Nihon Hyakumeizan: in search of ground truth (17)

Travelogue concluded: the avatar of a Famous Mountain is present even in the middle of Tokyo

24 November: I’d passed the little shrine in Ogikubo a dozen times over the years, never giving it a second glance. Now, on the way to dinner with old friends, I noticed the characters inscribed on the stone pillar: White Mountain.

So this was a Hakusan shrine, taking its name from the 2,702 metre-high volcano on the Japan Sea Coast. The mountain's most recent eruption was in 1659, meaning that, even now, it smoulders on beneath its woods and streams. In its eruptive prime, 100,000 years ago, Hakusan may have topped out at three and half kilometres, making it possibly the highest mountain in all Japan.

Hakusan lays a more certain claim to fame as the first of Japan’s high mountains to be climbed. It was opened in the first year of Yōrō (717) by the monk Taichō. He is said to have meditated in a lava cave below the summit, which can still be visited. (Picture of cave below by courtesy of Hakusan no Shizen blog.) Perhaps it was there that he was granted his vision of the eleven-faced Kannon, the goddess of mercy.

By the middle ages, Hakusan was established as one of Japan’s top three sacred mountains, alongside Fuji and Tateyama. Today, there are two thousand or more Hakusan shrines in Japan, considerably outnumbering the Sengen shrines dedicated to Mt Fuji.

Over the centuries, quite a few people have sought counsel or comfort from Hakusan. One of them was Fukada Kyuya, the Hyakumeizan author. In the relevant chapter of his most famous book, he records how, when he came home after the war and led an isolated, fugitive life for three years and a half, it was Hakusan that consoled him. “I could write for ever about Hakusan, so much has this mountain given me,” he concludes.

The little shrine in Ogikubo offered sanctuary of a sort too. Sandwiched between a shopping street and a main road, it was a grove of silence and shadow amid the city's din. Surely there was time for a quick look before dinner… But before I could move, a man in a business suit walked quickly out of the shopping street, past the raucous pachinko parlours, and up the stone path under the trees to the shrine. I turned away. On second thoughts, it wouldn’t do to be late for dinner.

Nihon Hyakumeizan: in search of ground truth (16)

Travelogue continued: a social visit to the Tanzawa mountains uncovers some changes

25 November: When, after many years, you climb a mountain with an old friend, you’d expect the friend to be changed more than the mountain.

Yet here was Matsuo-san, swinging a heavy pack onto his shoulders, just as he did on our snow-holing expeditions a decade ago. Since then, he’s retired or rather devoted himself full time to mountain photography. Possibly his pack was even heavier now; these days, the compleat photographer carries both digital and film gear, together with a vast armoury of lenses.
Privately, I doubted if those cameras were going to get a look in. A cloud bank with the density of miso soup had socked in the Tanzawa hills. But we were on our way to Kusano-san’s hut on Nabewari Hill, which faces Mt Fuji, and Matsuo-san had to be prepared. A man whose mountain calendars sell 10,000 copies a year has a reputation to live up to.

At the foot of the hill, we found a table piled with water bottles and a hand-written sign bidding us to carry up to the hut as many as we dared.

In the old days, Kusano-san used to port immense loads up Nabewari (he maxed out at 114 kilos); now his guests are invited to share the burden.

Obediently, we loaded up. Perhaps we overdid it; an hour or so later, I started to suspect that tectonic forces had raised the hut by several hundred metres since our last visit.

It was then that we came across the deer. Grazing by the side of the path, they hardly bothered to notice us. Like chimpira lounging by the curb in Kabuki-cho, they grazed as if they owned the place. Strange, I observed to Matsuo-san: you never used to see deer this low down.

The hut materialised out of the fog and we stumbled gratefully inside. Kusano-san looked much the same, though he doesn’t pack quite as much uphill as he did when he carried up every beam, plank and pillar that went into this hut.


