Et in Arcadia Cs-137

Famous mountains fall victim to the taint of the Fukushima reactor accidents

In those days, on the way back to Tokyo, we'd pull off the Kan-etsu Expressway at the Tanigawa Parking Area, just after the long tunnel. Then we'd slew the weatherbeaten Subaru to a halt next to the public fountain, and fill every water bottle we had.

We might think twice about doing that now. The big city's tap water probably hasn't improved, but it may contain less radioactive caesium than do the mountain streams. That, at least, is my guess after looking at the "heat maps" of radioactive contamination recently published by Japan's science and technology ministry.

These charts show that the mountain ranges around the Kanto plain have generally soaked up more radioactivity - specifically the caesium 134 and 137 isotopes - than the low ground. Rain falls more heavily in the hills, washing out more of the plume that emanated from the derelict Fukushima reactors.

Quite a few "famous peaks of Japan" stand within the scope of the ministry's survey. What would Fukada Kyūya have made of this modern-day threat to his mountains?

There's no way of knowing, of course, as the Hyakumeizan author died (on a mountain hike) on March 21, 1971. This was just five days before the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant officially went into service. It's as if one era ended and another began in that far-off month forty years ago.

References

Many thanks to Wes for pointing out the relevant post in Michael Cucek's estimable current affairs blog, Shisaku. An article on the science ministry's survey can also be found in the Japan Times, which is also the source of the map shown here.

Advice for hikers:-

Interview in Yama to Keikoku magazine with Professor Katsumi Shozugawa on Wes Lang's Hiking in Japan website.

Japan Times articles:-

Okutama cesium level seen spiking

Effect of contaminated soil on food chain sparks fears

Economist article:-

Hot spots and blind spots

New York Times article:-

Radioactive hotspots in Tokyo point to wider problems

Images and ink (9)

Mikurigaike (tateyama), a photo by sunnybeauty on Flickr.

Text: On Mikurigaike, from Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964):

Above Jigoku-dani is Mikuri-ga-ike, a lake with waters of an exquisitely deep blue. Naturally, we cannot pass by without sampling its legends. There was once a monk who took a swim here, unheeding of the people who tried to stop him. On the first attempt, he bathed with a dagger clenched between his teeth and emerged unscathed. Then, letting down his guard, he went back into the water unarmed. He swam around the pool once, twice, and then on his third round he was dragged down into the depths never to reappear. This episode gives the lake its name, which means 'Thrice Round Pond'.

Many thanks to Sunnybeauty for allowing Project Hyakumeizan to use this sunnybeautiful image.

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.

Behind the curve

Savants have sought to explain the secret of Mt Fuji's subtly concave slopes for more than a century. Now they're getting close

It was the curve that captivated him – the line that falls, steeply at first, from Mt Fuji’s shoulders, then at an ever-shallower angle until, at Omiya, it blends softly into the horizontal. So elegant was this line, he speculated, that it might have inspired the elegant cusping of Japan’s house roofs and castle walls. Merely to admire this mysterious curve wouldn't do, though. As a Victorian scientist, he had to explain it.

John Milne had joined the staff of the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo in 1876. He’d already packed several geological expeditions into his 26 years, including forays to Sinai and Newfoundland. Even his journey to Japan was an adventure; to avoid a long sea voyage, he travelled from England via Russia, riding part of the way on a dog-sled across the Siberian snows.

As one of 3,000 or so ‘o-yatoi’ or foreign technical experts hired by the Meiji government, the young professor’s duties were to teach mining, architecture, metallurgy and chemistry. Today, Milne is remembered as a founder of seismology. During his two decades in Japan, he invented an improved seismograph and later helped set up the first global network for monitoring earthquakes.

He also toured the archipelago, inspecting its volcanoes. Their regular forms contrasted with the “very rough” volcanoes he’d seen in Iceland. Just two years after landing in Japan, he’d acquainted himself with “Fusiyama, 12,365 feet near Yokohama; Ganjosan, 7,000 feet near Morioka, Chokaisan, 6,000 feet, between Niigata and Akita, Iwakisan, 5,000 feet, near Awomori; and Kumagatake, 2,700 feet, near Hakodate”.

Now Milne was ready to start his analysis, which he published in the 1878 edition of the Geological Magazine. All the above mountains, he wrote, appear conical at first sight. Looking closer, though, “we see this upper cone expanding and sweeping outward, forming a graceful curve”.

