Since they appear on the official maps, the government’s surveyors must have approved them, even if they didn’t come up with the names themselves. And, in this case, although a traditionalist in mountain nomenclature, the Hyakumeizan author seems to have passed on without raising any objection.

Musings on mountain names (3)

Naming mountains after people can lead to unforeseen complications

Johann Wilhelm Fortunat Coaz (1822-1918) has an alpine hut named after him, but no mountain peak. That is probably how he would have liked it. In the Swiss Alpine Club’s yearbook for 1865, the eminent Swiss surveyor, forester and alpine pioneer set out his position as follows:

By and large, naming summits after people is not something that I can favour. I feel that it is presumptuous of our generation to associate our fleeting lives with mountains that are hundreds of thousands of years older than we are, and that will outlive us by an equal span.

At the Hotel des Neuchatelois: where mountains were named after people
Illustration by Paul Hertig, Biel

Two years previously, Switzerland’s ruling council had summarily rebranded the country’s highest summit, in honour of an even better known surveyor than Coaz. Thus it was that Monte Rosa’s Höchste Spitze transitioned into today’s Dufourspitze (4,634 metres).

Whether or not it was this episode that got Coaz’s goat is unknown to this blogger. But, in general, it seems that most of his countrymen have always agreed with him: mountains should not be named after people.

Yet, even in the Swiss Alps, a few exceptions crop out. As noted in the previous post, the Austrian surveyor Ludwig von Welden (1780-1853) did name a few subsidiary peaks of the Monte Rosa massif after their early pioneers (including himself). This was in the 1820s. But he bestowed these names from the Italian side of the massif, even if they were afterwards acknowledged on Swiss maps too.

Some years later, though, a sprinkling of entirely Swiss family names appeared on those maps. And, unlike the Monte Rosa subpeaks named by von Welden, which straddle the Swiss-Italian border, the mountains so affected lie entirely within Switzerland.

It is here, in the remote Grimsel region, that we find an Escherhorn, an Agassizhorn, a Desorstock and a Studerhorn, among others. These names can be traced back to a sunny evening in 1840 at the “Hôtel des Neuchâtelois”. This was a large boulder that served as a summer bivouac for a group of largely French-speaking natural philosophers while they pursued their investigations into the icy world around them. The work was led by Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), soon to win fame as the leading proponent of a former Ice Age.

Louis Agassiz, Ice Age pioneer

After a hard day’s work probing into the secrets of the Unteraar Glacier, the assembled savants asked their guide what the surrounding peaks might be called. Jakob Leuthold, a local man from the Haslital, replied that, except for the Finsteraarhorn and the Oberaarhorn, none had names. Whereupon the savants decided to fill in these blanks on the map. So, starting with the Scheuchzerhorn, to honour an eighteenth-century pioneer of alpine research, they proceeded to memorialise some more recent scholar-mountaineers, including themselves.

“Memorialised” may be to overstate the matter. For sure, these names still appear on Switzerland’s official maps. But, after less than two centuries, their associations with historical figures are already fraying at the edges. Take the Studerhorn. Already people have difficulty remembering – and agreeing – which of two candidates it might commemorate. Was it Gottlieb Samuel Studer (1804-1890, right), a founder of the Swiss Alpine Club, or, perhaps a shade more likely, his cousin, the eminent geognost Bernhard Rudolf Studer (1794-1887)?

By contrast, nobody can forget whose name adorns the Agassizhorn. And that is the problem. For after catapulting himself to worldwide fame for his glacial researches, the great scholar crossed the Atlantic to become a professor of geology and zoology at Harvard University. And there, much later in his career, he published views about the origins of the human race that have since become incendiary.

As a result, some propose that the Agassizhorn should be “cancelled”. In 2008, Sasha Huber, an artist of Swiss-Haitian heritage, flew in a chartered helicopter to its summit. There she planted a placard calling for the peak to be renamed the “Rentyhorn”, after an ex-Congolese slave whom Agassiz had caused to be photographed in support of his theories.