After ordering two bowls of his famous Nabewari udon, we asked him about the deer. Kusano-san confirmed what we’d seen: their numbers have increased remarkably. Meanwhile, the reverse is true of their hunters: – the police are reluctant to give out new licences, so that the gun-owning population, like Japan’s, is ageing. Sometimes, hunting parties lack the strength to carry out a dead animal and just leave the carcass to rot where it fell. Kusano-san has several times happened on these grisly scenes.

And perhaps because the deer have spread, so have leeches – these were practically unknown in the old days, except, we’d heard, in the sawas of aptly named Leech Peak ( Hiru-ga-take). Now leeches are everywhere, Kusano-san said. They even batten on his car when he drives home. If he’s not careful to pick them off the tyres when he parks – as many as 20 or 30 can be lurking there – they will creep after him into the house.

Not all the news was bad. The beech trees near the hut, unlike their brethren on To-no-dake, haven't taken ill from the acid rain. And a radio tagging project suggests that 33 bears still inhabit the Tanzawa range. But don't worry if you hike the ridge paths: the bears prefer to haunt the river gorges.

We washed down our noodles with a coffee and went out to continue our survey. The fog hadn’t lifted. On the ridge behind the hut, the forest understorey had been nibbled almost to the bare earth. There used to be knee-high panda grass here. Yes, this mountain had changed quite a bit in ten years.


Stopping for a breather on the way down, we noticed a miniature torii by the path, its beams wrapped in silver foil. I turned to Matsuo-san for an explanation, but he’d never seen anything like it either. "Lurking under its trackless forests, the mountain exuded an air of mystery in those days," says Fukada Kyuya in the Tanzawa chapter of Nihon Hyakumeizan. Tenacious as the fog, some of that mystery still clings to these hills.

Nihon Hyakumeizan: in search of ground truth (15)

Travelogue continued: visiting the Island of the Immortals at a Great Mountain Temple near Kobe

23 November: Once you’re on a Hyakumeizan trip, everything becomes a mountain. By coincidence, the Senpai had chosen to visit a temple called the Taisan-ji – the Great Mountain Temple. When we arrived there, though – by now it was mid-morning – there was nothing obviously mountainous about it except the forested hill it sits in.

Taisan-ji belongs to the Tendai sect. In feudal times, Tendai Buddhism was for the Emperor, Shingon for the nobles, Zen for the warriors, and Jodo for the people. Today, in the bright autumn light, Daisanji was there for everybody.

Babies rode slumped on their mothers’ backs and children scampered, indifferent to the flaring colours of the maple trees. Photographers photographed. Appreciation for autumn hues increases with age. A very old man was helped down, step by painstaking step, from the gallery of the main hall.

We walked across an ornamental bridge into a glade. The shii trees that roof it, as well as the ilex, camellias and evergreen oaks, are said to be a remnant patch of the forest that once stretched in a verdant band all along this coast. By the stream, a stone Buddha seemed to distil green thoughts in a green shade.

On the way out, we noticed a side-temple, the Anyo-in. We shuffled off our shoes and went in.

Hidden from the outer world was a small stone garden, densely planted with curiously shaped rocks. One of them, explained a leaflet, represented the island peak of Horai-san.


We’d found our mountain for the day. I read on:

The concept of this garden came from Horai-Shinsen Thought brought from China, which was the fundamental thought in the long history of traditional Japanese gardens. Horai-Shinsen Thought came from the following legend. It was believed that there were mystic islands including Horai Island far away in the sea, and mountain hermits (Shinsen) who had hidden treasures and a secret formula for everlasting youth and immortal lived there. That was considered the highest idea to reach the Shinsen world of Horai-Shinsen Thought…


I took out my camera to record the garden, even though the leaflet subtly admonishes such behaviour: Please enjoy this garden, it said, sitting down on the floor and looking at the beauty of this garden with changes by four seasons. You can enjoy not only this garden itself but also profound meanings and thoughts behind it.