This curve, he reasoned, could arise in two ways. Either it formed at the start of the volcano's life, from the way its ash and lava were thrown out. Or it developed later, through "denudation" by wind and rain. But which of these factors created the elegant profiles of Japanese volcanoes?

Milne doesn’t waste many pages of the Geological Magazine before delivering a crisp judgment: “This being the case, I think we are justified in regarding mountains, similar to those about which I am now writing, as having a form mainly due to the simple piling up of material and not as cones which have been subsequently modified by a number of secondary causes, such as are advocated in treatises on Physical Geology and Volcanos.”

Two pieces of evidence lead him to this conclusion. First, his volcanic profiles – they form logarithmic curves, he believes – are so similar that they must have a common cause. Secondly, the slope angles are close to what theory would predict “for the stability of a self-supporting mass of loose materials”.

A lesser scientist might have regarded the case as proven. But Milne continued to think about the curve. And he went to look at more volcanoes, in Yezo and the Kuriles. More data, however, led to less certainty. A year later, he sent the Geological Magazine some “Further notes upon the Form of Volcanos”. The tone is now circumspect: the slopes Milne saw on his recent tour, while “generally logarithmic”, are not absolutely so.

Then he puts his theories about slope stability to the test. This he does by pouring onto the floor first sand, next gravel, and finally a mixture of the two. Sadly, the resulting heaps remain resolutely cone-shaped, betraying scarcely a hint of Fuji-like curvaciousness. "Taking these experiments as a whole," Milne admits, "it will be observed that I did not obtain much evidence in favour of my views."


He revisits the ways in which a volcano might get its curve. A self-supporting heap tends to spread out at its base; large particles roll further down the slope than small ones, creating a shallower slope angle lower on the hill; and there’s always "denudation" to fall back on. Incidentally, he's tried sprinkling water on his piles of experimental sand and gravel, but that too fails to produce the elusive line.

Has he missed something? Another savant, a Mr Mallet, has proposed that a volcano's weight might crush the strata under it, causing the mountain to settle into the ground. That might result in curved slopes. Or – and surely a note of desperation creeps in here – the volcano's core might shrink as it cools, pulling its slopes inwards like a child sucking in its cheeks.

This time, Milne’s conclusion is not even tentative; it is an abdication. “Taken as a whole, these causes are very varied ..,” he writes. “If we examine them singly, we can but barely form an idea as to the nature of their actions, and when we remember that … they act irregularly in their relations to each other, we see that the task of unravelling their complications becomes quite hopeless.”


As if taking this warning to heart, few scholars since Milne’s day have troubled themselves about volcanic curves. Current textbooks, if they raise the question at all, often take the opposite line to Milne’s: "Initially, a pristine volcano will form a pure conical form,” intone Jon Davidson and Shan de Silva in the Encyclopaedia of Volcanoes, “[until] Mass wasting results in a transfer of mass from the upper parts of the edifice to the lower flanks, building out a talus apron. The edifice evolves to a steady-state profile with concave-upward slopes..."

Yet denudation doesn’t do it for everybody. A trio of highly numerate geologists from Oxford and Cornell proposed – this was in 1981 – that "hydraulic resistance to the flow of magma determines the geometrical form of volcanoes". Feeding their equations for the stickiness of lava into a model, they came up with a slope profile that nicely mimics that of Mt Fuji. However, they note, “the theory is not expected to be valid near the summit, where the solution is singular”.


And there the matter rested – an unresolved tussle, if you like, between the Lords of Lava Dynamics and the Maharajahs of Mass Wasting – until the Space Shuttle blew onto the scene. On one of its flights, the vehicle carried a radar that produced accurate three-dimensional profiles of all the landforms a scientist could possibly want to ogle.

Using this data, a group of researchers led by a Hungarian volcanologist named Dávid Karátson took another look at volcanic slope profiles. They started by picking out 19 highly symmetrical stratovolcanoes from around the Pacific rim. All these mountains turned out to have lower slopes that curve in a logarithmic manner, just as Milne had surmised. This the researchers ascribe to “a combination of different volcano-related mass transport processes on the lower flanks”. In other words, denudation and stuff.

