The river is never the same (2)

Continued: an excursion along the Kurobe River's Upper Corridor

“Though the river's current never fails, the water passing, moment by moment, is never the same. Where the current pools, bubbles form on the surface, bursting and disappearing as others rise to replace them, none lasting long. In this world, people and their dwelling places are like that, always changing.”

In his classic Account of a Ten-Foot Square Hut, Kamo no Chōmei presents himself as the reclusive literary type. But his opening passage, quoted above, outs him as a prototypical Heian-era sawanaut, one who well understood the morphing, braiding, mining, sapping ways of a great river.

Had we read our Chōmei, we wouldn’t have been surprised to find ourselves forced into a roped river crossing where, only a few years before, Sawa Control and I had just kept walking along an easy embankment. And we would have spared ourselves the shock, right now, of finding a deep channel where none had previously existed.

This too was a crux pitch. The rock walls of the gorge were too steep to climb. Our buoyant packs floated us too lightly for us to use our feet to make headway; and we couldn’t swim against the current. Eventually we slipped through by flattening ourselves ninja-like against the rock.

While we’d been tussling with the river, the sunlight had retreated to the mountaintops. Down in the gorge’s shadows, we urged ourselves forward. Campsites are far and few between in the Upper Corridor, and I was aiming for the one that we’d found on the previous visit, a broad tableland standing several metres above water level. Then, you could have pitched a small town of tents on it.

“I’m sure it was here,” I said, “right here in this bend.” And there, indeed, it was, when we looked more closely. But the tableland was gone; in its place stood a mere pedestal, washed down to a sliver of its former size. As Chōmei might have warned us, the river had shifted the scenery as dramatically as in any opera.

We scrambled up the bank and found a flat patch of sand for our bivvy shelter. Shivering in the evening gloom, we changed into dry clothes and scrabbled around for firewood. There wasn’t much to find on this portaledge-sized terrain.

We saw no trace of any prior occupants on our pedestal – in fact, we would see no trace of human existence until we climbed out of the river next day: no footprints, no pitons, no garbage, nothing to indicate that other people had ever passed that way. There weren’t even any contrails in the sky above. We were the sole inhabitants of this gorge.

It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man, says Thoreau in his account of a river climb up Mt Ktaadn, “We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and dread and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. … Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe … Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific … the home, this, of Necessity and Fate …We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste …”

It was too dark now to go in search of berries. Nor did we expect any smart or spicy taste from the sachet of freeze-dried food that I’d just retrieved from the depths of my army pack and set to simmer on the Epigas stove. Not that we cared – after six hours in the river, our appetites, like those of Edward Gibbon’s Gallic army, were as indelicate as they were voracious. Caspar got a feeble campfire going just as the moon floated clear of the unhandselled ridge above us. Then we sat down on a river-rounded boulder to eat.

(Continued)

The river is never the same (1)

How two sawa-nauts learned respect for the Kurobe

The weather wasn’t to blame: the forenoon sun, roaring down from a cloudless sky, had bleached all colour from the landscape. Nor was our pace anything to fret about; yomping under ferry-weight packs, we’d easily make the boat across the lake. If the two of us weren’t fit enough for the Kurobe River, we never would be. Yet something still bothered me.

We’d left Shinjuku at 2am to start the five-hour run to the Northern Alps, the weatherbeaten Subaru lurching out into Kabuki-chō’s rush hour. Caspar had come straight from a bar: strictly business, he explained. I wasn’t afraid that lack of sleep would affect him – a few months back, he’d helmed a yacht through a particularly knockabout iteration of the Sydney-Hobart race. No, it was more the attitude that unsettled. I mean, if the Kurobe River and the Southern Ocean have one thing in common, it’s that nobody disses them.

On the once-a-day boat across the lake, we were the only passengers. This too gave me mixed feelings. On one hand, too much company might diminish the majesty of the wild Upper Corridor, the river gorge through the corrugated heart of Japan’s Northern Alps. On the other, if anything happened, the nearest hut was a day away and the mountains would muffle any bleating from radios or phones – not that we were carrying either. Time, though, was pressing – we were both due to leave Japan soon, and this was our last chance to explore the great river.

Two hours later, we’d gone as far as paths would take us. From here, it was us and the river. We swung our packs onto the river-smoothed gravel and assumed the guise of sawa-nauts; in my case, UV-faded polypro mountaineering clothes hiding a sawn-off wetsuit; a natty banana-hued ensemble for Caspar. Felt-soled sawa shoes replaced hiking boots. We put on climbing harnesses too, but no helmets – they drag your head down when filled with water.

