A meizanologist's diary (134)

29 March: the day after climbing Takadake, our hosts drive us back towards Mt. Aso. This time, the idea is to take in the whole massif at a single glance. The car is parked near a spacious tourist pavilion offering the usual array of leaflets and indigestible comestibles.

The place used to be known as the Tōmigahana (look-off nose) but in 1922 the writer Tokutomi Sohō rebranded it as the Daikanbō (great viewpoint), apparently at the local mayor’s request.

The mayor was right. For this viewpoint does deserve a dignified appellation. And it takes a moment before we can calibrate our eyes to the sheer scale of the panorama it offers. 

We’re standing on the brink of the “gairin-kan” – the outer rim of Aso’s giant caldera – and far off, over a sea of morning haze, float the five central peaks, including the two we visited yesterday. Everything within our gaze is part of one huge volcano.

“So they really do look like a reclining Buddha,” says the Sensei. We agree that the crags over on the left of the central mountains do indeed resemble an upturned face. The likeness is so often remarked that it even has a name: the Nehanzō, although the bronze versions seen at temples are usually lying on their sides.

Whether recumbent or reclining, no Buddha was mentioned by the celebrated poet and painter Kosugi Hōan when he came this way in 1930, his visit sponsored by the Kyushu Electric Power Company. Rather, he beheld:

a vast space, like the bottom of an urn, in which the caldera unfolds. Black smoke churns up in the centre to scorch the heavens. Under these incense fumes, sent up by the earth’s deity as if from some great censer, the five peaks of Aso vie with one another, each with its individual beauty.

As for the vast caldera’s backstory, Kosugi had this to say:

Originally, the crater plain, measuring four leagues east to west and six leagues north to south, covering forty thousand chō, was formed by a massive collapse. After the collapse, the five peaks that now exist erupted in the centre. Thus, surrounded by the circular outer rim, this plain should form a snake’s eye shape. However, Neko-dake, one of the five peaks, rose up and broached the outer rim near its southern edge, breaking the snake's eye shape at that point…

And pretty much the same account is related to us today by the Great Viewpoint's instructive signboards:

In Aso, the land subsided to create a caldera because of four super-eruptions occurred between about 90,000 years ago to about 270,000 years ago … The pyroclastic flow at that time spread the northern part of Kyushu island and volcanic ash curled up to sky covered all over Japan …The biggest pyroclastic flow of Aso (Aso-4) is the largest in scale in Japan in the past 100,000 years. Volcanic deposits would have reached the height of a four to five storey building if they were distributed uniformly in Kyushu island…

The collapse thesis, we later learn, was bolstered by the work of Howell Williams, an Anglo-American volcanologist who during the 1940s explained the formation of Oregon’s Crater Lake. More recently, though, a new generation of savants have objected that Aso could never have been so reprobate as to collapse in slavish imitation of a foreign model. Instead, as any self-respecting mega-vent should, it must have exploded heroically onto the scene...

But these revisionist views must be considered at a later date. Right now, our host is waving us back to the car. We are soon driving across that flat caldera floor, which is – according to the application to have Mt. Aso listed as a UNESCO world heritage site – “an excellent site for learning about how humans live in a volcanic area”.

From what we can see from the speeding vehicle, the humans are living here much as they do elsewhere in Japan – in the same prefabricated houses, under the same tangle of overhead wires, and amid the same proliferation of vending machines. Speaking of which, it must surely be time for a coffee…

Already, however, we are slanting up the slopes of those five central peaks. Sliding by on the right is the parasite cone of Komezuka. “Rice heap” is a good name for it, chiming as it does with the mini-volcano’s family-friendly scale. Its bonsai proportions somewhat relieve the oppression of its pitilessly vast surroundings.

Parking the car near the Aso Volcano Museum, we set off across a grassy paddock, dodging the errant pony riders from the nearby dude ranch as we head for the local eminence of Eboshi-dake. 

