Image: Mt.Bieifuji ( left ) and Mt.Biei, up from Shirogane-onsen, Biei, Hokkaido.
Ink: How Biei came to be Biei, from Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964):
When Matsuura Takeshirō first visited this place and made as if to drink from this river, a local Ainu cried out "Piei, piei!" to stop him. "Piei" meant that the water was greasy from the sulphuric effusions of Tokachi-dake. The name Biei stems from this incident. The town was founded in 1896 (Meiji 29), and its name was originally written with the characters for beautiful (bi) and for excellent (ei). The latter character is also used to represent "England", however, and, in the wake of some chauvinistic thinking, it was replaced with a more difficult ideograph.
References
Many thanks to "Threepinner" for posting the elegant header picture on his flickr site, whence it comes here. Photography fans should visit his flickr pages to see more superb mountain photography from Hokkaido.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
The professor of clouds
Chance encounter with a man who spent nineteen years studying Mt Fuji's weather
A wet weekend in Switzerland prompted a visit to a show of cloud photography at the Winterthur Fotomuseum. My eye was caught by a film loop of speeded-up clouds. In fact, the clouds were flowing past a strangely familiar cone. In flickering, sparking black-and-white footage, winter stratus streamed over the peak, lenticular clouds nibbled at the clear skies of spring, and a summer cumulus boiled up over the scorching southern flanks…
I looked at the programme. Apparently, the video loop was compiled from film clips made in the early 1930s by Abe Masanao (1891-1966). It seems that this so-called Professor of Clouds (雲博士) devoted much of his life to recording the clouds and wind currents around Japan’s most famous mountain.
After completing his studies at Tokyo University’s science faculty, he set up an observatory in 1927 near Gotenba, on Mt Fuji’s southern slopes. Then, equipping it with all manner of meteorological gear, much of it purchased on journeys abroad, he spent the next nineteen years documenting every nuance of the atmosphere's behaviour over and around the sacred peak.
Abe was particularly fascinated by Fuji’s cap clouds. Usually heralding the approach of a front, these wave formations hover numinously over the mountaintop, shape-shifting by the minute. Abe recorded them in volume after volume of still photos, using trigonometry to plot their ground track and sometimes using cameras separated by several kilometers to make stereo images.
But by far the best way to capture such clouds was in time-lapse movies, a technique so novel that he had to invent his own camera. The medium, he thought, suited the subject. Lenticular clouds look as if they are stationary yet, in reality, they consist of water droplets that blow ceaselessly through them. In a similar but opposite way, a host of static pictures, flickering past, creates the illusion of a moving image on a cinema screen.
Abe doesn’t seem to have come up with an all-embracing theory of clouds. Rather, he saw his role as setting down the phenomena as completely as possible, so that others could use the data as they wished. In 1937, the Central Meteorological Observatory (the precursor of today’s meterological agency) acknowledged his efforts when it recognized his institute as an affiliate.
After the war, Abe moved to Kamakura, far from Mt Fuji, leaving his observatory as a kind of museum. Following his death, the Gotenba city authorities took the instruments and records into storage, where they remain today. Meanwhile, the observatory fell into disrepair. The trees around it have grown so high that they hide all but Fuji's summit –and those tantalising, mysterious clouds, perpetually shape-shifting.
References
The Winterthur Fotomuseum runs “WOLKENSTUDIEN – Der wissenschaftliche Blick in den Himmel" until 12 February.
Fuji-san: oinaru shizen no kensho, Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1992.
Vielen Dank to Hellmut Völter for posting the video of Abe's film clips (see first link above) so that we can all admire and enjoy them.
Top three photos are from the exhibition website of Fuji-san no Juku no Mori (富士山樹空の森), a recently opened theme park at Gotenba. Not sure if the exhibition is permanent or temporary or whether it includes the instruments and publications that the Gotenba city authorities took into storage after Abe-sensei's death. Perhaps somebody closer to the spot can find out?
A wet weekend in Switzerland prompted a visit to a show of cloud photography at the Winterthur Fotomuseum. My eye was caught by a film loop of speeded-up clouds. In fact, the clouds were flowing past a strangely familiar cone. In flickering, sparking black-and-white footage, winter stratus streamed over the peak, lenticular clouds nibbled at the clear skies of spring, and a summer cumulus boiled up over the scorching southern flanks…
I looked at the programme. Apparently, the video loop was compiled from film clips made in the early 1930s by Abe Masanao (1891-1966). It seems that this so-called Professor of Clouds (雲博士) devoted much of his life to recording the clouds and wind currents around Japan’s most famous mountain.
After completing his studies at Tokyo University’s science faculty, he set up an observatory in 1927 near Gotenba, on Mt Fuji’s southern slopes. Then, equipping it with all manner of meteorological gear, much of it purchased on journeys abroad, he spent the next nineteen years documenting every nuance of the atmosphere's behaviour over and around the sacred peak.