The Upper Corridor of the Kurobe River lures you in gently. Like the immaculately raked approach to a shrine, an expanse of white cobbles leads towards the layered cliffs of Kuro-pinga. We walked to its end and crossed the river in water that was barely knee-deep. Perhaps this would be easy.

Soon we were disabused. Dry land ran out in the cliff’s shadow, where the river bends sharply and pinches down into a gorge. The river had to be crossed again, this time above a cheese-grater set of rapids that promised to punish any slip-up. Level with us, the river slid by like a green slab of steel on some monstrous high-speed production line. In its headlong drive towards the Japan Sea, the Kurobe didn’t seem to leave much scope for negotiating a crossing.

I doffed my pack again, uncoiled the dayglow pink rope, and tied it unhastily into my harness loop. To tell the truth, I wasn’t in a hurry to try conclusions with this river. When Caspar had taken up what I hoped was a firm stance behind a boulder, I waded into the racing green waves, eyes fixed on the far bank to avoid disorientation, and launched myself across the channel, like a human rescue rocket. As the rope twanged taut, dragging me off my footing, a bowshock of green water smacked me in the face.

Struggling to my feet and wiping the water from my eyes, I found myself in the shallows, back where I’d started. A second try, and again the river swept me contemptuously aside. Like I said, nobody disses the Kurobe, but the sentiment isn’t necessarily reciprocated. Yet we had to get across if we wanted to reach our bivvy site before nightfall.

Something different was needed. Forget the rescue rocket; instead, I would angle myself like a paravane, getting the current to swing me across the channel. Warning Caspar, I walked into the river again. When the green firehose hit, I felt the rope stretch, as if soaking up the shock of a climbing fall – it thrummed with the strain – but the ploy worked. Staggering up the opposite bank, the river cascading from my gear, I set about finding a belay.

Then it was Caspar’s turn for the laundromat. As he lurched to his feet at the end of the rope, water sluicing from all freeing ports, I saw respect in the eyes of a man who had faced down the yacht-smashing waves of the Southern Ocean. “You know,” he said, after he'd sufficiently recovered himself, “when you kited yourself across the river, the rope was slowly dragging me over the boulder. The friction of my kneepads was the only thing still holding us.” Now it was my turn to be thoughtful.

(Continued)

Mountain photography in yellow brick mode

Camera review: wading with a Weathermatic up the wildest river in the Japan Alps

Ah, the joys of yestergear. Yes, you read that right – I mean, today’s gear gets plenty of attention from Bre’er Hendrik and many other puissant hiking and mountaineering bloggers.

But what about the kit that Workmen Alpinists used twenty years ago? Who’s going to write about that? Well, I guess I’ll have to fill the gap myself, starting with a review of the Minolta Weathermatic Dual 35 (above). This, for the benefit of youthful readers, was an imaging device that captured light on a chemical-smeared synthetic substrate. We called it “film”.

As I had to get my Weathermatic in a hurry, from Yodobashi Camera’s pullulating multi-storey emporium in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, I probably paid close to the full list price of ¥36,800. Back home, I unpacked what looked like a yellow brick, solid as a bank vault, with an armoured window jutting from its front casing.

“Your Minolta Weathermatic DUAL 35 is a fully waterproof 35mm camera that is designed so that you can take pictures anywhere you go,” I read in the instruction leaflet. Apparently, I was the proud owner of “the world’s first waterproof camera that lets you select either standard (35mm) or tele (50mm) lenses at the touch of a button.”

I needed a waterproof camera because Sawa Control had just invited me on his return match with the fearsome Kurobe River, a multi-day swimming and scrambling expedition through the upper reaches of Honshu’s wildest mountain river gorge. No ordinary camera was going to survive this epic. And even the Weathermatic’s creators seemed to have their doubts.

“The Weathermatic DUAL 35’s watertight seals and rugged body are designed so that you take pictures in any weather and anywhere,” the manual says, “however, special attention must be given to the following precautions:”

In the event, the river let us off lightly - there was no need to surf or dive.  In just two days, we made it all the way through the Kurobe’s “inner corridor” to the hut in Yakushi-sawa. Perhaps we relaxed too much. On the second day, I tripped over in a boulder field, falling on top of the camera. The Weathermatic wasn’t even scratched; it was my ribs that came away with contusions.

But can this yellow brick actually take pictures? Eccentrically, the camera works only with two film speeds – ASA 100 or 400. I opted for 400-speed Fuji slide film, as river gorges can be dark and gloomy. Alas, the Provia proved a touch too fast in brightly lit places, where some pictures came out overexposed.