No, you can’t capture an image of Horai-san any more than you can climb it. Like Mount Analogue, the island peak is inaccessible. That is why, in a garden, it is never joined to other rocks with a bridge. You might, if you are lucky, reach the Shinsen world of Horai-Shinsen Thought, but never Horai-san itself.

Some have differed on that point. In his book Kwaidan, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) claims to have visited Horai-san. It is a place where the people drink wine from “very small cups”, he reports, and leave their houses unlocked, because there is no need to do otherwise. They are not immortal, however, and the essay ends with a warning: “Evil winds from the West are blowing over Horai; and the magical atmosphere, alas! is shrinking away before them. It lingers now in patches only, and bands – like those long bright bands of cloud that trail across the landscapes of Japanese painters.”

I thought about those patches and bands of Horai-san as we walked back to the van. Just how would you program your GPS if you wanted to find them today? Maybe the Senpai would know. Then, without asking, I understood why he’d chosen to visit Taisanji on a fine autumn day.

Nihon Hyakumeizan: in search of ground truth (14)

Travelogue continued: I pay a social visit to the Senpai, but we lose our way and discover a floating island. It isn’t Horai-san, though.

23 November: Trusting that the wind and currents would bring them to the floating island of the Immortals, they set themselves adrift in boats without oars or rudders. Those monks of the Ta’ng era came to mind after we’d launched ourselves, in the Sempai's van, into the tangled ocean of Hanshin expressway system.

Not that we were seeking a floating island, of course. No, the Senpai and I gave up our overseas expeditions some while back. (Probably to the relief of the Senpai’s wife.) These days, we just visit the odd garden or temple, like the one we were now heading for. But now, like those monks, we were, as the navigational manuals might put it, “uncertain of our position”. Worse still, we’d left home without a proper road-map, let alone GPS.

While the Senpai exited the expressway, turned the van round, and headed towards yet another on-ramp, I frantically consulted the large-scale map of Japan that I’d just found in a door pocket. Surely, I muttered, we are still on Honshu. Then, suddenly, we were no longer on Honshu; the van climbed a ramp and headed out between two mighty pillars. The sea glittered below.

“Well, I wanted to show you this anyway,” said the Senpai, quite unfazed. There was a touch of pride in his tone, and justifiably so. The Akashi Straits Bridge is an impressive sight, especially when the tops of its piers lose themselves in the morning mist. We rolled slowly towards mid-span as the Senpai explained how the half-built bridge gained a whole metre in length during the Kobe Earthquake fifteen years ago.

I later found an article that explained in detail what happened here within a few seconds after 5.46am on January 17, 1995. The bridge did, indeed, gain just over one metre in total span. The bridge deck, not yet hoisted into place, had to be lengthened to compensate. All this happened because the island of Awaji (or that part of it on which the bridge stands) had shifted 1.4 metres westward relative to the mainland.

We had found our floating island.

Driving a few yards onto Awaji, we turned the van more or less directly above the spot, 16 kilometres down, where the earth tore apart on that day of wrath. Then we drove back across the bridge, the tide-race below patterned into slow-churning whirlpools.

Nihon Hyakumeizan: in search of ground truth (13)

Travelogue continued: Taking in three views of Mt Fuji on the way back to Tokyo

November 21/22: “Fuji is there for everybody,” writes Fukada Kyuya in One Hundred Mountains of Japan (Nihon Hyakumeizan). And so it is. On this holiday weekend, the Shinkansen was full and the only remaining seat was on the seaward, non-Fuji side.

Thus it was gratifying to discover that – at just one place on the Tokaido line – Fuji shows itself even to passengers sitting on the wrong side of the train. This is just before Shizuoka station, approaching from the west. So we had our first view.

I was on my way to Shimizu to drop in on friends at a conference. The port city is famed for its prospect of Mt Fuji. Unfortunately, the forecast warned of so-so weather, suggesting that we might have to settle for fewer than the thirty-six views depicted by Hokusai.