To date, the Agassizhorn can still be found on the official maps. But even if it were to be rebranded, that would still leave a plethora of geographical features named after the glacial pioneer, including several more mountains, all in North America, to say nothing of a glacier and a creek, as well as a Crater Agassiz on Mars and a main-belt asteroid.

It will probably be a while until the world sorts through all the historical complexities that can arise from naming mountains after actual people. Until then, Coaz’s sound advice, as quoted above, might deserve some wider consideration.

References

Paul Hertig, Wie die Berge zu ihren Namen kamen: Wer waren die Männer die mit Gipfelnamen geehrt wurden?, Einwohnergemeinde Guttanen.

Musings on mountain names (2)

Map-making didn't always bring order to the medley of mountain nomenclature

The Gran Paradiso stands out as Italy’s sole 4,000-metre peak. In the summer of 1860, though, it proved difficult enough to find, let alone scale. As explained by John Jermyn Cowell (1838-1867), a Cambridge “Apostle” turned alpine pioneer, the problem was this:

Some mountains, which undoubtedly have a material existence, are unfortunate enough to have no name (for which reason, of course, I cannot point out an example); and on the other hand, some mountains which undoubtedly have names – and well-known names too – such as the Aiguille de la Vanoise and Mont Iseran, unfortunately have no material existence. But the Grand Paradis, previously to 1859, suffered from both these disadvantages at once …

Proof positive that the Gran Paradiso exists
Image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure

The European Alps had no monopoly on nameless peaks. When Japanese climbers inaugurated their own “golden age” of mountain exploration, in the early twentieth century, they came up against the same sort of lacunae. This was particularly the case in remote regions such as "the innermost mountains of Sunshū Tashiro”, soon to be rebranded as the Southern Japan Alps. In an early edition of the Japanese Alpine Club’s journal, Ogino Otomatsu describes a trip to this fastness in September 1906, less than a year after the club’s establishment:

From time to time, we could see through the trees, on the other side of the valley, a mighty peak, bare-topped and reddish, in the midst of the Akaishi range. When I asked Kōhei, our hunter-guide, what it was, he called it Warusawa on account of the extremely dangerous gully that drains the waters of this mountain into the Nishimata. This sounded much as if he had just said the first thing that came into his mind …. (as quoted in Nihon Hyakumeizan).

Neither Cowell nor Ogino could refer to modern maps of their respective mountain ranges. As one would expect, it was the surveyors sent out by central governments who did most to fix mountain names in place. In a paper entitled “Mountains have names!”, Professor Martin Scharfe, a cultural historian from Bavaria, tells the story of Ludwig von Welden, an officer in the Austrian imperial service who had somehow ended up in Italy.

In 1821, von Welden visited the Monte Rosa group, which straddles the Swiss-Italian border with the aim of surveying it. But he soon found that none of its individual summits were named. Any and all high peaks in the region were pointed out to him as “Monte Rosa”. But, making a virtue out of necessity, he proceeded to make good the deficit, naming many of the previously anonymous peaks for pioneers of the range. This is why we now have the Zumsteinspitze, the Parrotspitze and the Vincentpyramide. And von Welden himself was immortalised in the Ludwigshöhe (4,341m).

Today's monomial Jungfrau
Image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure

Elsewhere in the Alps, so far from lacking a name, some prominent peaks had an excess of them. As late as the decade and a half between 1775 and 1790, so Martin Scharfe records, four names each were in use for the Bernese Oberland’s Eiger and Jungfrau, and a “whopping seven” for the Mönch, the mountain that sits between them. Small wonder that Conrad Escher von der Linth, a Zurich-based silk merchant and mountain maven, complained in 1806 that the “muddling and confusion of names … was getting out of hand”.