Our path up the easy ridge is fringed with Japanese andromeda (asebi), the so-called drunken horse tree. Presumably the ponies are kept well away from them. 

Although it rises only a paltry few metres above the carpark, Eboshi-dake qualifies as one of Aso-san’s Five Peaks. 

Even better, it commands fine views in all directions. Behind us, we now see that what we took to be a grassy paddock is in fact the crater floor of a retired volcano, a kind of caldera within the caldera. East of us, and fortunately downwind, is Nakadake, still venting its corrosive fumes high into the hazy air. 

And in the opposite direction, riding hull-down on the dust horizon, are the upperworks of Unzen, the westernmost of Kyushu’s volcanoes. A conveniently placed signboard helps us locate it.

All this looking-off works up an appetite. We hurry down Eboshi’s eastern ridge, looking for somewhere to eat our lunches. 

Alas, several of the benches considerately installed for that purpose have burned to the ground. They apparently get torched during the annual grass-burnings (noyaki) that are carried out to prevent these uplands tumbling down into scrub. 

When we finally reach an uncharred picnic place, we watch an elderly couple struggle up a variation route on another nearby hill. Not for us, we decide, as we tuck into our bento boxes. Although we have been hiking almost as efficiently as we did thirty years ago, just one of the Five Peaks will do nicely for today. Besides, we still have a Place of Power to take in on our way home.

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 (123)

5 March: On the way to KIX via the southern route, we're flying across Korea about as close to its northern border as is legal or wise. Alas, window seats in these buffs are a bit of a toss-up. Either the windows freeze up on you, or – as in the case of Seat 41A today – there is no window at all, as the plane’s engineers didn’t seem to trust themselves with one in this part of the fuselage.

Fortunately, by leaning forward into somebody else’s airspace, I can just see above the cloud deck a distant and solitary peak to the north, surmounted by an eyebrow wisp of lenticular cloud. Judging by the direction and altitude, this can be none other than Mt Paektu (2,744 metres), the Paradeberg of North Korea.

Sorry, there’s no question of bringing a camera to bear – to do so, I’d have to mug the passenger in front – but it’s gratifying even to have managed a glimpse of this elusive peak. Few Europeans get closer than this. 

One who did, though, is Clive Oppenheimer, professor of volcanology at Cambridge, who worked with DPRK scientists to establish exactly when the volcano’s last great outburst, the devastating “Millennium Eruption”, took place. 

The scientists went about this task by taking a carbon sample from a larch tree buried in that cataclysm. With the help of a lab in Zurich, this helped to establish the year as between CE 946 and 947. 

A researcher in Japan then supplied the missing clue: a chronicle maintained at the Kōfukuji temple in Kyoto records that, on 3 November 946, “white ash fell gently like snow” – although no volcano within Japan was known to be erupting at that time.

For the full story of this volcanological detective work – the time-chronicling varves of Lake Suigetsu also get a look-in – it’s best to read the lively write-up in Professor Oppenheimer’s Mountains of Fire. Subtitled The Secret Lives of Volcanoes, the book will give you a much better close-up view of North Korea’s secretive volcano than any window seat on a bucketing buff.

Ontake reopens; stay alert

Restrictions on hiking to the summit of Mt. Ontake, a volcano in central Japan, will be lifted from tomorrow, Saturday 29 July, reports the Mainichi Shimbun. The summit area has been closed to hikers since the deadly eruption in 2014, in which more than sixty people lost their lives.

Fumaroles on Ontake, summit region, c.1992

From 10 am Saturday, entry will be allowed to a ridge that connects the 2,936-metre Otaki peak to the highest 3,067-metre Kengamine peak, an area particularly affected by the volcanic disaster, the newspaper says, adding that access to some hiking paths near the summit will remain restricted.

The 2014 disaster – a so-called phreatic eruption – was all the more devastating because of a complete lack of warning signs. In its wake, Japan’s Home Ministry and its Meteorological Agency issued a leaflet for hikers to raise awareness of volcanic hazards. Now that Ontake is open again, it might be time to take another look at those guidelines.