Abe was particularly fascinated by Fuji’s cap clouds. Usually heralding the approach of a front, these wave formations hover numinously over the mountaintop, shape-shifting by the minute. Abe recorded them in volume after volume of still photos, using trigonometry to plot their ground track and sometimes using cameras separated by several kilometers to make stereo images.
But by far the best way to capture such clouds was in time-lapse movies, a technique so novel that he had to invent his own camera. The medium, he thought, suited the subject. Lenticular clouds look as if they are stationary yet, in reality, they consist of water droplets that blow ceaselessly through them. In a similar but opposite way, a host of static pictures, flickering past, creates the illusion of a moving image on a cinema screen.
Abe doesn’t seem to have come up with an all-embracing theory of clouds. Rather, he saw his role as setting down the phenomena as completely as possible, so that others could use the data as they wished. In 1937, the Central Meteorological Observatory (the precursor of today’s meterological agency) acknowledged his efforts when it recognized his institute as an affiliate.After the war, Abe moved to Kamakura, far from Mt Fuji, leaving his observatory as a kind of museum. Following his death, the Gotenba city authorities took the instruments and records into storage, where they remain today. Meanwhile, the observatory fell into disrepair. The trees around it have grown so high that they hide all but Fuji's summit –and those tantalising, mysterious clouds, perpetually shape-shifting.
References
The Winterthur Fotomuseum runs “WOLKENSTUDIEN – Der wissenschaftliche Blick in den Himmel" until 12 February.
Fuji-san: oinaru shizen no kensho, Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1992.
Vielen Dank to Hellmut Völter for posting the video of Abe's film clips (see first link above) so that we can all admire and enjoy them.
Top three photos are from the exhibition website of Fuji-san no Juku no Mori (富士山樹空の森), a recently opened theme park at Gotenba. Not sure if the exhibition is permanent or temporary or whether it includes the instruments and publications that the Gotenba city authorities took into storage after Abe-sensei's death. Perhaps somebody closer to the spot can find out?
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Men in a hurry
The mountaineers who saw out Honshu's golden age of mountain exploration
Permit me to introduce Messrs Kogure and Tanabe. They look like men in a hurry, and well they might - since the Japan Alpine Club was formed, just eight years ago, most of Honshu's high mountains have already been explored. And soon the surveyors of the Army General Staff will issue the first modern maps of the mountains, banishing the thrill of discovery forever.
So now is a last chance to grab a piece of the action. This is August 1913, and the duo are setting out from Kamikochi to walk until they run out of mountain. They'll press north along the backbone of the Japan Alps, past Yari and over Tateyama, ever northwards, until the ridges falter away under them into the Japan Sea. For thirteen days, they'll follow paths as faint as dreams, or none at all, through the creeping pine and the drifting clouds.
Their conversation should be as elevated as the terrain. Both are Tokyo University men, yet both were brought up in remote villages that still adhered to the old mountain faiths. In this, they recapitulate, in their own experience, Japan's shift from traditional mountain worship to modern alpinism.
Kogure, we've met before. As for Tanabe, a recent graduate in English Literature, he's a devotee of Wordsworth and Walter Pater. Perhaps these high-mountain expeditions help him burn with that hard, gem-like flame. Although, as he's slight of build, he also complains about the heavy loads that they oblige him to carry.
Tanabe Jūji (above) was born in 1874, in a village near Toyama where people still worshipped the mountain deity of nearby Tateyama. However, Tanabe was frail as a child and didn't apparently go on pilgrimage. He went up to Tokyo Imperial University in 1905, where he got to know Kogure Ritarō and acquired a taste for travel and mountain literature.
His own mountain career got under way when he graduated from Todai, started on a teaching career, and moved into the same lodging house as Kogure. They made ambitious traverses the length and breadth of the Northern Alps, but are most often remembered for their explorations of Kogure's native hills, the forested Chichibu range near Tokyo. The aspirant painter Nakamura Seitaro, then still a student, joined them on many of these forays.
The Kogure-Tanabe partnership lasted eleven years - seeing out the end of what Kojima Usui called Japan's golden age of mountain exploration. Tanabe wrote up these mountain travels as "Pilgrimage to the Japan Alps and Chichibu" published in 1919. The title gave him some misgivings: "At present, there's no suitable word to describe the mountain ranges now collectively referred to as the 'Japan Alps'. Alas, though, I can't at the moment think of a better one."
Actually, Tanabe's problem with the Japan Alps went deeper than a purist's objection to a katakana loanword. At about this time, he'd started to feel the need for a change in his mountain journeys. Whatever it was that he sought, it was more likely to be found among the wooded ridges and gorges of the Chichibu mountains, where the hoary old trees were festooned with Spanish moss, than on the austere heights of the Japan Alps.