In the evening, there was a brief glimpse of the volcano rising numinously beyond a liquid natural gas ship. We presumed that LNG regasification terminals must be one of those Seven Industrial Plants of Autumn - a fitting (modern) seasonal foreground for Japan's most symbolic mountain. Anyway, we were grateful for our second view.

Next day, a pall of cloud overspread the bay. We visited the famous pine grove of Miho Matsubara. This is where an angel drops from heaven – surely on a warmer day – in the Noh play of Hagoromo, leaving her feathered robe hanging on a convenient pine branch while she bathes. A local fisherman finds the robe and makes as if to keep it. Without a feathered robe, a Japanese angel cannot return to heaven. At first, the fisherman ignores the angel’s pleas but, when she appeals to his finer feelings, he restores the robe, letting the angel soar away “Over the mountain of Ashitaka, the high peak of Fuji.”

The mountain is mentioned only once in the play, yet it appears in almost every wood-cut or painting that illustrates the piece. In an oil painting exhibited in 1890, Honda Kinkichiro (1850-1921) shows Mt Fuji receding below the angel as she deploys a pair of Western-style feathered wings in addition to her feathered robe. Late Meiji was a time of rapid modernisation, even for angels.

We walked on to the end of the sandspit, where a short airstrip points out to sea. A bronze statue commemorates the youths who, in 1944, joined a squadron straight from high school. The inscription on the monument is difficult to read: a signboard beside it elucidates: “the young pilots …never doubting of their country’s cause … endured bitter trials within the sight of Mt Fuji, the sacred summit …”

Nearby, a revetment sheltered a Cessna and a V-tailed Beechcraft, their wing-tips twitching in the big wind. Out across the bay, Fuji was inferred rather than seen; a blue rift in the grey ceiling showed where its summit was shredding the clouds.


Back at the station, we said our farewells. Today, it seemed, we would have to leave without another view of Fuji. But, no, just before the train arrived, the familiar cone appeared, its phantom outline hovering in the gap between two buildings.

Even – or perhaps especially – in this unpromising setting, the mountain seemed to soar, as far removed from the earth and its troubles as an angel in a Noh play. What was it that Fukada had said? “Fuji is there for everyone and yet, soaring into eternity, stands for something beyond any man's grasp.”

Nihon Hyakumeizan: in search of ground truth (12)

Travelogue continued: a distant view vindicates Kujū-san as the pre-eminent mountain of Bungo Province

November 20: After visiting two of its summits and a troublesome gully, I'm still bemused as to why Fukada Kyuya elevated this massif to the ranks of his one hundred notable mountains. The Hyakumeizan author seems to have had doubts too; his Kujū chapter begins half-apologetically: "Overshadowed perhaps by the lofty reputations of Kirishima, Aso, and Unzen, Kyūshū's highest mountain is often overlooked. For it is, in fact, Kujū-san."

Height alone, though, does not make a mountain 'famous'. In the manifesto attached to his book, Fukada insists that a mountain must have a special character or significance to qualify as a Meizan. Yet, by his own admission, Kujū's scenery lacks distinctiveness: "Rather than lording it over his fellows, Kujū presides over an oligarchy. Moreover, all these peaks are tholoid-type volcanoes, making them even harder to tell apart."


The troublesome gully has ejected me in front of a huddle of mountain huts. Steam wisps into the air behind them. This is the Hokke-in, a hot spring once patronised by mountain mystics. Austerities may not have been all they practised: a signboard by the path records that the hermitage was shut down for being too "lively" (nigiyaka).

So what is this mountain about? Without vouchsafing an answer, the path leads me across a grassy plain, over a low col, and down to the road-head.

2.30pm: resplendent in a uniform that wouldn't disgrace a naval commodore, the venerable driver is guiding his bus down the switchback roads towards Bungo Nakamura. Still high on the mountain, we grind in low gear through a tilted landscape of woods and small fields. Nature and people seem to get on well together here.

