The Hot & Cold Hyakumeizan challenge (18)

Travelogue concluded: learning respect for Arashima-dake

8 December: Never diss the mountain you are about to climb. On approach marches, Sherpas take this principle so much to heart that they eschew all drinking, swearing, and lechery. Not that we were using profane language or thinking impure thoughts on our drive towards Arashima-dake – the Sensei, for one, wouldn’t hold with that. Even so, I fear that we may have offended our peak's tutelary deity.

“You know,” said the Sensei as she guided the van deftly over the frozen road, “Arashima gets low ratings on internet forums. It’s as if people are asking why it was chosen as one of the Famous Mountains.”

Now it’s true that Fukada Kyuya provoked some of these doubts himself – he says in Nihon Hyakumeizan that he considered other mountains in this Hokuriku district as alternatives. But he hadn’t climbed them, so Arashima was chosen by default. All the same, it might have been wiser not to raise this touchy subject in the mountain’s presence.

And there it was, now, looming against the orange glow of a winter dawn. There were the “two gentle ridges” described in Hyakumeizan, spreading out to embrace the small plain like the paws of a sphinx. We were heading for the ski-ground at the mountain’s foot. Soon the van was parked on frozen snow and we were unloading our gear from the back.

The Sensei had borrowed an extra pair of snowshoes. They were made by a company more famous for its petrol stoves, but I was glad to see them nonetheless – the lack of such aids had led to my summary rejection by Rishiri-dake two weeks previously.

I did a quick calculation: Arashima is 1,523 metres high, but we’d parked several hundred metres above sea level, so we had a mere 1,200 metres to climb. ‘Mere’… I shouldn’t even have thought that word, let alone said it out loud. Mountain kami-sama may be very sensitive about their height.

We walked up a short ski-piste and entered the woods, following a trail trampled into the deep snow. “They were wearing kanjiki,” deduced the Sensei. Kanjiki are traditional snowshoes, formed from a hoop of bamboo and tied onto the boot with rope thongs. People have used them here for centuries; they’re even mentioned by the twelfth-century all-terrain poet, Saigyō. But I was sure we’d get further with our high-performance footgear from the Seattle stovemakers. This peak was a sure thing…



The Sensei drew my attention to the trees, beech perhaps, with maple or holly lurking in the understorey. Dead branches hung down here and there. Perhaps they had taken ill from the exhaust fumes of all the tour buses that crowd the summer car-park, my companion suggested. Or it might be that the trampling boots of the peak-bagging hordes have exposed their roots. This is the curse of the Hyakumeizan: any mountain so designated attracts armies of visitors, thus robbing it of the charms that attracted Fukada Kyuya in the first place…

I began to wonder if the internet scribblers who diss Arashima have a point. After all, the mountain scrapes in above Fukada’s own minimum height stipulation by a mere – that word again – 23 metres. And to describe it, as Fukada does, as “sternly Matterhorn-like” is frankly preposterous. Could it be that the author was guilty of insider trading or plain misrepresentation in raising this mountain to the ranks of the Hyakumeizan?

Consider the charge sheet: Fukada was born in the neighbouring prefecture of Ishikawa, but his mother was from Fukui and he went to school there. That would prejudice him in favour of slipping a prominent Fukui peak into his celebrated list of One Hundred Mountains. Prior to its debut in Hyakumeizan, Arashima was pretty much unknown outside the prefecture …

The prosecution was warming to its case when we left the dingy lower woods and stepped up into the radiance of a beech grove in winter. Shards of hoarfrost glittered in the morning sun as the wind blew them through the open rides between the trees. The sky was blue, but a faint halo surrounded the sun. That is always a bad sign in the north country. Already we were losing the favour of this mountain.

We came out into a glade called Shakunage-daira. It was a pretty place, even without its namesake rhododendrons, buried as they were metres deep under the snowdrifts. We paused for some food and tea.

“Now the work begins,” said the Sensei, nodding to the other side of the glade. I saw what she meant. Yesterday’s trailbreakers had come this far and no further; from now on, we would have to make our own tracks. “No problem,” I said blithely, “with these excellent rackets, we’ll make good time.” The Sensei looked skeptical but said nothing.

I took a step forward and sank deep, just as if red-hot stoves were attached to my feet. The softness of the new snow was to blame, of course, not the high-tech shoes. Suddenly, 1,200 metres seemed like a long way. We waded across a connecting ridge to the main body of the mountain.