But the upper slopes told a different story. Eight of the mountains looked like true cones, with ruler-straight upper skylines – the researchers called these C-type, for conical – while the rest had concave upper slopes. These were termed P-type, for parabolic. Yotei-zan in Hokkaido is a classic C-type volcano, while Mayon in the Philippines is a P-type.

Erosion cannot explain the upper-slope profiles, Karátson & Co believe. Instead, they suspect that the differing "eruption styles" of P- and C-type volcanoes may be responsible. Parabolic slopes form when volcanoes put out more lava than ash. (By what exact mechanism is left unexplained.) Conversely, straight-sided cones result when eruptions are explosive and ash-rich. Just in time for Milne's centenary, it looks as if the mystery of Mt Fuji's curve may be on the way to being solved.

But what happened to Mt Fuji in all this? Regrettably, the top Hyakumeizan didn't make it into Karátson's elite group of 11 "parabolic" volcanoes. Marred by an eighteenth-century flank eruption, its form was deemed too irregular for study. To its admirers, of course, it may be this very irregularity that transforms Mt Fuji into an image of perfection. But that raises a different kind of question altogether…

References

Milne, J (1878): On the Form of Volcanos, Geological Magazine (Decade II), 5: 337-345

Milne, J (1879): Further Notes upon the Form of Volcanos, Geological Magazine (Decade II) (1879), 6: 506-514

Lacey, A, Ockendon, J and Turcotte, D (1981): On the geometrical form of volcanoes, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 54, Issue 1, June

Davidson, J and De Silva, S (1999): Composite Volcanoes: Chapter 43 in The Encyclopedia of Volcanoes, Elsevier

Karátson, D, Favalli, M, Tarquini, S, Fornaciai, A, and Wörner, G (2010): The regular shape of stratovolcanoes: a DEM-based morphometrical approach, Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, 193, 171–181. (And many thanks to Dávid Karátson for explaining some key points about this paper to Project Hyakumeizan.)

Photos: Portrait of John Milne from Wikipedia; photos of Fuji from The Volcanoes of Japan, Part 1, Fujisan by John Milne & W.K. Burton; Collotype Plates by K. Ogawa, ca 1892

High winds

But are they strong enough to reshape Japanese mountaintops?

The Japan Alps blow away the competition: at 3,000 metres altitude in January, the wind speed averages 21 metres a second – some 75.6 kilometres an hour. That’s more than double the free-stream wind at the same height in the European Alps (10 metres a second) and a third faster than in the Rockies (14 metres a second). None of that would surprise the workman alpinists in the image below, who are skiing through a spring gale at Tsugaike.

The YamaKei guidebook (see References) that quotes these statistics also draws attention to some curiously striped terrain on high mountaintops. It is wind erosion, says the article, that is responsible for these alternating strips of grass and gravel. You can see them at Kisokoma-ga-take (photo below) and Shirouma, among other places.

Whether or not this explanation holds – maybe somebody should go and take another look – nobody would deny that Japanese mountain winds can shift the real estate. Bashō himself testifies to that:-

Blowing the gravel
Off the ground on Mount Asama
An autumn gale

吹き飛ばす石は浅間の野分かな

As if to corroborate the famous haiku poet, I’ve heard stones drone past me at the fifth station of Mt Fuji. It’s hard to explain how pebbles can be flying at speed through the air on these relatively gentle mid-slopes, unless you posit that they were blown far into the sky from the summit regions.

According to the YamaKei authors, the driving force behind Japan’s strong surface winds is the jet stream. Or rather two of them. In winter, the Himalaya often splits the polar jet into northerly and southerly streams – which then flow back together just to the west of Japan, causing atmospheric mayhem.

It’s probably no coincidence that the jet stream was first discovered from a site near Mt Fuji. This is where the meteorologist Ōishi Wasaburō launched his weather balloons in the 1920s. Unfortunately, he chose to publish his observations in Esperanto, ensuring that recognition was slow in coming.

References

Y Tsuno and O Uchida, Chuo Arupusu to Yatsu-ga-take, Kusatsu Tozan Gaido

中央アルプスと八ガ岳―特選10コース (新版・空撮登山ガイド) [単行本]
津野 祐次 (著), 内田 修 (著)

Hitomaro's sense of sasa

And how Japanese deer threaten to make a meal of literary sensibilities

Just pages into today's breakfast book, I lit on a verse that halted my coffee-mug in mid-air, twixt table and lips:

The whole mountain is a storm
of rustling leaves
of dwarf bamboo
but I think of my wife
having parted from her

The poet who performed this coffee-mug arrest was Hitomaro (right), mediated through Ian Hideo Levy’s masterly translation of the Man'yōshū. If this eighth-century collection of verses is "Japan's premier anthology of classical poetry" (Levy’s words), then Kakinomoto Hitomaro (c.662-710) is its premier poet.