References

Mainichi Shimbun, "Entry bans around Mt. Ontake summit to be lifted after 2014 eruption", 26 July edition.

“Hazard alert: Japan’s authorities issue volcano safety guidelines for hikers”, One Hundred Mountains (this blog), May 2017.

Women who devour the earth

The Hawaiian eruption highlights parallels between two powerful volcanic deities

Again, the New York Times demonstrates its unfailingness. Tuesday’s edition documents how the ongoing eruptions on Kilauea have prompted an upsurge in reverence for Madame Pele, Hawaii’s goddess of volcanoes. Now this is a topic that cannot fail to rivet the attention of any aspirant meizanologist.

Pele: painting by Herb Kane
at the Hawaii Volcanoes NP Visitor Center
Photo via flickr, courtesy Prayitno

Pele, also known as “the woman who devours the earth”, has been worshipped for centuries in the Native Hawaiian culture. And respect for the deity is growing, even though – or because – lava from her favourite volcano is currently devouring forests, houses and even a power station. According to the NYT, a retired schoolteacher who lost her home described it as “an offering for Pele”.

To folks who live underneath one, rites and oblations to appease a volcano have always made sense. In medieval Japan, such ceremonies were raised to a fine art. During Mt Fuji’s ninth-century eruptions, the authorities offered the Great God Asama a more commodious shrine (in what is now Fujinomiya). Then, in 859, they promoted him to the senior grade of the third court rank. And when that didn’t placate him, they censured the governor of Kai for neglecting the proper rituals and demanded an apology on the god’s behalf.

At that time, the deity of Mt Fuji was most definitely a guy. But, in later centuries, his role was taken over by a goddess, Konohanasakuya-hime, the Princess of the Flowering Cherry Tree. How this transgendering happened need not detain us; what’s interesting here are the obvious parallels between the Princess and Madame Pele.

Both deities are rather senior in their respective pantheons. “We believe in 40,000 gods, but Pele is in the highest echelon for obvious reasons,” says a hula teacher and lecturer on Hawaiian culture quoted in the NYT, adding that “Pele created Hawaii; she is that primordial force that exists within all landmasses. And she can be vengeful, so watch out.”

Konosakuya: Princess of the Flowering Cherry Tree
Nihonga painting by Dōmoto Inshō

For her part, Konosakuya is the wife of the god Ninigi (I’m relying on the usual online references here). Ninigi we’ve met before on this blog, as the deity who came down to earth on Takachiho, a volcano in Kyūshū, and founded the imperial line.

Like Pele, however, the Princess had to endure a troubled marriage, which may account for her volatile temperament. For she too can be somewhat vengeful: legend has her kicking over hapless Yatsu-ga-take because the older volcano had once presumed to be taller than Mt Fuji.

Intriguingly, Pele is said to be a shape-shifter who can easily appear in human form: “If you see her hitchhiking, pick her up. If you have a bottle of gin, even better. Pele, like her descendants, likes a little mischief,” suggests a Hawaiian evacuee, quoted in the NYT, who is waiting to see if the lava flow destroys her home.

This advice reminds me of an autumnal excursion to Mt Fuji. The official climbing season was long over; nobody was about. While sheltering from the bitter wind behind a boulder, we were overtaken by a little old lady, who was trotting up the mountain carrying a white shopping bag in each hand. As all the huts were closed, we couldn't imagine where she might be heading. And, since we weren't able to catch her up, we never found out.

You know, after reading that Times article, I rather regret that I didn’t immediately rush after her and offer to carry those shopping bags.

References

New York Times, "Madame Pele, Hawaii’s Goddess of Volcanoes, Awes Those Living in Lava’s Path", 21 May 2018 (print)

Shizuoka-Yamanashi Joint Council for Mount Fuji World Cultural Heritage Registration, Mt Fuji: the Wellspring of our Faith and Arts, Shogakukan, 2009

Unpredictable explosions

Some volcanic eruptions are less foreseeable than others

In today's tragedy at the ski-resort under the Kusatsu-Shirane volcano, one soldier was killed by flying rocks after a volcanic explosion. Several more people were hurt. The accident recalls the much greater disaster on Ontake three years ago, when 63 people died.