Where it mattered, though, the Weathermatic’s metering was spot on. The photo above shows Sawa Control moving pack-awash through a deep channel. Note how the film manages to capture the shadowed foreground without getting completely burned out by the sunlit rocks behind. That’s a trick that digital sensors still struggle to emulate.

Sharpness, said Henri Cartier-Bresson, is a bourgeois concept. Weathermatic users are compelled to agree. In anything less than the brightest light, this lens is what Ansel Adams would call a fuzzy-wuzzy. It harasses the light a little as it passes by; its zones of confusion would extend beyond the planet Pluto. It is, in short, an optic of the Anti-Leica.

Does it matter, though? To my mind, the unsharp image (right) does honour to the way that the late-afternoon light shimmered off the river as we worked our way towards that first day’s bivouac site. On the other hand, National Geographic is never going to beat a path to your door if you use a Weathermatic.

On the fourth and final day of our expedition, we went home over Washiba-dake. The camera’s metering coped well with all manner of lighting, from the pre-dawn airglow over Yari, through fogbows above the clouds, to the gloom of forest glades on the long, straggling ridge that we descended. Only the flower pictures were a bust – the autofocus couldn’t cope with close-up subjects.

After this trip, though, the crappy lens, the limited zoom (35mm or 50mm, but nothing in between), and the sketchy autofocus meant that the Weathermatic stayed at home whenever I could get away with something less robust. On our second visit to the Kurobe, three years later, I took along one of the newfangled Pentax Zoom WR90s, which had a proper zoom lens and better metering.

My last outing with the Weathermatic was a winter climb on Yatsu-ga-take. The last pitch of Sekison Ridge takes you into a steeply angled lava tube, almost like a miniature subway tunnel, except that the roof had fallen in. I was halfway up this defile when the rope came tight – we’d run out of slack, and Mike, belaying 50 metres below, couldn’t hear my shouts for him to come up.

For a moment, it looked as if an unstructured situation might develop. Jammed in my tube like a Northern Line train in the London Underground, I could move neither up (no rope) nor down (too steep). Spindrift came blasting up the tunnel, driven by a fierce cold northerly. The last piece of protection was far below. A giant chock was desperately needed, to slot into the only wide crack within reach. Unfortunately I had no such gear with me. Unless, perhaps, the camera would fit.

Before the Weathermatic could be put to this ultimate test, Mike moved up and the rope came free. So I never did find out how this most bombproof of cameras might function as a makeshift bong. No, not that kind of bong. In our day, a bong was a kind of expanded piton made of folded aluminium, specially shaped for off-width cracks. Really, is it necessary to spell out everything for the youth of today?

Tao of sawa

赤木沢出合にて, a photo by Alpine Light & Structure on Flickr.

Is sawa-nobori, the Japanese art of river-climbing, just an offshoot of modern alpinism - or is it something entirely different? After pondering that question in a previous post, I came across this quotation from Mishima Yukio's novel, The Sea of Fertility:

Mahayana Buddhism, especially the Yuishiki school, interpreted the world as a torrential and swift rapids or a great white cascade which never pauses. Since the world presented the form of a waterfall, both the basic cause of that world and the basis of man's perception of it were waterfalls. It is a world that lives and dies at every moment. There is no definite proof of existence in either past or future, and only the present instant which one can touch with one's hand and see with one's eye is real.

Related post: The ahistoricity of sawa

Sucker hunch

In Japanese river climbing, unusual challenges demand special solutions

Surly and turbid was the mood of the Tamba River, swollen by the June rains. A sneak eddy had already taken down N-san. He bobbed up again, but not his spectacles, alas.

Now, on a gravel shoal ahead, Sawa Control was setting up a belay. “You can do this,” he said, handing me the wet end of the rope. This time, though, he would be wrong.

Flailing my way across the foaming pool was no problem – but, upstream, where the gorge narrowed, the current speeded up. As Mr Micawber might have said, had Charles Dickens been more into river climbing, “Swimming speed, two knots; flow rate, three knots: result, ignominy.”

Climbing round the impasse didn’t appeal; the gorge was sheer. As for hauling oneself upstream, no crack or hold came to hand on those slimy walls of chert. Try as we might, the river kept flushing us back into that foaming pool. Eventually, we had to give up – we’d come back when there was less water.

Back at home, reading a ‘how-to’ book, I realised we’d lacked a vital piece of kit. That’s right; the humble drain unblocker. Slap one onto a hopelessly smooth wall (see right) and you can haul yourself forward against raging torrents of moving water. Indeed, the slimier the rock, the better it sticks.