He alludes to this change of heart in the preface to his book. "It seems to me that, rather than introducing the Japan Alps, I've put most of my effort into describing the Chichibu range." Later, in an essay entitled "Thoughts about Mountains", he explained his new thinking as follows:
We don't look at mountains in the way that romantic or symbolist poets do, using them as mere subjective scaffolding in order to sing about themselves. Rather, we look at mountains objectively, seeking out points of congruence between them and ourselves. This is by far the most free, the most natural way of looking at them, and you can appreciate the mountain's character as a mountain. This is how the English poet Wordsworth approached all of nature. He strove to see nature objectively and, more than any other poet, he was capable of submerging himself in nature. And it is only through this powerful serenity of contemplation can we become one with the mountains.
Getting married may also have helped to change Tanabe's life. So might his appointment, in 1922, to a professorship at Hosei University. For whatever reason, he was no longer a man in a hurry; peak-bagging and mountain exploration had lost their meaning for him. Instead, he was more inclined to wander, alone and contemplatively, over passes and along old roads such as the Kiso Kaido or Basho's route to the deep north, less like a modern mountaineer than an itinerant haiku poet.
He didn't entirely turn his back on the high mountains. He became head of Hosei University's mountaineering club and even took up skiing. Yet something was missing in this modern age, when every mountain had long since been mapped and named. Nothing, it seemed, could bring back the splendour of those youthful ridgeways to the Japan Sea.
Envoy
When I was at school in Tōkyō, the Jōetsu mountains were less explored than they are today and the Northern Alps still fairly inaccessible. So I did most of my mountaineering in Oku-Chichibu, using Tanabe Jūji's "Pilgrimage to the Japan Alps and Chichibu" and the Chichibu issue of the "Sangaku" journal that I found in a second-hand bookshop. In those days, there were few paths, mountain huts were thin on the ground, and signposts almost non-existent. With rice and soya beans, a hatchet and a saw in our packs, we would light out for the empty mountains. If we had two or three free days, we preferred to spend them walking around the mountains of Chichibu, not in Tōkyō.
(From Fukada Kyūya's Nihon Hyakumeizan in the forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan)
References
Outline of Tanabe's life from Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka?, Volume 103 in the Taiyo Bessatsu: Nihon no Kokoro series (Heibonsha, 1998)
Quotation from Tanabe's essay comes from Miyashita Keizo's Nihon Arupusu: Mitate no Bunkashi, a book on the Japanese interpretation and importation of the Alps published in 1997.
Photos copyright of 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).
Permit me to introduce Messrs Kogure and Tanabe. They look like men in a hurry, and well they might - since the Japan Alpine Club was formed, just eight years ago, most of Honshu's high mountains have already been explored. And soon the surveyors of the Army General Staff will issue the first modern maps of the mountains, banishing the thrill of discovery forever. 
So now is a last chance to grab a piece of the action. This is August 1913, and the duo are setting out from Kamikochi to walk until they run out of mountain. They'll press north along the backbone of the Japan Alps, past Yari and over Tateyama, ever northwards, until the ridges falter away under them into the Japan Sea. For thirteen days, they'll follow paths as faint as dreams, or none at all, through the creeping pine and the drifting clouds.Their conversation should be as elevated as the terrain. Both are Tokyo University men, yet both were brought up in remote villages that still adhered to the old mountain faiths. In this, they recapitulate, in their own experience, Japan's shift from traditional mountain worship to modern alpinism.
Kogure, we've met before. As for Tanabe, a recent graduate in English Literature, he's a devotee of Wordsworth and Walter Pater. Perhaps these high-mountain expeditions help him burn with that hard, gem-like flame. Although, as he's slight of build, he also complains about the heavy loads that they oblige him to carry.
Tanabe Jūji (above) was born in 1874, in a village near Toyama where people still worshipped the mountain deity of nearby Tateyama. However, Tanabe was frail as a child and didn't apparently go on pilgrimage. He went up to Tokyo Imperial University in 1905, where he got to know Kogure Ritarō and acquired a taste for travel and mountain literature. His own mountain career got under way when he graduated from Todai, started on a teaching career, and moved into the same lodging house as Kogure. They made ambitious traverses the length and breadth of the Northern Alps, but are most often remembered for their explorations of Kogure's native hills, the forested Chichibu range near Tokyo. The aspirant painter Nakamura Seitaro, then still a student, joined them on many of these forays.
The Kogure-Tanabe partnership lasted eleven years - seeing out the end of what Kojima Usui called Japan's golden age of mountain exploration. Tanabe wrote up these mountain travels as "Pilgrimage to the Japan Alps and Chichibu" published in 1919. The title gave him some misgivings: "At present, there's no suitable word to describe the mountain ranges now collectively referred to as the 'Japan Alps'. Alas, though, I can't at the moment think of a better one."