I'd got back into my stride and was preparing Fukada's defence in the Hyakumeizan misrepresentation case - namely that the author wasn't the first to include Arashima in an all-Japan list of famous mountains - when the Sensei interrupted my thoughts. “Next we have Mochi-ga-kabe,” she announced.

That sent a chill down my spine. Mochi are the glutinous rice-cakes that regularly choke to death numbers of hapless New Year revellers. A wall named Mochi could bode no good. Soon my fears were realized. A short but steep ramp barred the way. A tentative kick with the high-technology snowshoes dislodged a small snow-slide, revealing blue ice underneath.


In need of a good reason to go on, I found one when I looked over my shoulder and saw the Sensei standing there, arms folded. She seemed to be expecting action. It wouldn’t dare, I decided: Mochi-ga-kabe wouldn’t dare avalanche while a university professor and a member of the illustrious Fukui Mountaineering Club was looking on.

I set to work. Every step up caused the snow to collapse and minutes ticked away before I could work high enough to grab a spray of panda grass and haul myself up in vegetation-assisted A-zero mode. Not even The Thicket on Rishiri had called for such unwholesome tactics.

As soon as we came up on the main ridge, the sharp easterly found us. Stray fronds of panda grass rattled in the wind. While I waited for the Sensei to join me, I looked for a friendly beech trunk to shelter behind, but there were none. Now we stood among sparse stands of mountain birch. Strange, it seemed, to have climbed so quickly through vegetation zones – maple, beech, and birch – especially when the deep snow had slowed us so much.

I looked at my watch: 1.30pm already! Clearly a fox was at work here, speeding up time and stretching distances. While we tackled Mochi-ga-kabe, he’d also made off with the blue sky. A pall of cloud had come posting up from the horizon and buried the sun in its grey tendrils.

We could allow only another half-hour if we wanted to get down before nightfall. I hurled myself at another slope of deep snow, only to be smothered in its mochi-like depths. Slowly I engineered a trench towards the skyline. The Sensei followed, hardly less laboriously. We seemed to be re-enacting Death March on Mt Hakkoda, albeit with a smaller cast.

At 2pm we came out on a small top, above the trees and within sight of the top. Well this would have to do for the day. We allowed ourselves a minute to take in the view. Behind us loomed Hakusan, luminously pale against the darkening skies. Below, like a snowy patchwork, was spread the snowy plain of Ono, sprinkled with farmsteads.


Above, spindrift plumed Everest-style from the ridge; this mountain clearly insisted on being taken seriously. “There used to be a hut and an antenna up there,” said the Sensei, “but they knocked them down because this is a Hyakumeizan. They also took away the shrine.” No wonder the kami-sama is aggrieved, I thought: it must be mighty cold without a shrine to bivvy in.

We started back. Even the downhill going was slow, but again I noticed how soon the dake-kamba (birches) gave way to the beech woods. Perhaps the fox had rearranged the scenery too.


It turns out, though, that Arashima’s treelines really do bunch more closely together than on other mountains. Its beech trees give way to birch at a mere 1,420 metres, compared to 1,700 metres on nearby Hakusan and in the Northern Alps. The savants ascribe this downshifting of vegetation zones to the mountain's exposure to the Siberian winds sweeping in from the Japan Sea.

That makes Arashima, climatically speaking, the equal of a higher or more northerly eminence. It has the stature of a famous peak, even if it packs its height into a smaller interval.

The light was fading when we got back to the car. As we drove away, All Angels playing on the CD drive, I looked back and saw a black bar of cloud, like a sword, hanging over Arashima-dake. For the first time, I considered the meaning of its name: the wild island peak. Yes, this is a mountain that deserves the utmost respect.

References

Nihon Hyakumeizan by Fukada Kyūya in a forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan

百名山の自然学西日本編　by　清水長正

Random acts of mountain photography by Project Hyakumeizan and (more) by the Sensei

The Hot & Cold Hyakumeizan challenge (17)

Travelogue continued: getting to know the Hyakumeizan author in his home town

7 December: I boarded a time machine at Osaka station. The bull-nosed Raicho express dated back to my student days, but now I meant to ride it much further into yesteryear. Yes, I was aware that a regular Japan RailPass does not even cover night trains, let alone time travel, but a voyage into the past was necessary if I was to get to know the Hyakumeizan author better.