As in the Alps, so in Japan. In his Nihon Hyakumeizan, Fukada Kyūya records many a case where the inhabitants of different valleys called the same mountain by different names. Or the same name drifted from one mountain to another over time.

A White Crumbling Peak also known as Kaikoma
Image by courtesy of Alpsdake (via Wikipedia)

Take Kaikoma, for example. This great pyramid of shattered granite obtrudes itself from the northern apex of the Southern Alps. That is why Shinshū folk used to call it Shirokuzure-yama, the White Crumbling Peak. But the name in use today makes it one of Japan’s many “horse mountains”, akin to one of those plentiful Rossbergs or Rossstocks in the German-speaking Alps. Indeed, there is another horse mountain just down the road, in neighbouring Kiso province. But neither name was sufficiently poetic for Monk Kairyō, who used yet another alternative in this deftly turned tanka:

Hills lap over valleys in the mountains of Kai

Alone amid the clouds floats Tetsuri-no-mine

The azure beauty of its summit stands forth

When the snows melt in May, against the blue sky .

In the Alps as in Japan, it fell to the modern mapmakers to impose order on mountain nomenclature.In Switzerland, the first nationwide mapping surveys were organised by General Henri Dufour (1787-1875), whose name has, by official decree, adorned the highest summit in the Monte Rosa massif since 1863. In the course of this rationalisation, some perfectly serviceable names were lost for ever.

Formerly known as the Silver Beard, or perhaps Saddle
Image by courtesy of Alpine Light & Structure

For example, the sweeping frontier ridge once known as the Silberbart (Silver Beard) was restyled (by Dufour) as the Lyskamm – although, according to Martin Scharfe – nobody has a clue where this name came from. But another authority says that the Lys element refers to a valley on the mountain’s southern, Italian, side. And also that the mountain’s previous name was not Silberbart but Silberbast (Silver Saddle).

As this episode suggests, chaos no less than clarity could proceed from the surveyors’ efforts. Professor Scharfe goes so far as to say that “A substantial number of the mountain names that are familiar today probably resulted from simple misunderstandings – misheard or mistranscribed, mistakes that went unnoticed at the time.”

This might be particularly true if the surveyor in question was deaf. The unfortunate Peter Anich (1723-1766) from Perfuß near Innsbruck had lost his hearing early on, Professor Scharfe records, so that “one had to shout every word slowly and clearly, directly into his ears, if one wanted him to understand”. Unsurprisingly, this “caused him more than a little trouble (as can easily be deduced) in his geometric work, especially because of the many names of the places he measured and the rivers and districts he described.”

Much the same could happen in early modern Japan. A mountain of the Jōshin-Etsu region called “Warimeki-yama” (Crevice Peak) is reliably attested in the nineteenth century yet appears nowhere on modern maps. Musing on this mystery, the Hyakumeizan author Fukada Kyūya posits that the army surveyors simply misheard the name as they passed through: “Warimiki did you say? Aha, that’ll be Waribiki then.”

In a way, these cases are curiously reassuring. It’s as if the untamed mountains, the realm of nature, have successfully resisted all human attempts to impose order on them.

References

J J Cowell FRGS, “Two ascents of the Grand Paradis”, in Peaks, Passes and Glaciers, Second Series, Vol II, London 1862.

Martin Scharfe, ‘Mountains have names’: on the history of how mountain names became established, Bavarian Studies in History and Culture, English version, 2021.

Nathalie Henseler, Gipfelgeschichten: Wie die Schweizer Berge zu ihren Namen kamen, Faro im Fona Verlag AG, 2010.

Fukada Kyūya, One Hundred Mountains of Japan, Hawaii University Press, 2014. 

Musings on mountain names (1)

Investigating the curious case of the Thirty-Three Bay Mountain

Sanjūsangen-zan is an 844 metres-high eminence that sits on the prefectural border between Fukui and Shiga Prefectures. What an evocative name that is. It links the mountain with one of Kyoto’s most storied temples – the Sanjūsangen-dō, founded in 1164 by none other than Taira no Kiyomori (1118-1181), the overlord who first brought martial rule to Japan. And then, for his sins, died a fiery death from an unquenchable fever.