Actually, Tanabe's problem with the Japan Alps went deeper than a purist's objection to a katakana loanword. At about this time, he'd started to feel the need for a change in his mountain journeys. Whatever it was that he sought, it was more likely to be found among the wooded ridges and gorges of the Chichibu mountains, where the hoary old trees were festooned with Spanish moss, than on the austere heights of the Japan Alps.He alludes to this change of heart in the preface to his book. "It seems to me that, rather than introducing the Japan Alps, I've put most of my effort into describing the Chichibu range." Later, in an essay entitled "Thoughts about Mountains", he explained his new thinking as follows:
We don't look at mountains in the way that romantic or symbolist poets do, using them as mere subjective scaffolding in order to sing about themselves. Rather, we look at mountains objectively, seeking out points of congruence between them and ourselves. This is by far the most free, the most natural way of looking at them, and you can appreciate the mountain's character as a mountain. This is how the English poet Wordsworth approached all of nature. He strove to see nature objectively and, more than any other poet, he was capable of submerging himself in nature. And it is only through this powerful serenity of contemplation can we become one with the mountains.
Getting married may also have helped to change Tanabe's life. So might his appointment, in 1922, to a professorship at Hosei University. For whatever reason, he was no longer a man in a hurry; peak-bagging and mountain exploration had lost their meaning for him. Instead, he was more inclined to wander, alone and contemplatively, over passes and along old roads such as the Kiso Kaido or Basho's route to the deep north, less like a modern mountaineer than an itinerant haiku poet.
He didn't entirely turn his back on the high mountains. He became head of Hosei University's mountaineering club and even took up skiing. Yet something was missing in this modern age, when every mountain had long since been mapped and named. Nothing, it seemed, could bring back the splendour of those youthful ridgeways to the Japan Sea.
Envoy
When I was at school in Tōkyō, the Jōetsu mountains were less explored than they are today and the Northern Alps still fairly inaccessible. So I did most of my mountaineering in Oku-Chichibu, using Tanabe Jūji's "Pilgrimage to the Japan Alps and Chichibu" and the Chichibu issue of the "Sangaku" journal that I found in a second-hand bookshop. In those days, there were few paths, mountain huts were thin on the ground, and signposts almost non-existent. With rice and soya beans, a hatchet and a saw in our packs, we would light out for the empty mountains. If we had two or three free days, we preferred to spend them walking around the mountains of Chichibu, not in Tōkyō.
(From Fukada Kyūya's Nihon Hyakumeizan in the forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan)
References
Outline of Tanabe's life from Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka?, Volume 103 in the Taiyo Bessatsu: Nihon no Kokoro series (Heibonsha, 1998)
Quotation from Tanabe's essay comes from Miyashita Keizo's Nihon Arupusu: Mitate no Bunkashi, a book on the Japanese interpretation and importation of the Alps published in 1997.
Photos copyright of 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).
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Images and ink (12)
Ink: On Tokachi-dake, from Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964):
Today, the sulphurous smoke vents not from the main crater but from the so-called New Crater that opened on May 24, 1926. The sudden explosion overthrew the crater wall, sending its debris and volcanic detritus cascading downslope in all directions. Fed by melting snowfields, the resulting mudflow cut a swathe of destruction for twenty-eight kilometres, burying homes, devastating countless fields, and snuffing out one hundred and forty-four lives.
References
Many thanks to "Threepinner" for posting the elegant header picture on his flickr site, whence it comes here. Photography fans should click on the picture to see more of Threepinner's mountain photography from Hokkaido. The photos of the 1926 eruption (as mentioned in the text) are by courtesy of Hokkaido Science Education Center
Today, the sulphurous smoke vents not from the main crater but from the so-called New Crater that opened on May 24, 1926. The sudden explosion overthrew the crater wall, sending its debris and volcanic detritus cascading downslope in all directions. Fed by melting snowfields, the resulting mudflow cut a swathe of destruction for twenty-eight kilometres, burying homes, devastating countless fields, and snuffing out one hundred and forty-four lives.
References
Many thanks to "Threepinner" for posting the elegant header picture on his flickr site, whence it comes here. Photography fans should click on the picture to see more of Threepinner's mountain photography from Hokkaido. The photos of the 1926 eruption (as mentioned in the text) are by courtesy of Hokkaido Science Education Center
Monday, January 9, 2012
Purple mountains
The painter who joined the pioneers of Japan’s golden age of alpine exploration
“Except for some literary society, I know of no other association that has more poets and writers than ours,” said Kojima Usui about the Sangaku-kai, soon after he founded Japan’s first alpine club. Perhaps he should have mentioned painters too. There was at least one in the Sangaku-kai. Nakamura Seitaro joined the club just two years after its inauguration. That was in 1907, the same year that he started as a student of the Tokyo Institute for Business Training (商法講習所|), the predecessor of today's Hitotsubashi University.
Nakamura was born in 1888, the only son of a couple who ran a shop selling yukata. He got his first training as an artist by practising the patterns used to dye the linen. While still at school, he organised a group of friends to go hill-walking. Joining the Sangaku-kai would allow him to tackle bigger mountains and perhaps even find new ways up them.