Alas, it is no longer possible to meet with Fukada Kyuya in person - he died in 1971, while climbing a mountain - but a museum commemorates him in his birthplace of Daishoji, Ishikawa prefecture. If you want to get to know somebody, you have to visit them at home, and this was why I was heading for the north country in an antiquated express train.

“My native mountain is Hakusan,” writes Fukada in Nihon Hyakumeizan. “You could see it from the top floor of the house where I was born, from the gates of our primary school, from the banks of the river where we used to catch minnows, from the sand dunes of the beach where we swam, in short from just about anywhere in our town. There it was, right in front of us, noble and beautiful.”

And there it was, noble and beautiful, as we came into Daishoji late in the afternoon. Winter had come early, veiling Hakusan in pure white. True to the description in Hyakumeizan, its summit snows swept down from the ridgeline in a flawless folds, unblemished by outcrops or shadows.

The sun was setting as we walked into the museum, which occupies a large and dignified wooden building just across the river where the young Fukada Kyuya used to catch minnows. An elderly curator met us at the door to welcome us to the Fukada Kyuya Yama no Bunkakan. The museum is run and staffed by volunteers from the Friends of Fukada Kyuya Society (深田久弥を愛する会), our guide explained.

Not for the first time, I wondered if Nihon Hyakumeizan is a book or a movement or even a cult. Apparently, the Ai-suru Kai was founded about a decade ago to collect and preserve memorabilia of the Hyakumeizan author.

The Hyakumeizan author? Well, I’ve taken to describing him so in this blog, but the tag might mislead. Before we’d even shuffled away from the entrance hall in the museum-provided felt slippers, our guide waved his hand at an entire bookcase of works – stories about north country girls, a war novel, collected essays, books about the Himalaya and Central Asia, and, of course, several more books about the Japanese mountains. This was a reminder that Fukada already had four decades of literary activity behind him before he published Nihon Hyakumeizan.

We moved on to a ‘kura’, a former storehouse, which was appropriately full of mountaineering gear. A pair of wooden skis with primitive leather-strap bindings recalled a descent of Mt Fuji in March, a feat which even today should be undertaken only by experts in favourable conditions.

On the floor was pitched a high-altitude tent with a round hatch, somewhat like the window of a tea-house. This was the door that Fukada and his two companions crawled in and out of at their high camp on Big White Peak (7,083m) in the Jugal Himal. Although they didn’t make the summit, the expedition is significant as one of the first Japanese forays to the Himalaya after the second world war.

Writers are like icebergs: you see in their books only as much of them as they allow you to see. Hyakumeizan offers few hints or none that its author climbed in the Himalaya or skied down Fuji. Fukada keeps himself largely in the background. Often he barely mentions his own experiences when describing a particular summit. Yet the book distils an entire life of climbing and writing. The almost ego-less style accounts for the paradox of Hyakumeizan: an intensely “personal choice” of mountains that nonetheless became a national institution.

We thanked our guide and walked briskly down Daishoji’s main street. Daylight was ebbing and we still wanted to pay our respects to the house where Fukada was born on March 11, 1903. We came up to an old wooden building, fronted with a sliding glass door to the shop on the ground floor. A sign in the window advertised that New Year cards could now be ordered. Fukada was the son of the local printer, and the business continues to this day, although it has passed out of the family.


Daishoji is a small town – the Raicho doesn’t stop there – and it’s quite possible that you can still see Hakusan from the top floor of Fukada’s former house. Fukada could certainly see the mountain when he moved back to Daishoji for a few years after the war. At that time, he was writing a novel based on his experience as a platoon leader in China. Quite often, he must have looked out of the window:

Fine winter days are far and few between in the Hokuriku region. But on one of those rare cloudless evenings, when the air was clear and cold enough almost to crackle, Hakusan floated there in the pale moonlight like a work of fine crystal chased in silver. It was a scene drawn less from reality than from some land of fantasy.

The sun had already set and a chilly breeze was getting up. As we walked back to the car, we glimpsed Hakusan at the end of a side-street. The summit snows glowed with an unearthly radiance, as if illuminated from within. On this rare fine winter evening, the mountain had presented itself as Fukada Kyuya saw it sixty years ago.

For a brief moment, at least, the Japan Railpass had permitted a trip out of time.

The Hot & Cold Hyakumeizan challenge (16)

Travelogue continued: searching for ground truth on Sakurajima and finding the meaning of Meizan

6 December: “Do you feel lucky, punk, well, do you?” There comes a point when every mountaineer should ask himself that question and I’d just reached it. Ahead, the ridge narrowed to a crumbling knife-edge of loose volcanic ash.