Eruption at Kusatsu-Shirane in December 1982
Photo: Japan Meteorological Agency

Both mountains belong to Fukada Kyūya’s One Hundred Mountains of Japan. Reading his write-ups, one would never guess that climbing these peaks might be a hazard to life and limb. That’s not because the Hyakumeizan author was negligent in his research, but rather the effect of timing. When Fukuda wrote about Ontake, in the late 1950s or early 1960s, the volcano had never erupted during historical times. Its first recorded eruption was in October 1979, eight years after Fukada’s death. Until then, the mountain was thought to be inactive.

Fissure eruption at Kusatsu-Shirane in 1942
Photo: Japan Meteorological Agency

Kusatsu-Shirane too appears quite innocuous in Fukada’s account. In the relevant Hyakumeizan chapter, he notes that the mountain was ascended by the Confucian scholar Asaka Gonsai in the summer of the ninth year of Tempō (1838). Today, Fukada adds, “one often meets old women and frolicsome children on this path.”

Yet Gonsai’s description, as quoted by Fukada, leaves no doubt as to Kusatsu-Shirane’s volcanic temperament: “All the peaks are scorched partly red, partly black, by the sulfurous vapors. Bare bones, stripped of flesh, not a tree or blade of grass, an exceedingly strange and ghastly scene.”

"An exceedingly strange and ghastly scene"
A pre-war postcard view of Kusatsu-Shirane

Indeed, it appears that Kusatsu-Shirane has erupted much more frequently than Ontake. About 14 eruptive episodes have been recorded since 1805. Taking a simple average, therefore, you'd expect such explosions to take place slightly more often than once every two decades.

In reality, though, the volcano erupts at quite irregular intervals, and it so happened that Fukada wrote it up roughly in the middle of a lull that lasted more than thirty years. So it’s fair to conclude that Kusatsu-Shirane’s eruptive potential could not have been in the forefront of his mind.

Eruption on Kusatsu-Shirane (from a pre-war postcard)

On both Ontake and Kusatsu-Shirane, all historical eruptions have been phreatic – that is, caused by water coming into contact with hot rocks rather than by rising magma. Unfortunately, steam explosions are harder to predict than eruptions caused by upwelling magma, as they are less likely to give out clear seismic signals in advance.

“Eruptions can occur without warning, so stay alert to what is happening in and around the crater,” warned the Japanese authorities last year in a pamphlet distributed to hiking and climbing organisations. That advice remains as valid as ever. At the same time, it should be recognised that a volcano may give no usable warning.

The meaning of Mt Paektu

How North Korea taps into the symbolic voltage of a mysterious volcano

Has Kim Jong-un taken up winter mountaineering? Exactly a month ago, he was again bestriding the Korean peninsula’s highest peak. A local newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun, reported that "His eyes reflected the strong beams of the gifted great person seeing in the majestic spirit of Mount Paektu the appearance of a powerful socialist nation which dynamically advances full of vigour without vacillation at any raving dirty wind on the planet."

Kim Jong-un bestrides Mt Paektu in December 2017

It’s easy to mock the style of North Korean pronouncements. But this may run the risk of underestimating their effectiveness, warns B R Myers, a North Korea-watcher based at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea. In his view, the regime’s “ideology has generally enjoyed the support of the North Korean people through good times and bad”, adding that about half of the refugees who make it over the border to China end up by voluntarily returning home.

Mt Paektu (the "white-headed peak") figures prominently in this propaganda. Visits to its snow-covered summit by the Supreme Leader often preface or follow important decisions, alleges a popular UK newspaper. Kim Jong-un last visited the peak in September 2016, right after the country’s fifth nuclear test. He was also there in April 2015, just before executing a former defense chief, and in November 2013, before executing his own uncle, among other top officials.