For Nakamura was fortunate enough to start his climbing career during Japan's “golden age” of mountain exploration, when mountaineers had to find their own way without the help of modern maps. In 1909, he joined Kojima on a traverse of the Southern Japan Alps. Unable to splurge on expensive foreign kit, Nakamura got a local smithy to bash out an alpenstock. This may have been Japan’s first domestically produced ice tool.
Atop Warusawadake the party discovered that pilgrims had been there before them. Recorded in the club’s journal, Sangaku, the incident was later quoted in Nihon Hyakumeizan (“One Hundred Mountains of Japan”):
On the summit, they found signs that others had been there before them. Three shrines of unvarnished wood stood there and a rusted iron banner leaned into a rocky niche. And nearby, the pilgrims had left scattered on the ground wooden tablets inscribed with the name of the deity Arakawa Daimyōjin.
In the late autumn of 1911, Nakamura climbed Saru-ga-dake (2,629m), shod in newfangled crampons (at that time, they were still called “kana-kanjiki” – iron snowshoes). This was the first time that a peak in the Southern Alps had been tackled in winter conditions.
In 1913, he joined Kogure Ritaro and Tanabe Jūji for part of their epoch-making traverse from Yarigatake in central Honshu all the way northwards to the Japan Sea. In 1917, he climbed volcanoes on Java and the Celebes and in 1919 he again teamed up with Kogure for an exploration of the Kurobe valley – they got as far as Ike-no-daira in Sen'nin-dani before porter troubles and lack of food forced them to cut short the trip.
Although Nakamura had already decided to become an artist, he left his painting materials at home for these youthful expeditions. From now on, though, he went into the mountains specifically to paint and his works started to appear in exhibitions and in the pages of Sangaku. In 1936, he founded the Japan Association for Mountain Art and exhibited seven paintings at its inaugural exhibition, including one of summer snow on Tateyama (below). He died in 1967, at the age of 79.
Inevitably for a Sangaku-kai member, Nakamura was also a writer. Perhaps inspired by that youthful encounter with pilgrims’ relics on Warusawadake, he published three books on Japan’s mountain religions. Dealing as they did with the mystic aspect of the mountain world, these studies were of a piece with his paintings. The unexplored mountains of his golden age were “vast, mysterious, sublime”, Nakamura wrote, “as if wrapped in some purple cloud, enshrined in the inner recesses of my heart”.
References
“Yama to Bijutsu” chapter in Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka?, Volume 103 in the Taiyo Bessatsu: Nihon no Kokoro series (Heibonsha, 1998).
Quotation from Nihon Hyakumeizan from the forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan.
Images of Nakamura's paintings are by courtesy of this website. Paintings show (from top to bottom) the snowfield on Yarigatake; glacial corries on Tateyama; a study of a creeping pine (haimatsu); summer snow on Tateyama, and an edelweiss.
“Except for some literary society, I know of no other association that has more poets and writers than ours,” said Kojima Usui about the Sangaku-kai, soon after he founded Japan’s first alpine club. Perhaps he should have mentioned painters too. There was at least one in the Sangaku-kai. Nakamura Seitaro joined the club just two years after its inauguration. That was in 1907, the same year that he started as a student of the Tokyo Institute for Business Training (商法講習所|), the predecessor of today's Hitotsubashi University.
Nakamura was born in 1888, the only son of a couple who ran a shop selling yukata. He got his first training as an artist by practising the patterns used to dye the linen. While still at school, he organised a group of friends to go hill-walking. Joining the Sangaku-kai would allow him to tackle bigger mountains and perhaps even find new ways up them.
For Nakamura was fortunate enough to start his climbing career during Japan's “golden age” of mountain exploration, when mountaineers had to find their own way without the help of modern maps. In 1909, he joined Kojima on a traverse of the Southern Japan Alps. Unable to splurge on expensive foreign kit, Nakamura got a local smithy to bash out an alpenstock. This may have been Japan’s first domestically produced ice tool.
Atop Warusawadake the party discovered that pilgrims had been there before them. Recorded in the club’s journal, Sangaku, the incident was later quoted in Nihon Hyakumeizan (“One Hundred Mountains of Japan”):
On the summit, they found signs that others had been there before them. Three shrines of unvarnished wood stood there and a rusted iron banner leaned into a rocky niche. And nearby, the pilgrims had left scattered on the ground wooden tablets inscribed with the name of the deity Arakawa Daimyōjin.
In the late autumn of 1911, Nakamura climbed Saru-ga-dake (2,629m), shod in newfangled crampons (at that time, they were still called “kana-kanjiki” – iron snowshoes). This was the first time that a peak in the Southern Alps had been tackled in winter conditions.
In 1913, he joined Kogure Ritaro and Tanabe Jūji for part of their epoch-making traverse from Yarigatake in central Honshu all the way northwards to the Japan Sea. In 1917, he climbed volcanoes on Java and the Celebes and in 1919 he again teamed up with Kogure for an exploration of the Kurobe valley – they got as far as Ike-no-daira in Sen'nin-dani before porter troubles and lack of food forced them to cut short the trip.