Suddenly I could see the whole diagram. The dense thickets of pine and razor grass that I’d fought my way through below were actually my allies. Their roots held the volcanic rubble together into a broad hog’s back.


Above the tree-line, however, erosion had honed the ridge to a lethal sharpness. One crumbling foothold here and the next stop would be the hard lava slabs of the gully below. Well, how lucky did I feel?


Sakurajima is not a famous mountain or ‘Meizan’. That is to say, Fukada Kyuya didn’t choose the volcano for his A-list of One Hundred Mountains of Japan. But that didn’t stop him climbing it. In fact, he set out the same day that he stepped off the night ferry from Yaku-shima, in December 1939. As I had just returned from the same island, it seemed reasonable to follow in his footsteps.

There was at least one defect in this plan. Since Fukada’s day, Sakurajima has stirred into life several times. On one occasion, it dropped a five-ton volcanic bomb on a nearby hotel. As a result, Fukada’s path to the volcano’s north summit has long since fallen into disuse. In fact, nobody could even tell me where it used to be, until volcanologist and fellow blogger Tom Bouquet gave me a steer.

So I’d crossed over from Kagoshima on the early-morning ferry and, thanks to help from a kindly farmer and a truck-driver, soon found the start of the ridge. Then I followed the trails of wild boar upwards, shouldering a way through dense brushwood, until I picked up the line of the old path. Somebody had marked part of the way with pink twine. Then I emerged above the treeline and the knife-edge ridge blocked the way. Well, punk …

Far to the north, snow squalls were sweeping over the Kirishima massif, home to another of Fukada Kyuya’s favourite volcanoes. Above, the narrow ridge led up to steep slopes of rubble and the tilted raft of Kita-dake’s summit block. Yesterday’s cold front had dusted it with snow.


The mountain was certainly showing another side to its personality. From afar, Sakurajima takes the form of a long, low ridge. Only the omnipresent smoke-plume distinguishes it as one of Japan’s most active volcanoes. Move closer, though, and those seemingly inoffensive slopes disintegrate into wild tangles of forest, gully, cliff and crest.


On balance, I was not feeling lucky enough. Yet it was frustrating to give up so close to a summit that is less than 1,200 metres high. By turning back, I would not top out on Kita-dake, the highest of Sakurajima’s three tops, and I would not look down into the old crater, where, in Fukada’s day, weekend trippers had spelled out their names in white stones.

Nor would I be able to follow Fukada and his companion as they climbed down into the old crater of Kita-dake and crossed its floor. When they climbed to the opposite rim, they were astonished by sight of the smoke churning into the sky from Minami-dake, the active summit. Drawn as if magnetically by this vision, they clambered down onto an eroded col, a relic of another old crater, then climbed a narrow ridge to the central summit. Finally, and with bated breath, they hauled themselves up a rocky slope onto the very edge of the active crater.


Below them was a declivity “like an iron tub” but more than 120 metres deep, according to the map. Steam jetted from the wall opposite them, the plume seeming to change its position from time to time. Vapour was also wafting up from below their vantage point. They took some photos and started down a chute of snow-covered rubble on the mountain’s western slopes. “An unpleasant descent,” Fukada records, “and hardly one to be recommended to beginners.”

I was scarcely looking forward to my own descent. For a start, mountaineers who turn back must deal with what might be called the John Ruskin Syndrome. As that all-terrain literary critic wrote from Chamonix to his father in 1863, “this I know and find practically, that if you come to a dangerous place, and turn back from it, though it may have been perfectly right and wise to do so, still your character has suffered some slight deterioration; you are to that extent weaker, more lifeless, more effeminate, more liable to passion and error in the future…”
I suggested that Ruskin kindly kept his observations to himself, and set off down the ridge. Immediately I fell liable to error, if not passion, and lost my way in the thicket. It took even longer to descend than it had to come up and I staggered out onto the road scratched, sweaty and out of sorts.

Then I remembered the two tangerines in my pack. Just after stepping off the ferry that morning, I had been consulting my map when a small van pulled up. A woman in field attire had jumped out, pressed the two mikan into my hand and asked me where I was going. Then she insisted on driving me partway up the hill. “When you get back,” she suggested, “just tell the tourist office to pass a message to the Nakamura who grows giant radishes and we’ll know you’re safe.”