North Korean commemorative stamp showing
Kim Jong Il atop his native mountain

And this is to say nothing of the mountain’s ubiquity as a backdrop for the Kim dynasty in all manner of official productions, from postage stamps to oil paintings.

In his book, The cleanest race – how North Koreans see themselves and why it matters, B R Myers offers a convincing explanation for this prominence. Many see North Korea as a hardline Marxist-Leninist regime. Yet this is misleading, Myers says. For, when Kim Il-sung established his regime in the late 1940s, he chose not follow the model of his Soviet mentors but reached instead for Japan’s pre-war emperor cult, to which Korea had been intensively exposed during the country’s period as a colony.

Painting of (l to r) Mrs Kim, the infant Kim Jong-un and Kim Jong-Il 

This thesis explains a lot. It makes clear why members of the Kim dynasty are often depicted riding on a white horse – typically in a mountainous setting – an imperial motif that can be traced back as far as Napoleon. As for Mt Paektu, it simply replaced Mt Fuji as a symbol of national prowess. This, in turn, explains why official sources so assiduously insist on Mt Paektu as the birthplace of Kim Jong-il, the present Supreme Leader's progenitor.

In doing so, they tap into a legend that a mythical founder of the Korean nation descended on the peak thousands of years ago. In effect, “Kim Il-sung turned his whole family into a divine entity. He knew theocracies last longer than any type of regime,” says Song Bong-sun, a historian at Korea University in South Korea, as quoted in the Taipei Times.

Even the snow in our header picture fits this narrative, as a symbol of the cultural and ideological purity that North Korea preserves from corruption by the foreign-dominated south. So the answer to our opening question – has Kim Jong-un taken up mountaineering – is clearly “no”. Rather, he’s revealed himself as a master of misapplied meizanology – the art and science of divining a mountain’s meaning. And, in Kim's case, of exploiting it too.

The majestic spirit of Mt Paektu ("White head peak")
Photo: Wikipedia

Of course, Mt Paektu is no Mt Fuji. Sited on the remote northern border, it never figured as centrally in Korea's classical literature and art as Mt Fuji did in Japan’s. And at 2,744 metres, it tops out a full kilometre below its Japanese counterpart – although its altitude is curiously similar to that of another "white mountain", Hakusan (2,702 metres), one of Japan’s three most sacred peaks.

A crater lake from central casting (Landsat image)

Even so, Mt Paektu does have a "majestic spirit", to borrow the Rodong Sinmun's words. It has mystery – nobody is quite sure how a volcano managed to grow so far from an obvious plate boundary – and it has a magnificent crater lake, on a scale that hints at the incalculable menace lurking beneath. But suggestions that a gigantic eruption might be triggered by nearby bomb tests – thus hoisting the regime with its own petard – are probably wishful thinking.

In the end, you almost have to applaud how adeptly the three Kims have co-opted their top mountain into shoring up their legitimacy. At the same time, one wonders how long it will take their regime’s arch-antagonist – himself no slouch at self-aggrandisement – to take a leaf out of their meizanological playbook. Or, on second thoughts, perhaps it really is better not to go there.

References

B R Myers, The cleanest race - How North Koreans see themselves – and why it matters, Melville House, 2010.

Banyan column, "Peak patriotism", The Economist, December 16, 2017

"Only a rumbling volcano could make North Korea and the West play nice", New York Times, December 9, 2016

Hazard alert

Japan’s authorities issue volcano safety guidelines for hikers

One-third of Japan’s popular One Hundred Mountains are active volcanoes. This can lead to tragedy. In September 2014, a sudden eruption on a volcano in central Honshū killed 63 people. Some of the victims were never found. To raise awareness of these hazards, Japan’s Home Ministry and its Meteorological Agency have recently issued a leaflet for hikers.

