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

The o-yatoi who weighed the earth

A mid-Meiji encounter of science and religion at the summit of Mt Fuji

On a windy day in early August 1880, the priest called Kinoshita lost his sacerdotal cool. Half an hour ago, a balding foreigner had asked him, through an interpreter, if he could set up his infidel devices in Kinoshita's shrine - the Summit Sanctuary of the Sengen Goddess of Mt Fuji herself.

SUNSET FROM THE SUMMIT OF FUJI -- The Photographer Catches His Shot At the End of a Long Climb, a photo by Okinawa Soba on Flickr.

Unthinkable, fumed Kinoshita, as he sent the interlopers on their way. Yet now the interpreter, this gangling student-type, was coming over to pester him again. Would the estimable priest be so good as to reconsider his decision, the student was asking, because the American sensei wants to weigh the earth.

Thomas Corwin Mendenhall (left) did not come to Japan specifically to weigh the earth. As one of the 3,000 or so 'o-yatoi' or foreign employees of the Meiji government, he'd been invited to teach physics at the newly established Tokyo Imperial University. Arriving in Yokohama on September 21, 1878, he gave his first lecture the very next day, from a podium set up in a venerable Buddhist temple. (The images had been carefully moved aside for the occasion).

Mendenhall attached great weight to the experimental method. Experiments, you could say, were the making of him. Born in 1841, the youngest of five children, he was brought up on a farm in eastern Ohio. It was a young Quaker teacher, teaching through practical demonstration, who started him on the road to science. For instance, during recess, the girls' shawls were used to block out the windows. A pinhole in this screen produced a clear image of children playing outside, projected onto the room's white ceiling.

Money was scarce; the future physicist had to buy his copy of Euclid with a silver dollar he earned by driving a neighbour's cow twenty-five miles to market. The only way he could get a further education was to become a teacher, which he did by taking his teaching certificate at the age of sixteen. From his first job at a primary school, he worked his way up to a professorship at the new Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Ohio State University) in 1873. Then came the invitation to Japan.

Once in Tokyo, Mendenhall built, more or less from scratch, a modern physics laboratory, using equipment sent from friends in America; all his students would be required to do lab work. Some would also accompany him on field trips and take part in research projects.

It is unclear how Mendenhall lit on the idea of measuring the earth's gravity on the summit of Mt Fuji. Perhaps the idea came to him when the "most beautiful mountain in the world" had soared over the sea horizon, as if to welcome him, the day before his ship docked in Yokohama.

As for the apparatus, he'd become interested in measuring gravity by means of pendulums. A fellow o-yatoi, Professor Chaplin, the professor of civil engineering at Todai, lent him an astronomical transit instrument, by which the accuracy of the recording chronometers could be checked. Now all was set.

The scientists and their instruments travelled to the foot of Mt Fuji, by jinrikisha - the railway went only as far as Yokohama. The students had gone ahead to make arrangements. As the Americans arrived in Subashiri at night, it was not until next morning that the great volcanic peak revealed its full splendour. At which, Professor Chaplin turned to Mendenhall and exclaimed, "My God, I don't wonder they worship it."


At 8am, the party started its ascent. One of the "goriki" or porters had to carry the main part of the transit instrument, which weighed 160 pounds, but he still managed to outclimb the two scientists. By mid-afternoon, in the barren wastes of scoria above the treeline, they were struggling. And the summit still looked far away.

Just then, the Americans were overtaken by a band of pilgrims, all dressed in flowing robes of white, their leader urging them on with a small bell. Mendenhall noted that the leader limited each effort to one hundred steps, which he counted in a loud voice. After each advance, the pilgrims fell instantly to the ground, where they rested under their immense straw hats, until called to their feet again by the leader's bell.

PILGRIMS DESCENDING FUJI, a photo by Okinawa Soba on Flickr.

The pilgrims didn't seem to pay much attention to their leader's counting - instead, they timed their paces to their chanting of the mountain votary's prayer - "Rokkon, shōjō" (May our six senses be purified). The scientists fell in with this group, learned their chant, shared their climbing routine, and had their moral support through the rest of that day.

They put up for the night at a hut near the eighth station, where they admired the mountain's conical shadow as it stretched out further and further until the sun finally set. The pilgrims too stayed in this hut, yet all managed a comfortable night.

Next day, the scientists reached the summit. They soon found an adversary that they hadn't reckoned with - the strong wind that prevented them from putting up their tents. And even if somehow the tents could have stayed up, the blustering gusts would have disturbed the instruments too much for useful readings.