For really critical passages, you might even consider a brace of them - one in each hand, like ice-climbing tools (only cheaper). But don’t forget to lanyard your unblockers to your belt. In strong currents, as any sawa-naut will tell you, there’s a sucker borne away every minute …


References

Yoshikawa Eiichi, Sawa nobori: nyumon to gaido, Yama to keikoku, 1990 (black-and-white photo is from this book)

The ahistoricity of sawa

Tracing the Japanese art of river climbing back to its mysterious roots

Solitary sawa-naut

At first sight, the history of Japanese mountaineering seems clear-cut. Monks and mystics started climbing high mountains in the eighth century. Mt Fuji got its first ascent two or three hundred years later. In the Edo period, some people went up mountains just for fun. But modern alpinism didn’t arrive until 1905, when Kojima Usui and friends founded the Sangakaku-kai or Japanese Alpine Club…

What about sawa-nobori, though? How do we fit the art of river gorge climbing into this historical sequence? My usual reference work doesn’t even try. If you look at YamaKei’s illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering, the topic is relegated to a couple of pages in the last-but-one chapter. Even then, the book doesn’t venture to suggest how sawa-nobori originated, or whether it relates to other branches of mountaineering.

Several sara-nauts

For these origins seem to be truly obscure. According to Yoshikawa Eiichi, author of an excellent ‘how to’ book, nobody can agree if sawa-nobori represents a uniquely Japanese art, or whether it merely split off from Western-style alpinism. Yoshikawa favours the latter view, but offers no evidence. And, he admits, attitudes towards sawa-nobori have radically changed in recent decades.

When Yoshikawa first joined a mountaineering club, sawa-nobori was just a lowly rung on the ladder that led from hiking to Himalayan climbing. It ranked above mountain walking, but below rock-climbing and alpinism. Young climbers would climb sawas in ordinary mountain boots until they were confident enough to tackle big rock routes in gnarly places like Ichinokura-sawa. In those days, the mark of an expert sawa-naut was that he never got his feet wet.

Kanmuri & Co explore the Kurobe River

Like many traditional hierarchies, this one broke down in the 1960s. During the Woodstock decade – actually, in Japan it was more of a riot-and- teargas decade – river climbing finally broke free and became a sport in its own right. Thus far Yoshikawa. I’d add that the process was probably helped by the appearance of specialised kit – such as the wet socks and wading boots with brillo-pad soles that you can buy in any Japanese mountain gear store today. Now sawa-nauts were willing, eager even, to get their feet wet.

Fast forward two decades, and we find a young activist applying these tools to the ultimate sawa project. Shimizu Tetsuya spent two autumns in the late 1980s exploring every tributary and gorge of the Kurobe region in the heart of the Japan Northern Alps. This included a highly technical solo through the precipitous Tsurugi-sawa ravine. Sawa-nobori was no longer an apprenticeship for beginners; as practised by Shimizu, it had evolved into an extreme sport that drew on every advanced rope-trick in the alpine manual.

Kanmuri & Co inspect Juji-kyo

But – hold it – did Shimizu really represent a new wave? You could say that, except for his ultra-modern climbing techniques, he followed very much in a tradition. Take Kanmuri Matsujiro, for example, who spent many a summer in the 1920s exploring every nook and cranny of the Kurobe valley. And then there was Tanabe Jūji (1884-1972), another Japanese Alpine Club man, who turned away from high mountain expeditions to explore the less rugged Chichibu hills. It was among their forests and gorges, he explained, that he felt most at home.

Kanmuri and Tanabe could draw on a lengthy heritage. Their thoughts about nature can be traced through a long line of writers and poets far back into the middle ages. This tanka, by Saigyō (1118-1190), the all-terrain poet of late Heian times, captures the very essence of a sawa climb:

In Tsurugi-sawa

瀬をはやみ宮瀧川を渡り行けば心の底のすむ心地する

making my way 

through the whirling rapids of Miyataki river

I have the sense of being washed clean

to the base of my heart

(translation by William Lafleur)

Come to think about it, the poem helps to explain why sawa-nobori is hard to set in a historical context. You can always pin down when a new set of techniques – such as aid-climbing or ski-mountaineering – came in. But river climbing has always been less of a technology and more of a state of mind.

References

Yoshikawa Eiichi, Sawa nobori: nyumon to gaido, Yama to keikoku, 1990 (top two photos are from this book)

Yama to Keikoku illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering (目で見る日本登山史 by 川崎吉光、山と渓谷社) (lower three black-and-white photos are from this book)

Envoy

One summer, three workman alpinists set off up a sawa in the Nasu volcanic range. This was a river gorge in the Mirkwood mould, dark and dangerous. When a thunderstorm broke out, rocks started tumbling from the overhanging cliffs. The crux waterfall was surmounted by a scary pitch on steep, holdless slime, unprotectable by piton, bolt or chock.