Sakurajima’s farmers are justly proud of their daikon, which thrive in the same black ash that makes for such unsatisfactory ridge-climbing. There is even a Giant Radish festival. I peeled one of Mrs Nakamura’s tangerines: it was delicious too.

I hadn’t walked far when a turbo-diesel roar announced a heavy vehicle grinding up the road. From the purple metallic paint and chrome exhaust stacks, I recognised the truck that had stopped for me in the morning. The driver wound down his window, a grin creasing his face under the punch perm: “How did it go?” he asked. “I didn’t get far, but thanks for dropping me off at exactly the right spot. O-sewa ni narimashita…” I replied with a bow. This was becoming a remarkably sociable volcanic excursion.



I walked on down the road between tangerine plantations carved out of the tangled woods. The ripening fruit shone like constellations in the shadowy groves. Clouds of kites wheeled overhead and orange-breasted finches hopped through the bushes; birds seem to like it here.


The volcano is a good habitat for people too, I reflected. It gives them fertile orchards, hot springs (Fukada stayed at one after his climb), and limitless employment for the construction crews who build anti-erosion dams across its gullies. Acknowledging this bounty, the Koike school playground even has a miniature volcano for the children to scramble over.

Or is it a bomb shelter? Those who live on volcanoes have to reckon with the occasional conniption*. Just up the road from here, a sign advises construction workers to take cover “when you see stones come flying through the sky like a flock of crows”.

This blend of familiarity and respect reminded me of another island volcano. One winter afternoon, I’d admired the steam pluming from Etna’s summit craters while gaps in the clouds below revealed rich tracts of vineyards and olive groves. Sicilians call their volcano “’a muntagna”, as if there were no other. Sometimes they even speak of “la nostra signora”.

La nostra signora … the words could describe the gilded Kannon that I had just walked past. Standing on a strip of land between the coast road and the sea, the statue looked as if it belonged to a private shrine. Perhaps she was there to intercede with the mountain.

As the ferry drew away, Sakurajima seemed to rise into the sky while the port town at its foot dwindled into the distance. I realised that I’d misjudged this volcano. Even if it didn’t make Fukada Kyuya’s A-list, it has a presence and stature of its own. And it is most certainly The Mountain for all who live around it. Looking back over the wake of the ferry, I felt privileged to have made the acquaintance of this splendid Meizan.



*this may understate the violence that Sakurajima can sometimes be capable of. See this account of the Taisho eruption from the New York Times. (Incidentally, the NYT should be applauded for its generous and enlightened policy of free access to its archives.)

References

Photo of crater: Japan Meteorological Agency, report on Sakurajima

Tom Bouquet, Guide to Japanese Volcanoes: Sakurajima

Fukada Kyuya, essay on Sakurajima, in Hyakumeizan Igai no Meizan 50. As for Nihon Hyakumeizan, Sakurajima almost made the cut, but not quite. In his afterword to his most famous book, Fukada says, “I allocate six mountains to Kyūshū, to which one might add Yufu-zan, Ichifusa-yama, and the volcano of Sakurajima.”

The full quotation from John Ruskin’s often-quoted letter:

"That question of the moral effect of danger is a very curious one; but this I know and find practically, that if you come to a dangerous place, and turn back from it, though it may have been perfectly right and wise to do so, still your character has suffered some slight deterioration; you are to that extent weaker, more lifeless, more effeminate, more liable to passion and error in the future; whereas if you go through with the danger, though it may have been apparently wrong and foolish to encounter it, you come out of the encounter a stronger and better man, fitter for every sort of work and trial, and nothing but danger produces this effect."

The Hot & Cold Hyakumeizan challenge (15)

Envoy to Yakushima: Hananoego high moor tells a harrowing tale of destruction and redemption

Sometimes the landscape can be as hard to read as a shy girl sitting in a corner. From her unassuming mien, one would never guess at the epic story she has to tell. That was the case with "Japan's southernmost mountain bog", where I paused only long enough to snap a photo in my rush to escape from the top of Yakushima (see previous post).

It turns out that Hananoego High Moor – as she is formally known – harbours an infinitely more dramatic record. Captured not on a digital sensor but in successive layers of peat, these images were brought to life by several talented academicians. One of them was Yasuda Yasunori, a scientist from Kyoto University, who took core samples in 1983 and analysed the pollen trapped in them. This is the story outlined by his research.

If you'd hiked up here about 6,300 years ago, a dense forest would have filled your view. Then as now, the pollen confirms, the big cryptomeria were kings. But among them stood box trees, evergreen oaks, and magnolias – trees that today grow only several hundred metres lower on the mountain. In this warmer climate, the forest climbed high, so that trees covered the summits instead of rocky outcrops.