What to do? They peered down into the sheltered crater - perhaps three hundred feet deep, by Mendenhall's guess - but the difficulties of getting the instruments down its stone-raked walls looked insurmountable. It was then that they decided to ask the priest in charge of the summit shrine if they could use his main sanctuary as a temporary laboratory.

The scientists' first request was rebuffed - the priest seemed indignant even to be asked. Mendenhall decided to give him half an hour to recover his composure, then resolved to make another trial. This time the scientist explained, through one of the students, that his experiment was intended to compute the weight of the earth.

Signs of interest appeared on the priest's face and soon he agreed to lend his shrine to the scientists for three or four days. In a few hours all was ready: the image of Buddha was respectfully moved to the back of the hut, the pendulums were mounted on stones projecting from the walls, the chronograph was connected with the chronometer and set going, and the transit instrument was deployed near the door, ready to take star sightings.

Mendenhall's experiment drew on an illustrious heritage. It was Isaac Newton, no less, who was the first to hazard a guess at the earth's density. You'll find it in the Principia, Book III, The System of the World, Proposition 10, Theorem 10:

Accordingly, since the ordinary matter of our earth at its surface is about twice as heavy as water, and a little lower down, in mines, is found to be about three or four or even five times heavier than water, it is likely that the total amount of matter in the earth is about five to six times greater than it would be if the whole earth consisted of water, especially since it has already been shown above that the earth is about four times denser than Jupiter.

This was a prescient conjecture. But it still had to be verified in the hard currency of experimental results. The baton was taken up about half a century after Newton's death by Britain's Royal Society, which set up a so-called Committee of Attraction.

In 1774, this body sent Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, to visit a 3,500-foot mountain in Scotland. By measuring how far the mountain attracted a plumb line away from the vertical, the savants would be able to calculate by how much the earth's attraction outweighed, so to speak, that of the mountain.

The Fairy Hill of the Caledonians - Schiehallion, a photo by idg on Flickr.

Schiehallion, the mountain in question, was chosen for the Fuji-like regularity of its conical form. This, it was hoped, would simplify the task of estimating the mountain's density, on which the whole calculation depended. It may be that Schiehallion's form wasn't sufficiently Fuji-like; Maskelyne's result came in one-fifth too low, making the earth rather too light.

It fell to Henry Cavendish, another Committee of Attraction member, to perfect an indoors experiment. This would eliminate the geological guesswork, by measuring the gravitational pull of one lead sphere on another. The apparatus was so sensitive, indeed, that readings had to be taken through a telescope, from outside the sealed-off laboratory.



Published in 1798, Cavendish's paper puts the earth's density at 5.48 times that of water. It was Cavendish too who first wrote of "weighing the earth" - the earth's mass can, of course, be deduced from its density. In this way, he unwittingly coined the phrase that would later win over priest Kinoshita on the summit of Mt Fuji.

Twenty or so years later, another savant caught a slip in Cavendish's arithmetic - the actual result from his apparatus should have been 5.45. Nobody said that weighing the earth was going to be easy.

Mendenhall's experiment drew on work by later British and European scientists who used pendulums to take gravity readings both on the surface and at the bottom of deep mine-shafts. The idea was to find the difference between the two different gravity readings; the pendulum should swing slightly faster in the stronger gravitational field underground than it would on the surface.

Then, knowing the radius of the earth and knowing (or at least guessing) the density of the ground between the surface and the depths of the mine, you could educe the density of the whole earth. The method was pioneered by the British astronomer George Airy, not without tribulation. His first attempt, in 1826, failed after one of the pendulums met with an accident; a second try miscarried when the mine flooded.

The experiment was eventually completed in 1854, Airy's pendulum swinging just over two seconds per day faster below ground than above. After taking the advice of a mineralogist on the density of the overlying rock, Airy concluded that the earth weighed slightly more than six and half times heavier than the equivalent volume of water.

Mendenhall's innovation was to substitute a mountaintop for the mineshaft. Using self-devised pendulums for greater accuracy, he took readings first in Tokyo, then on Fuji, and then in Tokyo again. The mountaintop work was favoured by clear days and starry nights for the transit readings.


When the country below was covered in cloud, the scientists felt as if they were floating on an island in the sky. The pilgrims, apparently undisturbed, kept filing up to the shrine to make their obeisances and throw copper coins in at the door. One of the students collected up these offerings and took them to the priest.

When it came to estimating the volcano's density, Mendenhall went one better than Airy; he polled five different geologists and averaged their opinions. If Mt Fuji were 2.12 times denser than water - the mean estimate of the geologists - then the earth's density would be 5.51, Mendenhall calculated.