As daylight faded, they came to a dell with a level floor and pitched their lightweight bivvy tent in a nest of panda grass. Nasu is far distant from the marquee peaks of the Japan Alps. Yet it was here that the sawa-nauts were overtaken by an odd sense – just a passing thought, really – that never again would they come so close to the heart of the Japanese mountains.

Notes of a summer trip (2)

Continued: the mountain explorations of Professor Atkinson and his colleagues in the summer of 1879. Part II - escape from Yatsugatake and sawa-climbing on Hakusan.

Atkinson and Nakazawa were on the narrowest part of the ridge when it started raining. The worst piece of climbing was where the branches of the creeping pine hung over the abyss and nobody could be certain of stepping upon and not over the ridge: “This part, I confess, I got over on hands and feet in fear and trembling, sincerely glad that we did not intend returning the same way …”

But they did have to return the same way. Aka-dake was already looming above them when the guide reported an impasse ahead; a chasm had apparently opened up since his last visit. To add to the party’s troubles, a full thunderstorm now broke out, deafening them with one of the most violent peals of thunder that Atkinson had ever heard. Or ever wished to hear. Back on Mikaburi-yama, they went astray in the tangled wood, the guide lost all confidence, and it was Mr Nakazawa who found the way back to the hot spring hut using a compass.

Quieter days followed, travelling northwards across Shinshu. They passed through villages with many a silk-winding establishment and they visited the famous shrine of Suwa. A road like a “well kept gravelled path” led them towards the Gombei Pass over to Fukushima (above) on the Nakasendo road. Like all large towns, griped Atkinson, it possessed no good hotel; “we stayed at the best and found it very indifferent”.

The next night they stayed at Odaki, a staging place for pilgrims on their way to Ontake:

The time for the great incursion of pilgrims had not yet arrived, but even now there were a great many in the tea-houses. They form themselves into companies, and, under the guidance of a leader, who is generally elected on account of the number of times he has made the pilgrimage, start on their journey on a particular day, and are expected to arrive. at the various places on their way at fixed times. On that day the hotel keeper suspends, in a conspicuous place, one of the small flags seen hanging in front of the house, with the badge of the band expected, or already in the house.

The mountain paths were narrow. On the pass over to Hida, one of their pack-horses fell 120 feet down a mountainside. By a minor miracle, both the beast and their baggage were recovered unhurt. On another watershed, they were plagued by hornets; the guides provided them with strips of bark that, when lit, gave off a “stifling smoke”.

Every day they moved deeper into the countryside. At Kaware, they noticed that the mulberry trees were cultivated in the old fashion, growing up into tall trees. The fields looked like orchards, an effect much more pleasing than the modern style espoused in Shinshu, where the trees were pollarded down. “Never had I been so much out of the world as I now was,” thought Dixon.

By the time they reached the Shirakawa valley, with its steep-gabled houses, they were so deep in that people in the villages no longer regarded them as “objects of curiosity”. Indeed, one old man “professed the greatest astonishment” that the Englishmen were not high-ranking Japanese officials.

At long last, they were in sight of Hakusan. At 10.30 am on July 31, they started out from Miboro. Soon they were scrambling over steep rocks and wading to and fro across a mountain stream. Like many a future sawa climber, Atkinson was forced to rethink his footwear:

Up to the first fording I had been walking in boots with waraji (straw sandals) underneath, but on exchanging them for tabi and waraji, I found the latter so good for this kind of climbing, not only because of the ease with which one can wade though water, but also because the footing on smooth rocks is so much firmer, that I continued walking in them to the summit.

Even with the correct footgear, Dixon found his first river-climbing excursion quite taxing:

We were now climbing a perpendicular wall of rock, fitting our feet into the crevices and pulling ourselves up with the assistance of twigs; again, cautiously terracing a sheer precipice, a deep green pool gleaming far below the narrow and shaky tree-trunks which formed our road; again, clutching at withes to prevent ourselves from sliding with dangerous rapidity down a slippery declivity. There were scores of places where the utmost circumspection was necessary to avoid a fall either into the river or among sharp stones or into entanglements of brushwood. And now we have descended, or rather slidden, to the river's bed, and are leaping from boulder to boulder, — above, crags and tier upon tier of foliage, — in front, behind, and around, the flashing of the white rapids. A point is reached, where it is necessary to ford the stream. One or two of the guides are already stemming the current with the water considerably above their knees. It seems to take all their strength, loaded as they are, to resist the force of the stream. Presently, laying down their loads on the farther bank, some of them return to our assistance; and, grasping the sticks extended to us, we each stagger across the current.