In its last days, a heavy lading of ash may have blanched the leaves of the old forest. North-west winds would have brought this fall-out from a tall conical island about 50 kilometres away. Today, Yakushima's volcanic twin, or what is left of it, is known as Kikai. Smoke and ashes probably tumbled from its vent for months or years before anything more serious happened.

The peat doesn't record the exact fate of the forest when Kikai exploded with the force of five Krakatoas. If the base surge had not already smashed it to matchwood, it would have succumbed to the pyroclastic flow. This was a wall of searing gas and ash that flashed the sea to steam as it passed. If they were still standing, the old cedars would have flared like torches when the heat rolled over them.

A thin seam of white pumice within the peat conjures up a blasted, tree-less landscape. After the eruption scoured off the island's vegetation, these tell-tale volcanic debris washed into the moor while ravines gnawed at the unstable slopes. For decades or centuries, Yakushima was a hulk. Then plants started to creep up the mountainside. Among the first to colonise the ash drifts were rhododendrons (shakunage).

Eventually, the cedars came back to the marsh, but not the evergreen oaks and magnolias. Perhaps the climate cooled after Kikai darkened the skies with thirty cubic miles of ash. It certainly cooled later. People returned too, leaving traces of charcoal in the post-eruption layers. But they probably did not stem from the island's original inhabitants. For, when Kikai vanished, so did early Jomon civilisation all over Kyushu.

I should have reserved more time for Hananoego. She tells quite a tale for a small patch of soggy ground. One wonders what kind of a story those layers of peat and pollen will imprint over the next few centuries.

Reference

Influences of the Vast Eruption of Kikai Caldera Volcano in the Holocene Vegetational History of Yakushima, Southern Kyushu, Japan by Yasuda Yasunori, International Research Center for Japanese Sladies, Kyoto University, in Japan Review, 1991, 2: 145-160

Guide to Satsuma-Iwojima (Kikai) by Tom Bouquet

The Hot & Cold Hyakumeizan challenge (14)

Yaku-shima concluded: A dark night’s passing turns into a noki-shita horror show

4.30pm: the path comes out into a waterlogged clearing. This is Japan’s southernmost mountain bog, a noticeboard says. A pool reflects the westering sun as tinted clouds brush the wooded ridge above. And now I really do have to hurry: there’s no more than an hour of light left.

5pm: I switch on my headlamp outside the Yodogawa hut. Under the forest canopy, the darkness is almost palpable enough to run my nose against. Get careless now, and it would be easy to stray off the path and disappear down a gully. An hour later, I emerge onto the forest road. Safe, sort of. Now for the four-hour hike back to the coast.

6.40pm: I pause for a moment by the Kigen Sugi, a tree said to date back to the dawn of history. The sky is so dark that not even the cedar’s topmost boughs can be seen, but I listen to the wind. It’s not every night that you hear the wind blowing through a tree that seeded itself before humanity discovered iron.

8pm: the moon sails into the clouds. Walking down the dark, dark road, I spot a tiny blue light ahead, shining like a good deed in a naughty world. As I get closer, I see that it’s a camping lantern and that it’s illuminating the interior of a car.

Then the beam of my headtorch picks out the bulk of a silver Nissan Patrol with Hamamatsu plates. Hamada-san has just finished his pot noodles when I knock on the window. He is as surprised as I am. We exchange news – he did a training run up today and will go for Miyanoura-dake tomorrow. He warns me it’s a long way down to the coast and says he’ll drive me there, an offer I deflect – he’s already saved my day once, after all – by saying I’m going to bivvy just a bit further down the road.

10pm: still hiking down the mountain road. Outraged hoots and crashes in the bush indicate that the monkeys prefer to have the mountains to themselves at night. Seawards, an occasional flicker of electric blue runs along the horizon. As you can’t logically have summer lightning in the middle of winter, I decide that the flashes must be emanating from lighthouses on Tanegashima.

11.30pm: I reach the first sign of civilisation, a vending machine. Although it purports to be the passport to drink paradise, I keep going. The glare from its illuminated cabinet lights me far along the road.

11.45pm: The coastal village of Ambo is deserted, shuttered, dead, dark. But not quite silent: the sound of karaoke wafts to my ears. I follow the music to its source, drop my pack, and slide open a glass door. The singers – it is a duet – don’t miss a beat. Raggedy figures stumbling out of the jungle late at night are clearly nothing unusual here. In the lull before the next song, I order a plate of yaki-soba.