Announced the following year in a lecture "on pendulum experiments on the summit of Fujiyama", this result came within a hair of the currently accepted value.

SAILING INTO FUJI, a photo by Okinawa Soba on Flickr.

The following summer, the Mendenhalls sailed for home, catching a final glimpse of Mt Fuji from the ship's rail. Successful as the gravity experiments had been, the professor saw his students as his principal legacy. "Always fond of teaching," he wrote later, "I cannot but look back upon my three years with these well-mannered, good tempered, ambitious, and intellectually strong men as being ... the pleasantest and best of all my professional years."

The ambitious young men bore out their promise. One, Kikuchi Dairoku, went on to become a minister of education and, briefly, the first president of RIKEN, Japan's government-sponsored science research institute. Another, Tanakadate Aikitsu (standing, second from right in photo), made important discoveries in geophysics.

Quite probably it was Tanakadate (left), a north-country samurai, who handled the delicate negotiations with the priest of Mt Fuji's summit shrine. If so, he made a good impression. Just before the scientists left the mountaintop - a dense fog had rolled in, spoiling the view - Mendenhall sought out the priest who had made his experiment possible.

The professor wanted to express his gratitude with a generous sum of money but the priest refused all reward; it was an honour, he said, to have been able to help in the solution of such an interesting problem. Since then, wrote Mendenhall in his memoirs, "I have always taken much pleasure in naming this liberal-minded Japanese, named Kinoshita, who allowed me to transform a holy shrine of almost the oldest of religions into a laboratory of science and to substitute for his sacred images the most recent devices for the measurement of time."

Science and religion often came to blows in the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet, for a few days in August 1880 atop Mt Fuji, they achieved an amicable and productive cooperation.

References

Crew, Henry, Biographical memoir of Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, National Academy of Sciences, 1934

Dickey, John S, On the rocks: earth science for everyone, 1996.

Hughes, David W, The mean density of the earth, Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 1.2006 - and many thanks to Professor Hughes for kindly providing an explanation of how the Airy experiment worked.

Mendenhall, T C (Jr.) (1989) American Scientist in Early Meiji Japan: The Autobiographical Notes of Thomas C. Mendenhall

Mendenhall, T C, On pendulum experiments on the summit of Fujiyama for the purpose of ascertaining the force of gravity at that point, Abstract of lecture read October 20th, 1881

Manifesto of a solo mountaineer

In March 1933, a chance encounter in the snowbound Northern Alps prompted Japan's most famous "Alleingänger" to set down his philosophy in writing - and also, possibly, to start questioning it.

"You know, mate, you're living on borrowed time." Sitting in the mouth of a rocky bivouac cave, the leader of the climbing group doesn't mince his words. He's talking to a lone mountaineer outside in the snow, who, a few minutes ago, showed up from nowhere. Solo mountaineering doesn’t get a lot of support in early Shōwa Japan, not even among fellow alpinists.

The loner gives a slight nod but doesn't otherwise respond to the other's prophecy. He is, of course, Katō Buntarō, whose winter expeditions have attracted quite a bit of publicity. On one occasion, when he went missing for a day or two in the mountains, he's created newspaper headlines. And he was bringing another solo exploit to a close when he happened across Nakamura and his crew, up here in Yokoō-dani, and dropped in for a chat.

Until now, Katō hadn't felt the need to justify himself, but the bluntness of Nakamura’s address has struck home. Back in Kobe, he's prompted to write a kind of rationale. The resulting essay, On solo mountaineering (単独行について), is a glimpse into Katō's hard-driving spirit. It is a manifesto for solo mountaineering.

An "Alleingänger", says Katō, using the German word, is one who favours the avalanche- and stonefall-raked routes shunned by others, one who scorns to follow in the dust of another's trail, and boldly tackles one impossible line after another.

There's all the difference in the world between these solo alpinists and folk who just go hiking by themselves. Yet both types start out the same way; they are urged on by a love of nature and they have shy, self-willed personalities. That is, they are too shy to ask experts to take them climbing and too self-willed to burden themselves with companions who might slow them down.

This is not quite the full story, though. Soloing is more than just climbing without a companion: "If mountaineering is about gaining knowledge and hence solace from nature, then surely the most knowledge and the highest degree of solace is gained from solo mountaineering." If you have a partner with you, you sometimes forget to look at the mountains. But, when you climb alone, "no stick or stone can fail to captivate your heart".