It was the dwarf bamboo that did it for me, or rather the new perspective on it. As a former workman alpinist, I never suspected the plant had such poetic depths. After all, it is everywhere. Dwarf bamboo, sasa, kumasasa - call it what you will - covers mountainsides all over Japan.

Apparently, there are four main kinds: Sasa kurilensis (chishima-sasa) and Sasa senanensis (kuma-zasa) grow where the winter snow is deep, as on the Japan Sea coast, while Sasa chartacea (sendai-sasa) and Sasa nipponica (miyako-sasa, as seen above) prefer the Pacific side with its shallower snows.


Hitomaro was probably writing about kumazasa (above); he sets his poem in snowy Iwami (today's Shimane Prefecture), his native province. I imagine him standing waist-deep on a slope of bamboo grass, on his way to the capital and looking back regretfully to his home village and the wife he'll never see again.

Senanenis or nipponica, it was all sasa to us. We pushed our way through endless thickets at the top of sawa climbs or bivvied in nests of it. Once – after coming out of the Kurobe gorge at Uozu – we were offered delicious sushi that had been wrapped in sasa leaves for freshness. But never did it occur to us that a storm of rustling bamboo leaves could stand for a world of loss. Until this morning, that is.

Hitomaro's highly refined sense of sasa started me wondering. What part does dwarf bamboo play in that slightly less famous work of literature, the One Hundred Mountains of Japan? Riffling through the pages of Nihon Hyakumeizan, we find sasa all over the map.

Hyakumeizan’s northernmost mention of the ubiquitous plant is in the chapter about Gassan, an extinct volcano in Tohoku. There, the haiku poet Basho is quoted as having made a pioneering bivouac:-

When we reached the summit, we were thoroughly chilled and could hardly breathe. The sun had already set and the moon had come out. Making ourselves a bed of bamboo grass with twigs of bamboo for a pillow, we lay down and waited for the dawn. (Translation: Dorothy Britton)

Now there is another reason for reading the classics: pay attention to Basho’s survival hints and, one day, the sasa may save you from a bad night out.

At the southern end of its range, the plant is mentioned in the very last Hyakumeizan chapter, on Yakushima's Miyanoura-dake. There's also a referencein the one about Odaigahara, a wooded upland in the Kansai:-

Ushi'ishi-ga-hara is a broad meadow covered in dwarf bamboo. Stands of tall trees here and there give it the appearance of a natural park. The place takes its name from a large stone shaped like a sleeping ox in one corner of the field.

If you went there now, though, you'd see less sasa. Much of it, reports a quartet of savants,* has been grazed out by the ever-increasing herds of deer. Let's hope the animals can keep their appetites in bounds. Otherwise, future heirs of Hitomaro may never get to hear the sasa rustle up a storm.

References

Fukada Kyuya: Nihon Hyakumeizan in a forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan

Ian Hideo Levy: The Ten Thousand Leaves: A Translation of Man'yōshū, Japan's Premier Anthology of Classical Poetry: Volume I

*Furusawa Hitomi, Hino Teruaki, Kaneko Shinji, Araki Makoto: Effects of dwarf bamboo (Sasa nipponica) and deer (Cervus nippon centralis) on the chemical properties of soil and microbial biomass in a forest at Ohdaigahara, central Japan. These savants also say there may be as many as 30.9 deer on each square kilometre of the mountain. No wonder the sasa is thinning.

Pictures: Hitomaro from Wikipedia; Sasa pictures from YamaKei guide to Japanese trees.

Screen test

A long summer's day on a cliff called Byōbu leads to a change in perspective

2.15am, Tokusawa: shooting stars are slipping out of the sky as we leave the campsite. One runs ahead of its trail, falling into the darkness like a glowing coal. Too bad that we can't spare the time to watch; every minute counts if we're going to climb him to the top. In silence, we chase the wavering beams of our headtorches up the valley path.