Yet, when this moment of peril is past, he becomes perhaps the first Englishman ever to comprehend the true joys of sawa-nobori:

The scenery of this glen was simply glorious. At one place where we had to ford the torrent three times in about ten minutes, the rocks rose almost sheer on each side, brightened with crimson azaleas and with the early autumn tints of creepers. This gorge led to an open semi-circular space with a beach of glistening white sand, above which in striking contrast towered pinnacled crags, surmounting multitudes of dark cryptomeria spires, — a sublime natural cathedral, where the 'voice of streams' ever rises in melodious echoes up to the throne of God.

Next day, after overnighting in a woodcutter’s hut (above), they passed a hot sulphur spring and some steam vents before encountering their “first glacier or more properly snow slope”. This they ascended easily, driving in their iron-shod poles for support. The second snow field was steeper, but the most dangerous part of the ascent was yet to come. This was a narrow and steep gorge, well named Jigoku-dani, “which we might translate freely as the valley of the shadow of death”.

At first, though, they saw no danger in the place...

To be continued

References

Text references: see previous post. All pictures except top and bottom ones are from Walter Weston, Mountaineering & Exploration in the Japanese Alps. Bottom image: Dixon's sketch of the woodcutter's hut on Hakusan, from YamaKei Me de miru Nihon no Tozanshi.

The traditions of Tairappyō

Sawa boots and straw sandals compared in a stream-climbing of Sasa-ana-zawa in the mountains of Echigō

The kompa broke out at midnight. We'd driven up through Karafuru, a hot spring town where the last yukata-clad revellers were staggering back to their ryokan, weaving between plumes of steam that vented up from gratings in the street. Our friends had arrived before us, their tents already pitched beside the river. When we showed up, Kirins were cracked open; a kompa was customary whenever Workman Alpinists from Tokyo met up with the Gunma crowd.

Lack of sleep notwithstanding, we struggled out of our sleeping bags before 5am; timekeeping was good when our patron from Gunma, a Himalayan veteran, was around. An hour’s walk along a woodland track took us further up the river valley. The sawa-climbing started gently; after a hot summer, there wasn't much water and we made our way easily over beds of dry pebbles.


When the valley narrowed down into a gorge, hiking boots were changed for wading shoes. That is, six of us pulled on modern nylon wading boots with brillo-pad soles, while Kuriffu-san, our guest, tied traditional straw sandals onto the kind of toed ankle-boot favoured by old-style Japanese builders.

Straw sandals, known as waraji, were the staple footwear of mountaineers during Japan’s Golden Age of alpine exploration. Even Walter Weston tried them out. But that was a century ago. By 1964, the Hyakumeizan author Fukada Kyūya was referring to "mountaineers of the old school like myself, who go climbing in straw sandals and leggings". Even then, straw sandals smacked of the past.

Still, somebody has to uphold tradition, and who better than Kuriffu-san, a Bristol-nadeshiko from the West of England and an expert on traditional Japanese dress. I did wonder, though, how the straw soles would cope when we got to steeper ground. At 8.30am, underneath a white rock like a castle, we roped up for our first waterfall. At first sight, the straw sandals seemed to be coping well. Maybe there was something to these old-fangled ways.

As it happened, I never saw how Kuriffu-san dealt with the second waterfall. That's because, just then, I was clinging desperately to some weeds on the gorge's sidewall. Everyone else was making their way up the rope, which the leader had fixed, securing themselves by a sliding prusik knot. This is a suspect technique – the knot can slide down just when it needs to arrest a fall, or jam up just when you need to move higher. Indeed, prusik knots had been behind a couple of recent sawa accidents. Prusiks gave me the creeps.

But soloing on steep, wet grass is even worse. Getting breathlessly to safety, I reminded myself that 'takamaki' – attempts to climb around waterfalls rather than tackle them directly – cause many more accidents than prusik knots. Fortunately, nobody seemed to have seen my weed-pulling foray and we moved on.


Ahead, the flat top of Tairappyō beckoned us on. Strange to say, this was the first time we’d laid eyes on this summit, although we’d ski-climbed it at least once. In winter, the mountain keeps himself shrouded under a cloud-cap woven from the moist winds blowing in from the Japan Sea; even on a fine day, spicules of snow keep drifting down, like diamond dust, from those woolly clouds. In this summer heat, it was hard to believe we were on the same mountain.


The centrepiece of Sasa-ana-zawa is a fifty-metre stretch of waterworn slabs that lead, like a royal road, directly up Tairappyō's eastern slopes. These we climbed on pure friction, splashing in and out of thin sheets of fast-flowing water. Straw sandals seemed to perform just as well as modern brillo-pad soles.