Although Nakamura had already decided to become an artist, he left his painting materials at home for these youthful expeditions. From now on, though, he went into the mountains specifically to paint and his works started to appear in exhibitions and in the pages of Sangaku. In 1936, he founded the Japan Association for Mountain Art and exhibited seven paintings at its inaugural exhibition, including one of summer snow on Tateyama (below). He died in 1967, at the age of 79.
Inevitably for a Sangaku-kai member, Nakamura was also a writer. Perhaps inspired by that youthful encounter with pilgrims’ relics on Warusawadake, he published three books on Japan’s mountain religions. Dealing as they did with the mystic aspect of the mountain world, these studies were of a piece with his paintings. The unexplored mountains of his golden age were “vast, mysterious, sublime”, Nakamura wrote, “as if wrapped in some purple cloud, enshrined in the inner recesses of my heart”.References
“Yama to Bijutsu” chapter in Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka?, Volume 103 in the Taiyo Bessatsu: Nihon no Kokoro series (Heibonsha, 1998).Quotation from Nihon Hyakumeizan from the forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan.
Images of Nakamura's paintings are by courtesy of this website. Paintings show (from top to bottom) the snowfield on Yarigatake; glacial corries on Tateyama; a study of a creeping pine (haimatsu); summer snow on Tateyama, and an edelweiss.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
The origins of alpinism (2)
The story of the Sangaku-kai continued: How Kojima Usui's furious scribbling helped to found Asia's first alpine club
Kojima Usui was always clear about the chain of events that led him to found the Sangaku-kai, later to be known as the Japan Alpine Club. As related in the previous post, he picked up a copy of Shiga Shigetaka's Theory of Japanese Landscape (Nihon Fūkeiron) in 1896, and was inspired by the book to climb Yarigatake a few years later. This led to the famous meeting in 1903 with Walter Weston, the mountaineering missionary, who suggested the idea of a club.
But what happened in the two years between the fateful meeting with Weston and the Sangaku-kai's actual formation in 1905? Here the story lacks detail. According to Kojima, the blame for that lies with the Great Kanto Earthquake, which devastated Tokyo and Yokohama in September 1923. By that time, Kojima was working as his bank's representative in California, but he'd left all his papers relating to the prehistory of the Japan Alpine Club - hundreds of letters - at his parents' home.
When the earthquake struck, the house was badly damaged and the family took refuge for the night in a nearby bamboo grove. While they were away, the house was looted. Quite why the thief should make off with bundles of old letters is obscure. But, Kojima adds vengefully, if the felon had wiped his nose with them, "may it wrinkle up like that of a Nambu salmon".
So, when it came to the events after the meeting with Weston (right), Kojima had to reconstruct from memory. - there might be gaps and errors in the narrative, he warns in his essay on the run-up to the Sangaku-kai's founding. If memory serves aright, though, his first move after meeting Weston was (characteristically) to write an article about him. This account, probably the first write-up of Weston's doings in Japanese, was published in a magazine for middle school students. It led to another meeting with the Englishman, who this time paid a visit to Kojima at his bank.
Starting with his "Account of the Exploration of Yarigatake" (1903), Kojima's mountain writings were now getting his name about. This saved him the effort of having to seek out like-minded folk. Indeed, all he had to do was wait for them to announce themselves. The first to pay his respects at Kojima's door was Takatō Jinbei, scion of a wealthy farming family from Niigata. Takatō's destiny was to bankroll the club during its early years to the tune of one thousand yen a year, a good sum in those days.
Then along came two students, Takeda Hisayoshi and Takano Takazō (left, photo taken, presumably, rather later in life). Both had a strong interest in natural history - Takeda had already written articles on botany, while Takano inclined to ornithology - and they had already founded their own club, the Japan Natural History Association. Takeda would later publish the first guide to Japan's alpine plants. Umezawa Chikamitsu was a third member of this group.
Another key man was Jō Kazuma, a lawyer and a member of the Tokyo city council. Later, he became head of the Korean court of appeals and also made a name for himself as an expert on the Meiji constitution. At that time, however, he still had time for his hobby, which was seeking out rare flowers in the mountains. He was the first to collect an example of the rare Tsukumogusa.
Soon they had a quorum: "Brought together by the mountains, and backed by Takatō's resources and energy, Jō Kazuma's social standing and statesmanlike judgement, the young naturalists' dedication, hard work and dash of romanticism, to say nothing of my propensity to recite Byron in the mountains and scribble away furiously, it was quite natural that we should end up by founding an alpine club."
Kojima is probably understating his contribution here. He had a talent for bringing people together, and not only on mountains. Later in life, for example, he acted as a negotiator of marital ceasefires between Yosano Tekkan and his wife Akiko.