The fever of Taira no Kiyomori
Woodprint from the Fitzwilliam Museum collection

But does the Mountain of the Thirty-Three Bays – a literal rendition of Sanjūsangen-zan (三十三間山) –  really have anything to do with this temple? Sometimes there may be less to a mountain name than meets the eye, as Fukada Kyūya here and there points out in One Hundred Mountains of Japan. In the essay on Mizugaki-yama, for example, he casts doubt on whether this high-sounding name really had such exalted roots:

When our ancestors named mountains, they certainly did not trouble themselves to consider mountaineering organizations looking for titles for their magazines. Far from being inspiring, the names they chose were extremely down-to-earth. Taking their cue from a mountain's color or shape or state, they came up with names like Spear (Yari), Red Peak (Aka-dake), or Landslide (Ōkuzure). Or they borrowed from the implements in their daily round, as in Basket (Zaru), Saddle (Kura), or Screen (Byōbu).

So, the Hyakumeizan author suggests, Mizugaki’s name probably had little to do with the “inner sanctuary” that its written form suggests. Instead, it may have started out as a corruption of “mitsunagi”, a word indicating where three ridges run together. 

Mizugaki-yama: probably not an inner sanctuary
Image by courtesy of Σ64 (via Wikipedia)

Hijiri-dake, a three-thousander in Japan’s Southern Alps gets the same sort of take-down. “Who could fail to be intrigued by Hijiri, the Peak of the Saint?” asks Fukada at the start of his essay, adding that “it is a name that befits this splendid mountain.” Alas, he is merely setting us up for disappointment:

Being for the most part pragmatic, rough-and-ready folk, we Japanese name most of our mountains for everyday objects that are brought to mind by the actual and obvious shape of the terrain. Elegant, literary appellations are correspondingly rare. This Hijiri-dake is no exception. A gully runs up into the mountain from the upper reaches of the Ōi river. As it is necessary to sidle along ledges ("hezuru") to get through this dangerous gorge, the place was called "hezuri-sawa". Corrupted into "hijiri", this name was afterwards taken by the entire mountain. This, at least, was the explanation that I remember reading in a book by Kanmuri Matsujirō …

This is not to say that all of Fukada’s mountains take their names from workaday tools or obvious geographical features. Some names enshrine their peak’s religious significance, as in Daibōsatsu, Nantai, Ryōgami, Yakushi-dake and Zao. Others may echo a folk legend, like those of Shiomi-dake and perhaps Naeba-san. And some are simply obscure: nobody can really explain how Tsukuba and Gassan got their names, although oddly both seem to incorporate the moon.

View of Sanjusangen-zan
Photo courtesy of Yama-to-Keikoku

So where does that leave us with Sanjūsangen-zan? Is it a corruption of some local dialect word, or is it really linked to that Kyoto temple? If you prefer the latter story, a glance at YamaKei’s gazetteer of Japanese mountains gives grounds for hope:

The unusual name of the mountain is said to derive from the fact that the building timbers of the Sanjusangendō in Kyoto were felled here. It is likely that the lumber felled on the mountain was first transported by the Amasukawa River and then drawn over the low Mizusaka Pass to Lake Biwa. Even today, old beech and mizunara oak forests remain on the Fukui Prefecture side of Sanjusangen-zan, reminding us of long ago when the trees were felled.

You know, if YamaKei’s write-up isn’t historically attested, then it deserves to be. You could imagine that, one day, a young savant might take isotope samples from the wooden columns in the Sanjūsangen-dō and trace them right back to their terroir on the slopes of the Thirty-Three Bay Mountain. Or, on second thoughts, perhaps the savants should keep their hands off this one. Some legends are best left uninvestigated.