After the slabs came the bamboo grass from which the sawa takes its name. For an hour or so, we "rowed the sasa", pushing our way through its thickets of dust-laden and razor-edged leaves. Filthier than before, we emerged gratefully onto the ridge. When sawa shoes were changed for hiking boots, Kuriffu-san hurled her worn-out straw sandals back into the sasa. Several more pairs of waraji could be seen rotting in the grass around us: Sasa-ana-zawa, it seems, is popular among sawa-climbing traditionalists.



Setting off homewards along the ridge, we wound our way between rhododendron bushes. The flowers were long gone at this season. Instead, the pampas grass waved tall beside the path. There was more than a breath of autumn in the air.

Waders of the lost arc

Journey without head torches in a season with no sun through a small river corridor

Figuring we’d get wet anyway, we spent most of the rainy season climbing rivers. The weatherbeaten Subaru was carrying us to our longest excursion yet when it emerged that nobody had remembered a head torch.

“Guys,” I remonstrated, “this is West Tanzawa we’re heading for.” This was by way of saying that the western half of the range is wilder, gnarlier, less manicured. In the eastern hills, you’ll find little tin signs identifying the more popular mountain streams and even some of the waterfalls. Such frippery is eschewed in the west, which is an hour or so further from central Tokyo.

In these western rivers, you follow your nose. And this, surely, is the charm of sawa-nobori; river climbing is the one mountain discipline where you find your own way, through pools and gorges, past waterfalls and up cliffs. There are no bolt ladders to guide you, no crampon scratches, no ski traces, not even footprints. Instead, you match your judgment, and your climbing or swimming skills, to the river’s flow.


That said, the gravel pan where we parked was scored with bulldozer tracks, for not even West Tanzawa has escaped the heavy machinery of man. To get into the river, we scrambled over a high concrete entei. These dams are designed to control the erosion of ruling party’s mandate, a function they perform by diverting liquidity into the construction industry.


At last, we were properly awash, edging along rock-shelves above deep pools of brown water or wading through shallower stretches, the pebbles pressing through the thin soles of our sawa boots. Ahead, Ogawa-dani-roka faded into the sylvan gloom, a lost arc of tumbling water under a canopy of foliage and many-layered monsoon clouds.

The sawa’s name translates as “Small River Corridor”. To call it the “the Kurobe of Tanzawa”, as the guidebook does, is to overdose on hyperbole, given that Ogawa-dani cannot start to match the scale and majesty of the gorge that drains the Northern Alps. For all that, it is more a river than a mountain stream, especially during the June rains.

I kept that in mind as we approached the first obstacle – a chockstone that channels the river’s full force into a low but energetic waterfall. To my relief, a jammed log helped us up. Only one of our party fell off, and we fielded her on the rope.

Sawa-nauts go about their business with two eyes open, one for the terrain and one for the scenery. Next came a treat for the scenic eye, a mossy staircase spiralling upwards beside a step in the river. The pattern repeats in thousands of gorges across Japan, yet every iteration is subtly unique, as if some master gardener set out to create countless variations from just a handful of elements – water, rock and sand.

Rounding a bend in the river, we found our path blocked by a giant boulder. This the guidebook calls the Tsuru-tsuru-no-O-iwa, or Big Slippery Rock. The description fits the slimy runnel that sawa-nauts must scrabble up if they wish to continue their journey. At the same time, it does less than justice to the boulder’s mass, poise, and elegance of form.

These qualities somehow brought to mind the Japanese national anthem, a brief verse that entreats the Emperor to perpetuate his reign “until pebbles grow into great boulders lush with moss”. Around then, much ink was being expended about whether the anthem should be sung at school graduation ceremonies. Perhaps the great boulder of Ogawa-dani would crumble into pebbles before that debate ended. Yet few national anthems are less chauvinistic than Japan’s; the words are taken from a collection of medieval poems…


Some of our companions might like the comfort of a rope, suggested the vice president, who'd joined me atop the boulder. We should bring them up one by one, she said, even if it took longer. Make it so, I agreed, for neither of us held with the quicker but dodgier method of having folk secure themselves by sliding prusik knots up a fixed rope. As for time pressure, we probably wouldn’t need the rope again after this.

By the same token, not much was to be expected from the scenery upstream. Strange, I mused, how worthwhile climbing and memorable sawa-scapes run inextricably together. The insight might be trivial or it might not but, either way, there was no leisure to reflect on it.