While the noodles are sizzling in the pan, the mama-san asks where I’m going next. Back to Miyanoura, I say, to catch the ferry. A man with a mop of white hair looks up from his sake. STORM! he says in English, miming wind and waves so vigorously that he almost swipes his bottle from the table. The mama-san remonstrates: the gaijin-san can speak quite good Japanese, so why not just speak normally. But White Mop is just getting into his stride: WAVES! STORM! FERRY! NO! STOP! he mouths.

5 December, 00.15am: with this warning ringing in my ears, I pay for the yaki-soba and step outside. A bit of cloud, but still a calm night with some stars: I can’t believe that a spot of bad weather is going to stop the MV Hibiscus, a 1,000-tonner disposing of 8,000 horsepower. So I’d better get myself to the ferry port. Unfortunately, Miyanoura is 20 kilometres away, as a roadsign reminds me. What now? I’m reminded of a joke involving an economist and a can of baked beans on a desert island. Assume a tin-opener, says the economist.

Assume a taxi
I try assuming a taxi and, on cue, a black Toyota Crown drives up. The passenger door, bearing the logo of the Nankoku Taxi Company, swings open by itself. The elderly but immaculately be-suited driver says, apologetically, that Anbo to Miyanoura will set me back about ¥6,000. That’ll be fine, I say. Lord Powerscourt has about run his course for today. On the way, the driver tells me about the weather: it’s much too warm for the time of the year, he says. Quite often by this time, the mountain-tops are white with Japan’s southernmost snows.

00.45am: The taxi driver cancels the meter when it reaches ¥5,500, well before we reach the ferry port, but I pay him the agreed fare anyway. Most late-night taxis you have to call. Only very special ones materialise when you assume them. The driver is concerned about my plans for the night. No need to worry, I say, I’m going to bivouac “noki-shita” – under the eaves of the ferry terminal.

01.30am: Noki-shita turns into the Noki Horror Show. I’ve just settled down under an arcade when a sheet of electric blue ripples across the sky. For a second, the mountains stand out as a crinkled black silhouette. Then the display repeats itself, this time with a roll of thunder for emphasis.

I scramble to my feet and consider the options. A shed for fork-lift trucks offers a more convincing shelter. I get there just before the first squall beats a furious tattoo on the tin roof. When it eases, the squealing of hawsers takes up the refrain as nearby ships strain at their moorings. The thunder moves on, but the rain continues to lash down. With this more than adequate precipitation, it’s going to be a cooler night than expected. I hope Hamada-san is OK, high up on the mountain in his Nissan Patrol.

7.20am: between the harbour pier-heads, there is nothing to be seen except for tumbling wave-crests that streak the black water with foam. The MV Hibiscus stays away. Later, an efficient clerk of the Iwasaki Steamship Company rebooks me on the hydrofoil – the sea-state is just within limits for the Toppi (‘flying fish’), as this one is called.

10.20am: As the gas turbines spool up with a rocket-ship whine – these really are jetfoils – the captain warns that he’ll turn back if the weather worsens. The occasional wavetop slams hard against the hull as the hydrofoil weaves through the swell, but we keep going. Behind our bucketing craft, Yaku-shima recedes into the heart of a dark cloud.

The Hot & Cold Hyakumeizan challenge (13)

Yaku-shima continued: No time to linger on the summit of Japan’s southernmost famous mountain

2.20pm: the trees are thinning now, as we approach the alpine zone. A wooden ladder helps with a rock step, and then I squeeze through a cleft into a new world. Ahead, much closer, is the green pyramid of Miyanoura-dake. The sun is now running ahead, and it takes the rock at a grazing angle, picking out the curious rectangular inclusions of a quartz-like mineral in the grey stone.

As much of Japan is volcanic, I’m still expecting to find some kind of lava in the centre of the island. But this is no volcanic rock: it looks like granite. Later researches indicate that Yaku-shima is more akin to Taiwan than to mainland Japan. It consists partly of sediments scraped off the Philippine Plate as it plunged under Eurasia. A blob of igneous rock later welled up into this melange of sandstones and mudstones, breaking out into crystalline pimples as it cooled. It is these bunions of orthoclase, embedded in granite, that are scraping at my pack as I ease myself through the rocky gap.