3.15am, Yokoō: breakfast is a couple of rolls in front of the hut, washed down with canned coffee from a vending machine. It's good that it's still dark, because he can't play mind games with us. In daylight, his profile looming above the trees would start raising questions. As in, is this steep enough for you, punks?

For a time, Byōbu was too steep. To get up that sheer skillet, you'd need artificial climbing techniques. We didn't do aid; therefore we couldn't climb Byōbu. Then, one September weekend, the props were kicked out from under that syllogism; our president and vice-president – that was Sandra – did two routes on Byōbu. The possible had just been redefined on us. I picked up the phone; it was time for action.

3.30: We enter the side valley, then wait quarter of an hour before it's light enough to wade across the stream. It's good that the face is still in shadow: in better light that central buttress would stand aggressively forward - less like an elegant lacquered screen, as its name should imply, than some windowless and totalitarian bastille. Welcome to the Ministry of Truth.

After the stream crossing, it's a half-hour scramble up a rubble chute of pulverised stone. Under one boulder is trapped a fragment of a shattered climbing helmet. I try not to speculate how it got there.

5.30: we're at the foot of the cliff, sorting the gear, just ahead of a trio of climbers from Nagoya. They've bivvied nearby, in a nest of panda grass. That was what Allan and I did last autumn, in our first visit to Byōbu: I remember a harvest moon rising into a field of altocumulus, turning the sky into rippled silver. A bad sign, as it turned out.

5.50: Today, the weather is flawless. In the growing light, I step off a patch of frozen snow onto the rock. A series of avalanche-rounded bulges leads upward; all the handholds have been smashed or smoothed away. Then Ken leads past, tackles an awkward overhang, and finishes the second pitch tethered to a stunted silver birch.

Now we're on T4 - T stands for 'terrace', but it's more like a steep patch of trees clinging to an island on the face. With the ropes draped around our necks, we stumble up it on the trace of a path. This is just the approach: the real climbing hasn't started yet. Yet the woods of Yokoō are already far below; the river has dwindled to a thread; its roar to a distant murmur.

8am: we flake out the twin ropes for the second time so that Ken can start on the first pitch. Route finding will be easy; that corner shows the way, arrowing upwards between granite walls. The climbing is "continuous at the grade", which means, translated from guidebook-speak, that it's hard all the way up.

But Ken is making steady progress. As his brightly clad figure dwindles into the face, I start to appreciate the cliff's scale; he's going to run out almost every centimetre of our fifty-metre ropes. The searchlight glare of an August morning is now flooding the face; I feel the sun scorching the black rubber heels of my rock-shoes as I come up.

When I arrive at the belay, Ken is still ebullient from his lead: "Anywhere else, that would be a climb in itself," he says. But here it's just the first pitch. My turn now: I clip a sling into a bolt above the belay and use it to start a hand-traverse, feet slapped onto holdless granite. Then it's a matter of edging crab-wise along a sketchy ramp, body flattened into the rock. The forest below shrivels into a mere herbarium.

I pull onto a ledge floored with smooth gravel and a soft stratum of cigarette stubs. Shielded by a pinnacle, it's a good perch while we eat another roll, watch the Nagoya three clinging like human flies to the neighbouring skyline, and drink the last of our water. Might as well go light for the next pitch, a near-vertical wall of blank granite, innocent of cracks and holds. In fact, we haven't a hope of getting up it without the handywork of a previous generation of alpinists.

Some 34 years before us, a trio of young Japanese climbers - the leader was 28 - woke from a bivouac on this very ledge and set to work. They'd hauled up heavy sackfuls of ironmongery for the job - starting out with 65 pitons and 38 of the new-fangled expansion bolts. Most important, though, was their attitude; they were out to redefine the possible.

This revolution had started in January 1955, when two rival climbing teams converged on Kita-Dake Buttress in the Southern Alps, vying for the same line. When they met up under the cliff, they decided to join forces. The long winter bivouacs on the face gave them ample time to discuss the state of Japanese alpinism.

How about it, somebody asked, if they formed an elite club. Recruiting only the very best climbers from the leading clubs, they would concentrate on big wall climbs, push grades up to top European standards, and train for new routes in the Alps and Himalaya. They would be Japan's answer to the Groupe de haute montagne, those praetorian guards of French alpinism.