Whatever the extent of Kojima's influence - and it was probably larger than he admits - the new Sangaku-kai met for the first time in Kojimachi, Tokyo, on 14 October 1905. Soon all its members and not just Kojima were scribbling furiously. The first edition of the new club's journal, Sangaku, came out the following spring.
Even before that, Takatō Shoku (Jinbei) published his magisterial Nihon Sangakushi (History of Japanese Mountains), a 1,200-page vade mecum to 207 peaks of the Japanese islands (including Taiwan) with contributions from Kojima Usui and several other Sangaku-kai members. Interestingly, an earlier version of the book was entitled "Nihon Meizan-shō (A Selection of Notable Japanese Mountains), foreshadowing the title of a much later author's masterpiece.
In this way, the Japan Alpine Club was almost literally written into existence. A bestselling book about nature had inspired its founder to start mountaineering. And Kojima's own writings were the operative instrument by which he gathered together the first few club members. Once Sangaku was established, the output of club members accelerated. In the end, Kojima's collected works would occupy half a shelf. And two collections of his essays are still in print today, as are two books by Takeda Hisayoshi.
The Sangaku-kai's belle-lettrist origins make an interesting comparison with the beginnings of alpinism in eighteenth-century Europe. There it was the savants who led the way, starting with Paccard, the young doctor who found the route up Mt Blanc, and continuing with Saussure, the scientist, who followed in his bootprints. In subsequent decades, there were Agassiz, Desor, Hugi, Forbes and Tyndall, who all made glaciers their study as well as climbing mountains. In Japan, by contrast, Kojima launched alpinism on a decidedly literary vector.
References
Kojima Usui: Sangaku-kai no seiritsu made. Essay in Arupinisto no Shuki (An alpinist's diary).
Anecdote about Kojima as a mediator between Tekkan and Akiko Yosano is from 多才なアルプニスト：小島烏水 article by 瀬戸島政博 (Setoguchi Masahiro) The Japan Journal of Survey, September 2008.
Photos copyright of 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).
Kojima Usui was always clear about the chain of events that led him to found the Sangaku-kai, later to be known as the Japan Alpine Club. As related in the previous post, he picked up a copy of Shiga Shigetaka's Theory of Japanese Landscape (Nihon Fūkeiron) in 1896, and was inspired by the book to climb Yarigatake a few years later. This led to the famous meeting in 1903 with Walter Weston, the mountaineering missionary, who suggested the idea of a club.
But what happened in the two years between the fateful meeting with Weston and the Sangaku-kai's actual formation in 1905? Here the story lacks detail. According to Kojima, the blame for that lies with the Great Kanto Earthquake, which devastated Tokyo and Yokohama in September 1923. By that time, Kojima was working as his bank's representative in California, but he'd left all his papers relating to the prehistory of the Japan Alpine Club - hundreds of letters - at his parents' home.When the earthquake struck, the house was badly damaged and the family took refuge for the night in a nearby bamboo grove. While they were away, the house was looted. Quite why the thief should make off with bundles of old letters is obscure. But, Kojima adds vengefully, if the felon had wiped his nose with them, "may it wrinkle up like that of a Nambu salmon".
So, when it came to the events after the meeting with Weston (right), Kojima had to reconstruct from memory. - there might be gaps and errors in the narrative, he warns in his essay on the run-up to the Sangaku-kai's founding. If memory serves aright, though, his first move after meeting Weston was (characteristically) to write an article about him. This account, probably the first write-up of Weston's doings in Japanese, was published in a magazine for middle school students. It led to another meeting with the Englishman, who this time paid a visit to Kojima at his bank.Starting with his "Account of the Exploration of Yarigatake" (1903), Kojima's mountain writings were now getting his name about. This saved him the effort of having to seek out like-minded folk. Indeed, all he had to do was wait for them to announce themselves. The first to pay his respects at Kojima's door was Takatō Jinbei, scion of a wealthy farming family from Niigata. Takatō's destiny was to bankroll the club during its early years to the tune of one thousand yen a year, a good sum in those days.
Then along came two students, Takeda Hisayoshi and Takano Takazō (left, photo taken, presumably, rather later in life). Both had a strong interest in natural history - Takeda had already written articles on botany, while Takano inclined to ornithology - and they had already founded their own club, the Japan Natural History Association. Takeda would later publish the first guide to Japan's alpine plants. Umezawa Chikamitsu was a third member of this group.Another key man was Jō Kazuma, a lawyer and a member of the Tokyo city council. Later, he became head of the Korean court of appeals and also made a name for himself as an expert on the Meiji constitution. At that time, however, he still had time for his hobby, which was seeking out rare flowers in the mountains. He was the first to collect an example of the rare Tsukumogusa.
Soon they had a quorum: "Brought together by the mountains, and backed by Takatō's resources and energy, Jō Kazuma's social standing and statesmanlike judgement, the young naturalists' dedication, hard work and dash of romanticism, to say nothing of my propensity to recite Byron in the mountains and scribble away furiously, it was quite natural that we should end up by founding an alpine club."