2.30: tea-break amid a cluster of granite domes set, like a collection of Moores or Hepworths, in a park-like expanse of bamboo grass. Now that no trees obscure the view, I notice a long bar of cloud hanging in the eastern sky. Lenticulars usually herald bad weather, but the balmy sunshine makes it hard to take this warning seriously. Reluctantly, I rise from my granite bench and address myself to the final slope.

2.45pm: generations of Hyakumeizan-baggers have worn a trench deep into the turf. Snow meltwater has smeared the path with ribbed ice. Here and there I have to take to the bamboo grass beside the way to make progress but my ice-axe doesn’t come into play.

The people who advised me to bring the axe were right, though: it can snow heavily on Miyanoura-dake. A foot of snow covered the summit when Fukada Kyuya, the Hyakumeizan author, topped out. In fact, the academicians have calculated that the mountain gets almost ten metres of rain or snow every year. Precipitation is adequate.

3.00pm: no shrine crowns the summit of Miyanoura-dake, just a humble wooden marker post inscribed with the altitude of 1,935 metres. The view is more impressive than this modest figure would suggest. To the west, scattered clouds trail their shadows on a silver sea. Eastwards, lenticulars shape-shift silently over a foreground of rocky outcrops. Puffy clouds are starting to drift over the ridge to the south – and that’s where I have to go.

Having attained a long-sought peak, the Hyakumeizan author liked to take his time. “Scrambling between the boulders, we hauled ourselves onto the summit and lay down to sun ourselves like the lizards. We spent a pleasant hour here, chatting and looking down on that wilderness of rocks … The hour I spent on that bright and peaceful top was as close to heaven as one gets in this world.” These are typical summit comments from his writings.

Fukada was in no rush. He got to know his mountains over the course of a lifetime: he was already in his sixties by the time Nihon Hyakumeizan was published. Would that we could emulate his unhurried style today. But the sun is leaning at an ominous angle towards the horizon and it’s time to press on.

The Hot & Cold Hyakumeizan challenge (12)

Yaku-shima continued: In the Senior Common Room of the Giant Cryptomeria

12 noon: a steep wooden staircase leads up to the Jomon Sugi, said to be the most impressive of Yaku-shima’s giant cryptomerias. The viewing platform in front of it is like the audience chamber of a monarch. A platoon of blue track-suited high-school students has just arrived. Committing an act of lèse majesté, they turn their back on the tree as they organize themselves for the group photo.

Some used to say the Jomon Sugi was 7,000 years old, but the academicians have set to work and calculated an age of a mere 2,000 years or so. Journeying into another ancient forest, the narrator of a famous novel by Joseph Conrad says that “Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were king.”

Here too the big trees are king, but this is no Heart of Darkness. These light and aery woods stand more than a thousand metres above the mangroves and riotous sub-tropical vegetation of the coast. We’re one storey higher than the pine forest too, with its louche flowers and shrubs. Up in these cool airs, the forest breathes a genial, collegiate atmosphere, as if inhabiting some sylvan Senior Common Room.

A collegiate forest? If that’s a heresy against tooth-and-nail Darwinism, you might look to Imanishi Kinji for support: “In a forest, the orderly arrangement of members … is probably the most logical: they avoid conflict, and as many as possible have access to adequate light or nourishment,” he wrote in The World of Living Things (生物の世界).

With its emphasis on collaboration as well as competition, Imanishi’s book offers a very Japanese view of nature. Looking up at this stately grove of trees, each one standing a considerate and respectful distance from his neighbour, I could see exactly where the great sensei was coming from.

I glance at my watch, a somewhat absurd gesture in front of a two thousand year-old cedar. I’m increasingly aware that a one-day traverse of Yaku-shima is not a feat. It is a crime.

1.30pm: the forest is filled with hooting and rustling at my approach. Clearly I am not particularly welcome. As I sit down for a bite to eat on the bench outside the Shin-Takazuka hut, an unwardened concrete structure, monkeys emerge from a nearby thicket. Keeping a watchful eye on me, they lope across the path.


After lunch, I pass a pair of monkeys sitting in a tree. One looks at me dubiously as I point my camera. Just because I’m used to this, says his long, expressive face, doesn’t mean I like it.

“It always astonishes me how simian they look,” I can almost hear him observe to his silky-coated companion, “but their manners put them quite beyond the pale.”

“Too, too, otiose,” she agrees, ripping another bunch of leaves from a twig. Strange how her turn of phrase reminds me of Sei Shonagon....