In January 1958, the new group took shape around Okuyama Akira (right), one of the Kita-dake leaders. They decided to call themselves the RCCII, harking back to the original Rock Climbing Club of Kobe, the outfit founded in 1924 by Fujiki Kuzō to pursue technical climbing. Fujiki, who was still around, thought the RCC name was worn out, but it found support from Fukada Kyūya; the Hyakumeizan author always had a soft spot for history.

The RCCII made its first mark in June the same year when they climbed an impossibly overhanging face in Ichinokura-sawa. Using expansion bolts for the first time in Japan, the climbers were able to cross blank areas of rock where traditional pitons couldn't be used.

Then, in April 1959, RCCII member Minami Hakuto (left) and his crew pounded a vertical row of expansion bolts into the very slab that now loomed above us. Altogether, they spent four nights on Byōbu-iwa. Borrowing the name of Minami's home climbing club, they called their line Unryō: "cloud ridge".

Over the next decade, routes like this helped to drag Japanese alpinism - I could imagine it gibbering and squeaking a bit, like myself following one of Ken's bolder leads - out of its III/IV comfort zone into the hard new world of V/VI.

RCCII faded from the scene after Okuyama's death - he took his own life in 1972 to forestall the cancer that was killing him - but not before its members had put up a first Japanese ascent of the Eiger north wall and attempted Everest's south-west face.

Minami, by the way, is still around. And so, it appears, are the very bolts that he drilled into Byōbu three decades ago. From the safety of our luncheon ledge, we are now inspecting these with misgivings; some of Minami's originals appear to have been bashed out of shape by avalanches; most have lost their rings. As makeshift replacements, more recent climbers have threaded the bolt-heads with 3mm shock cord. These so-called hero loops are frayed and faded, but we have to use them or give up the climb.


Ken clips his first étrier into one of these loops - it's his turn to lead again, thank goodness - and he steps up with care. The suspense grows as he gains height: a fall is unthinkable on this crummy protection; the whole rig might unzip. At half height, somebody has installed a modern Petzl bolt - now, at least, the lead climber won't deck out if something comes awry. More daunting still is the place where the bolts stop, forcing the leader to climb free on steep rock before reaching the belay.

At 1pm, we're both standing on a small ledge at the top of the third pitch -in the same place, last autumn, Allan and I looked out at Jōnen and saw the pyramidal peak dissolve into an advancing rain squall. It was time to bail: we reached the ground after three huge abseils at the limit of our ropes. Today, however, the clouds look puffy and innocent. We decide to carry on to the top.

This is where we part company with Minami & Co. Climbing in the spring, they continued to bolt their way straight up, through an overhang. As, in this season, we don't have avalanches to reckon with, we can free-climb - without aid - sideways into a gully, and thence upwards.


That traverse, though . My feet are on a bulge that slopes outward into space. To make the move, I pull outward on this rock flake, an elephant's ear of crumbly granodiorite. As I put my weight on it, the stone emits a creak. The adrenalin charge hits like an electric shock and propels me, skittering on tip-toe, across that plunging slab. It's only when we get into the gully that we realise how cool it's become; the sun is long gone behind the cliff.

The topo doesn't even dignify the gully with a route description - it just indicates the direction to follow with an upward arrow. Yet there are still three or four pitches to climb. Ken is in the lead again when we come up against a huge clod of earth and matted tree-roots blocking the gully. To evade this relic of last winter's avalanches, he goes out on the gully's side-wall and clambers, no holds barred, through a couple of trees.


4pm has ticked by when we scramble up the last grassy slabs into a low wood. We unrig our last belay, to a pine tree, and stuff the ropes into our sacks. The Nagoya trio have topped out; we hear their voices above. Now what? Ken finds the escape route, up an earthy rake through the trees.

This takes us, unexpectedly, to the brink of another chasm. Twin gullies, gnawing from either side, have almost severed our cliff from its parent mountain, leaving just a sliver of ground between them. Seemingly, the two sides are joined only by a tangle of creeping pine roots. Stepping onto this knife-edge bridge of dreams, we understand. Byōbu really is a screen; free-standing, frail, hardly less temporary than ourselves.

References

Yama to Keikoku magazine, July 1993, Classic routes of Japan series no 4, Byōbu-iwa, East Face, Unryō Route. (屏風岩東壁　雲稜ルート

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)

Web article about the history of RCCII: 第二次ＲＣＣの活動と歴史 by 松浦　剛