Or perhaps it’s a contest with nature. If mountaineering is "doing battle with nature and prevailing, then surely the battle and the solace thereafter are that much more intense when you are alone, counting on nobody but yourself."

Soloing is not for everybody, Katō warns. Only mountaineers who actively want to solo are qualified to do so; to solo in a state of self-doubt is a crime. "If you solo because you know it's right for you, then you can make progress without agonising about it. If you're weak, you'll be tormented; crushed. The strong will grow stronger and flourish. So, soloists, be strong!"

We can be fairly certain that few or none of these arguments were rehearsed outside the bivouac cave on that March day in 1933; Katō was the taciturn type. Propped against the low-slung branch of a mountain birch tree, he kept his thoughts to himself. And Nakamura wouldn't have listened anyway: "There's no way I'd go into the mountains solo," he insisted.

But is it possible that Katō took Nakamura's advice to heart? When, three years later, he set off into a January snowstorm to traverse the north ridge of Yari, he was with a climbing partner. That was the last time anybody saw Katō and Yoshida alive; some time later, the bodies were found in the valley below, still roped together.

In his last year, Katō had changed his stance on solo mountaineering. With a partner, you could climb harder routes. And beyond the winter Japan Alps shimmered the eternal snows of the Himalaya …

References

Right now, Katō Buntarō is enjoying a renewed lease of fame. That is due to the manga Kokou no Hito (孤高の人) about “Mori Buntaro”, a character loosely based on the hero of Nitta Jirō’s novel of the same title. The novel, in turn, elaborates on the life of the real Kato Buntaro. The manga's popularity brings quite a bit of traffic to this blog – specifically to the post Life and death on Japan’s Matterhorn. What Katō himself had to say about solo mountaineering, you’ll find in the text (excerpted) of his essay On solo mountaineering (単独行について).

Images and ink (8)

Image: Hodaka-dake in June by Ōshita Tōjiro (1870-1911)

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

As Kōda Rohan wrote: "Beyond the broad declivity in front of us rose up a noble and lofty range, manly in aspect, inspiring both awe and joy. Caught unawares, I was moved almost to tears. A reckless urge to reach out for the mountain took hold of me. For a moment, it was hard to say whether I held the mountain in my gaze or the mountain held me in his."

Related posts: Hodaka in winter and North ridge boogie

Journey to the centre of Mt Fuji

Discovering the crater in the company of a Heian-era literary scholar

The Warthogs came skimming up the slope, chasing their shadows over the snow. We leaned on our ice-axes, glad of an excuse to pause, and watched as the jets half-rolled into a ballistic arc over the mountaintop.

Craning upwards, the pilots must have seen Mt Fuji float, upside down, over their heads. It was clearly a good day for inspecting the crater. When we reached the summit shrine, all frosted up with rime-ice, I let slip my plan to Yamada-san. “Make it quick, then” he said. Our leader didn’t like solo excursions and November days are short.


A short distance under the radar station, I found what I was looking for – a ramp of snow that led smoothly down into the crater. No sign of ice or treacherous windslab. Cautiously at first, then with growing confidence in the Styrofoam snow that squeaked under my crampons, I made my descent.

The crater first floated into human ken during the ninth century. The earliest mention is in a Record of Mt Fuji (富士山記) by Miyako no Yoshika (834-879), an official at the Heian court and a scholar of classical literature. This is what he says:-

Mt Fuji takes its name from that of the district. Its deity is the Great God Asama. As for its height, it rises so far above the clouds that nobody knows how high it is.

The summit is flat and about a league across. It is sunken in the middle, in shape like a rice-steaming pot (koshiki). At the bottom of this pot, there is a mysterious lake and in the middle of the lake, a large rock. The rock is strangely shaped, just like a crouching tiger. Vapour rises incessantly from the crater. The lake’s colour is a pure and deep blue.

If one looks into the crater, it’s as if the water is seething. Looking at the mountain from afar, one often sees smoke and flames too. The summit pond is ringed with bamboo, which is a lush green and pliable. The snow never melts in spring or summer.

At the bottom of the ramp, I took stock. It was calm down here, sheltered from the gusts of snow blowing around the crater rim. There was no sign of a bamboo grove; just a sheet of rippled snow sloping down to a large black rock sitting at the crater’s lowest point.

If there was once a lake here, who came up to see it? According to Miyako no Yoshika, the mountain had only been climbed once, by En-no-gyōja. But this semi-legendary mystic and mage lived more than two centuries before Yoshika. In his own day, the chronicler says, “People can climb the mountain to its middle level, but it’s impossible to go further because of the ash which is always slipping downwards.”