How volcanoes can damage your health

What follows is an outline summary of the Japanese text (PDF). The front sheet of “Be prepared for hiking on volcanoes” (火山への登山のそなえ) marks the location of Japan’s 110 active volcanoes – “active” means showing signs of life, or having erupted within the last 10,000 years. The 33 active volcanoes selected by Fukada Kyūya for his One Hundred Mountains are distinguished in red.

Red captions mark the active Nihon Hyakumeizan

Next are points to keep in mind when climbing a volcano:

• Eruptions can occur without warning, so stay alert to what is happening in and around the crater.
• If you see any unusual venting of steam or gases, take refuge or descend immediately and warn the local authorities, police or Meteorological Agency (which is responsible for monitoring volcanic activity in Japan).
• As volcanic gases are heavier than air, they tend to collect in hollows and valleys. Stay out of such locations.
• Keep your mobile phone on and check for official hazard alerts. Be aware of whether your phone has a connection to the network. Information about mobile phone coverage is published on the websites of some phone companies, or marked on certain hiking maps. Try to establish whether and where you will have mobile phone connectivity before you leave home.
• During an eruption, there is a major risk of death or injury from flying stones and lava bombs near the crater. Get away from the crater and take shelter in a hut or behind a rock. If you have them, put on a helmet and goggles, and breathe through a face-mask or towel.

Things not to leave home without

In addition to your normal hiking kit, map and compass, you should consider carrying a copy of the local volcanic hazard map, which will show you the range of previous eruptions, and also places to take shelter. A helmet, goggles and a towel will protect against ash and other fall-out, as will a rain-jacket. A headlight will help in bad visibility. And don’t forget a spare battery for your mobile phone and emergency rations/water for yourself.

The last sheet of the leaflet starts with a reminder of the 2014 Ontake disaster. Then (see top graphic) two cartoon volcanoes present the various types of eruptive threat – showers of heavy rocks that can fly up to four kilometres from the vent; smaller stones with a lethal range of 10 kilometres; volcanic ash that may, in the leaflet’s measured language, “affect your breathing”, pyroclastic flows that burn and bury; volcanic gases and mudflows. Each category is illustrated from an eruption in living memory.

The message is clear: these hazards are for real.

Related posts: volcanic excursions

Asama: Serious steam

Asama: The inner world

Asama: Fires of Tartarus

Bandai: Sole survivor

Mt Fuji: Journey to the centre of Mt Fuji

Gassan and Chōkai: The twentieth-century Tōhoku express

Kaimon: Slow train to Kaimon-dake

Ontake: The gateway

Sakurajima: The hot and cold Hyakumeizan challenge

Yake-dake: Burning mountain, bad snow

Yake-dake: Seasons of a stratovolcano

A home mountain stirs in its sleep

Volcanic earthquakes detected under Hakusan

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

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

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

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

Images and ink (35)

Image: Asama erupts in 1783, from Illustrations of Japan (1822), by Dutch trader Isaac Titsingh. He wrote: “The flames burst forth with a terrific uproar ... Everything was enveloped in profound darkness ... A great number of persons were consumed.”

Ink: On Asama-san, from Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964):

Together with Aso in Kyūshū, Asama is the very model of a Japanese volcano. It has trailed smoke from its summit for untold ages, it was born in a roiling cloud, and its plume is far-famed to this day. While in normal times it emits only the faintest white wisp of vapor, Asama occasionally throws restraint to the winds and blows its stack. In just the last two decades, there have been more than 1,800 eruptions, large and small. This adds up to an amazing frequency of outbursts over the volcano’s lifetime. One of the most famous was the eruption in the third year of Tenmei (1783), when the lava surged forth for several kilometers, ravaging the foot of the mountain with fire. The famous Oni-Oshidashi, or Devil’s Flow, is a relic of that episode.

Image courtesy of the Bodleian, Oxford: the “Volcanoes” exhibition is on at the Weston Library from 10 February to 21 May 2017.

Related post: Serious steam