The bus stops at a school. A teacher looks on as five children climb into the bus. The boys head for the back, where they open a window to yell out to their friends. The bus driver says two words in a tone of naval asperity and the window is smartly closed. Two small girls sit very straight in a front seat, their toes hardly brushing the floor.


At the next stop and the one after, the mothers are waiting for their children by the roadside. Few people seem to be around in these villages and even fewer children. Probably the inhabitants have been leaving for decades. Some of these children will leave too, sucked into the big cities by the jobs and the bright lights. But, wherever they go, they'll carry this tilted landscape with them. Kujū is their mountain: "We spend our childhood in the shadow of our mountain and we carry it with us in memory when we grow up and leave the village,” Fukada wrote: “And however much our lives may change, the mountain will always be there, just as it always has been, to welcome us back to our home village.”

We're still only half-way down the mountain. The driver makes his bus back and turn through hairpin bends with minuet-like grace. Then he pilots us into a gorge where fan-vaulted basalt shows through the last red and gold leaves of autumn.

4.30pm: I consult the station-master at Bungo Nakamura. His must be the only station in Japan where the sheds for steam locomotives are still standing, complete with a rusting turntable. There's still an hour to wait for Yufuin-no-Mori express back to the big city. Time runs slowly here. The usual denizens of a Japanese high street - the Dennys, the Starbucks, the Seven-Elevens - have yet to reach this town. There’s no call for these merchants of haste in Bungo province.


If you want to buy a bento or a can of coffee, then you buy it from a grocery shop that a family has owned and run for generations. Down the street, the pachinko parlour is named for Hawaii in faded silver letters. In those days – how along ago was that? - Hawaii was still an exotic place. People emigrated there for good; they couldn’t flit across for a four-day Jalpak tour. A poster touts the town as 'the Japan you grew up in'.

Just before the light goes, Kujū-san manifests itself as a distant silhouette beyond those crumbling engine sheds. Now I start to understand. That gently undulating skyline of long-dormant lava domes - what could be more appropriate as a backdrop for the meandering and unhurried pace of life in Bungo? Kirishima is for fans of brash young volcanoes; Kujū for folk of a more mature and considered taste. The view from this station platform makes everything clear: sometimes you just need to step back from a Meizan to appreciate its full stature.

Now I regret not stopping for the night here. You don't often get to stay in a town that has arrested time – and what other insights might such a place confer? – but the express is sliding up to the platform and the station-master, who has kindly reserved me a seat, is standing nearby with his white-gloved hand raised in salute. Too late to change my mind ...

Nihon Hyakumeizan: in search of ground truth (11)

Travelogue continued: a map misunderstanding leads to an unpleasant quarter of an hour in a snow-dusted sawa. We continue to question the Meizan status of Kuju-san ....

November 20, 9.30am: The top of Kuju-san is bleak and cold. After passing over the central summit of Nakadake, I’m just looking for the fastest way outta here. A dotted green line on the map appears to offer that.

Beware of green dotted lines. The path heads downhill, through clutching thickets of azalea bushes, just far enough to make turning back too much of a chore. Then it fades into a landslip, a cliff of rocks embedded, none too soundly, in a crumbling matrix of dark-brown ash. I avoid this hazard by taking to the stream-bed, clambering over rounded boulders. My boots skid off patches of frozen snow.

Just at the wrong moment, the sun comes out, loosing stones from the cliff. One splashes down into a nearby rockpool. I scurry across the danger zone, hoping that nothing big enough comes down to spoil my day. Much later I emerge onto the regular hiking trail. A sign points back the way I came, warning that the gully route has “dangerous places”. Or maybe just one dangerous place; you never can tell in the Japanese language.

I’m still wondering why Fukada Kyuya designated Kuju-san as one of the Hundred Most Famous Mountains in Japan ….