Yet the Record of Mt Fuji has the ring of an eyewitness account. Crater lakes are found in many of Japan's volcanoes, though they tend to be short-lived. If anybody did go up Mt Fuji in Yoshika’s lifetime, he first had to brave the bear-haunted and trackless forests. Above the trees, tumbling rocks and slip-sliding ash would await him, the unsteady ground steaming with fumaroles and racked by earth-tremors.

The attempt would have been hazardous. Around the turn of the ninth century, something prodded the Great God Asama into a renewed frenzy. Bursting from the summit region in 800-802, the ash clouds of the Enryaku eruption turned day into night. Debris raked the seaward slopes, cutting the main highway to the eastern provinces.

A smaller eruption in 826 was merely a prelude to the great Jōgan event. In 864-865, red-hot lava flows torched the forests on Fuji’s northern flanks before rolling down into Se-no-umi, broiling its fish and cutting the lake in two.

Faced with this onslaught, the authorities offered the Great God Asama a more commodious shrine (in what is now Fujinomiya). This may have been early in the ninth century. Then, in 859, they promoted him to the senior grade of the third court rank. And when that didn’t placate him, they censured the governor of Kai for neglecting the proper rituals and demanded an apology on the god’s behalf.

In hindsight, the officials might have claimed a partial success. Although Mt Fuji rumbled on for another two hundred years, it never again erupted on the same scale. And, soon after the Jōgan eruption, it showed quite another side to its personality, as Miyako no Yoshika records:-

On November 5th, in the 17th year of Jōgan (876), the officials and people were celebrating a festival in accordance with an ancient rite when, as the day wore on towards noon, the sky cleared wonderfully. Looking up towards the mountain, they saw how two beautiful maidens robed in white danced above the summit, seemingly a span or more above it. Several local people witnessed this; a very old man passed on the tale.


Today, it was snow-devils that the wind was chasing around the crater rim. The winter sunlight set the ochres and terracotta of the rock walls aglow, as if freshly scorched by the volcano’s fires. It was hard to believe, as the savants insist, that Fuji’s central crater fell silent more than two thousand years ago. All the recent outbursts have issued from vents on the sides of the mountain, including those big eruptions in Yoshika’s day. Indeed, a flank eruption is chronicled in his Record of Mt Fuji:

At the eastern foot of Mt Fuji is a small mountain, which the local people call the new mountain. Originally this was flat ground, but in March of the 21st year of Enryaku (803) black smoke and steam came churning up and, after ten days, the new mountain was formed. Probably a god created it.

Up on the crater rim, Yamada-san would now be examining his altimeter watch. Feeling like an Apollo astronaut on the last moon mission – too much to see in too little time – I moved over to the black rock. Its anthracite facets were so dark, amid the snow-glare, that they seemed to suck the noonday light into themselves. What was this stuff…?

Pottering about in this crater a century ago, the mountaineering missionary Walter Weston had to ask himself a similar question:-

On the flat bottom we found great masses of newly fallen rock, and in a crevice of one of these a curious white substance embedded. Our friend described this as a great marvel – nothing less, indeed, than “petrified snow!” Possibly it was really some sort of gypsum, or even chloride of ammonia, which is sometimes found in the cooler part of volcanic fissures and fumaroles.
Perhaps Fuji does from time to time put out a crystal or two, together with its effusions of ash and lava. That would make sense of another enigmatic passage in Miyako no Yoshika’s account:

This must be a place where hermits and wizards disport themselves. As I’ve heard, during the Shōwa era (834-848), pearls and jewels rolled down from the mountain, each jewel with a little hole through it. These were probably beautiful gems that once adorned the reed screen of a hermit’s cell.

On the crater floor, I looked round for a souvenir – a beautiful gem would do nicely – but the ground was metres deep in snow. No matter, now it really was time to go.

References

A tentative translation from modern Japanese of the full text of Fujisan-ki. The chronicle was originally written in kanbun. It first appears in the Honchō-monzui, an anthology compiled in the mid-11th century.

Fujisan to Nihonjin, edited by Seikyūsha editors, Seikyūsha 2002

Mt. Fuji: The Wellspring of Our Faith and Arts, Shogakukan, 2009.

Playground of the Far East, by Walter Weston (1918)

Aerial picture of summit by courtesy of JTB; Miyako no Yoshika and Warthog from Wikipedia; detail of flying apsara courtesy of 日本の美をめぐる, No. 11.