In the gathering gloom, I glanced at my watch; with luck, we would get away without the head torches we hadn’t brought. A little later, we clambered out of the river and found the homeward path. Under the deeper shade of the forest trees, the pallid flowers of the kuchinashi glimmered like ghosts.

Captured by the Kurobe (5)

Kami-no-roka concluded: via a forgotten ridge path to the valley of the Takase and a well-deserved brew

Until now, we hadn’t given much thought to how we’d get back to Tokyo. The plan had to take account of two salient facts: one, we were now sipping our beers in a stormbound hut in the middle of Japan’s Northern Alps, and, two, Sawa Control’s corporate BMW was spotted out at Ogisawa, a carpark on the wrong side of the mountains.

The television – Mitsumata-renge is a well-appointed hut – set our minds at rest about the weather. The typhoon had passed, delivering a last cold front like a back-hand smash. That accounted for the thunderclap we’d just heard, but tomorrow would be better. We opened the map. Aha, we could go over Washiba-dake and then take a long ridge route, the Takemura Shindo, down to the valley. We asked the hut warden for his opinion.

“Sa …,” he started. Now, any opinion qualified with a hesitant “Sa…” should alert the listener to potential trouble, especially in the mountains. Despite its name, nobody had tended the ‘new path’ for a long time, the warden advised. There might also be rotten sections, he added. I wanted to ask how “rotten”, and what might lurk in that ‘also’ but Sawa Control cut short the discussion: “Well, we can go and have a look,” he said, using a phrase that has prefaced many a fine mountain day and also some not-so-fine ones.

Next morning almost dawned fine. Climbing the slopes of Washiba-dake, we looked across a sea of vapour towards Yari, a crisp silhouette against the electric blue of the rising daylight. But we never saw Washiba’s famous crater lake: as soon as the sun’s rays touched the clouds below, the vapours boiled upwards and blotted out our view.

On the other side of the peak, the fog cleared to reveal a white mist-bow below us. By chance, we must have been standing more or less where the Hyakumeizan author Fukada Kyuya locates the Kurobe’s source:-

Speaking of the Kurobe, Washiba is the cradle for the infant plashings of this river, famed for the depths of its gorges below. Stand on the summit of this mountain and you can see, plain as daylight, how the young Kurobe starts life. The source is a modest rill that you could cross with a stride. Soon it is raging on its way, through deep-cut chasms, into pools and hollows, plunging over waterfalls. Its headwaters are like the face of a boy fated to a turbulent youth.

Then the fog rolled in again. We continued along the ridge, over eroded spines of frost-shattered rock. At 11.30am we stood atop Masa-dake, the turn-off point for the Takemura Shindo. Scudding clouds of chilly drizzle helped us to a quick decision: by taking the ‘new path’, we would gain the shelter of the main ridge and turn our backs to the weather.

At first, the ploy seemed to work. Then, just at the point when it would have been too tedious to go back, the path vanished. A washout had gouged into the ridge, taking the trail with it and leaving a steep face of crumbling earth to cross. We teetered across on some sketchy footholds, trying to ignore the misty abyss below. “Another one of these and this will start to be not such a great idea,” I muttered, forgetting that, minutes before, I’d been singing the new path’s praises.

But we were not challenged again. Rather, the trial of the washout had won us admittance into a secret garden. Descending first through creeping pine, then autumnal groves of mountain birch, we wandered past flaring brakes of rowan bushes, raindrops brimming on their crimson leaves. The cloudy skies heightened the colours, turning them into a spectacle we’d remember for ever.

We crossed an intermediate peaklet and sank into evergreen forest at around the 2,300-metre mark. In the gloom under the trees, we had to hunt for the path’s continuation. The hut warden had spoken truly; few come this way these days.

Not for the first time, I had the feeling that the Japan Alps were once much busier. Paths like this one are falling into disuse, and huts in remote valleys have vanished altogether. We seemed to have missed out on the heyday of Showa-era alpinism.

Lunch was taken in a wooded col, sitting on a carpet of ferns. Further on, the panda grass grew deeper until we were walking through shoulder-high glades of it.

Dropping below the clouds at last, we saw opposite the crumbling yellow ramparts of Sulphur Ridge, a strange semi-volcanic excrescence that runs up towards Yari. Fumaroles wisped into the sullen air from its lower slopes, which were streaked with sulphur deposits like off-colour snowfields.

The Kurobe gave us up with reluctance. We arrived at the foot of the ridge at 4.30pm with a 15-kilometre yomp to the nearest roadhead still ahead of us. A debate ensued whether to break into our emergency rations – a bar of Kendal mintcake – but the occasion was not solemn enough to warrant it. Instead we took out the stove and brewed up. We reckoned we’d earned a cup of tea.