Kojima is probably understating his contribution here. He had a talent for bringing people together, and not only on mountains. Later in life, for example, he acted as a negotiator of marital ceasefires between Yosano Tekkan and his wife Akiko.
Whatever the extent of Kojima's influence - and it was probably larger than he admits - the new Sangaku-kai met for the first time in Kojimachi, Tokyo, on 14 October 1905. Soon all its members and not just Kojima were scribbling furiously. The first edition of the new club's journal, Sangaku, came out the following spring.
Even before that, Takatō Shoku (Jinbei) published his magisterial Nihon Sangakushi (History of Japanese Mountains), a 1,200-page vade mecum to 207 peaks of the Japanese islands (including Taiwan) with contributions from Kojima Usui and several other Sangaku-kai members. Interestingly, an earlier version of the book was entitled "Nihon Meizan-shō (A Selection of Notable Japanese Mountains), foreshadowing the title of a much later author's masterpiece.In this way, the Japan Alpine Club was almost literally written into existence. A bestselling book about nature had inspired its founder to start mountaineering. And Kojima's own writings were the operative instrument by which he gathered together the first few club members. Once Sangaku was established, the output of club members accelerated. In the end, Kojima's collected works would occupy half a shelf. And two collections of his essays are still in print today, as are two books by Takeda Hisayoshi.
The Sangaku-kai's belle-lettrist origins make an interesting comparison with the beginnings of alpinism in eighteenth-century Europe. There it was the savants who led the way, starting with Paccard, the young doctor who found the route up Mt Blanc, and continuing with Saussure, the scientist, who followed in his bootprints. In subsequent decades, there were Agassiz, Desor, Hugi, Forbes and Tyndall, who all made glaciers their study as well as climbing mountains. In Japan, by contrast, Kojima launched alpinism on a decidedly literary vector.
References
Kojima Usui: Sangaku-kai no seiritsu made. Essay in Arupinisto no Shuki (An alpinist's diary).
Anecdote about Kojima as a mediator between Tekkan and Akiko Yosano is from 多才なアルプニスト：小島烏水 article by 瀬戸島政博 (Setoguchi Masahiro) The Japan Journal of Survey, September 2008.
Photos copyright of 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).
Thursday, December 29, 2011
The origins of alpinism (1)
How Kojima Usui inaugurated the Japan Alpine Club and a rich tradition of mountain writing
I had long thought of climbing Yari-ga-take.
Why was this?
Because Yari is high, Yari is sharp, and Yari is steep.
These words introduce the account of Japan’s first alpine excursion. The motivation is recognisably modern – to climb a mountain not to worship it or survey it, but simply because it is high, sharp, and steep. Because it’s there.
The story of this climb begins in 1896 when a 23 year-old bank clerk emerges from a bookstore in Yokohama clutching a copy of Shiga Shigetaka's best-selling Theory of Japanese Landscape (Nihon Fūkeiron) in its sixth edition. This purchase leads directly to a pioneering ascent of Japan's fifth highest mountain, a meeting with an English missionary, and the founding of the Japan Alpine Club, as well as a tradition of mountain literature that is the equal of any in the world.
The future bank clerk was born in Takamatsu, on the island of Shikoku in 1873, the year in which the samurai class was officially abolished. His father – of samurai stock - was a customs official at the city's harbour. While Kojima Kyuta was still a boy, his father moved the family to the growing international port of Yokohama, a city of greater opportunity. Kyuta was enrolled in the Yokohama Commercial High School, where he received a good grounding in English. "Knowledge of commerce would be the thing for the new generation," his father thought.
Graduating in 1892, Kojima dabbled in journalism, contributing numerous articles to Bunko, a literary journal. One essay, “About Miss Higuchi Ichiyō”, impressed the editors so much that they invited Kojima to join the magazine's editorial board. By this time, he’d already exchanged his given name, Kyuta, which he'd always disliked, for the nom de fudè of Usui.
This was in 1896, a turning point in Kojima Usui's life. In the same year, he joined the Yokohama Specie Bank, the forerunner of the Bank of Tokyo, a career change that consigned his writing to the evening hours. It was around this time too that he made the fateful purchase of Shiga Shigetaka’s masterpiece.
If Kojima had been looking for something more in his life, he certainly found it in Nihon Fūkeiron. He read the book again and again, "carefully trusting it as though it was the scripture of natural beauty". What especially captured his attention was the appendix to the book, curiously entitled "Tozan no kifū wo kōsaku subeshi" (Cultivate the mountaineering spirit). And, within that treatise, one passage in particular haunted him:
Start out from the village of Shimashima. After ascending for about eight hours, you will reach the hut on the Tokugō pass at about 1,500 metres in altitude; from there, in about three leagues, you will find the Miyagawa hut, which you can regard as the foot of the mountain proper; from Miyagawa, climb six leagues or seven hours, and you will reach the summit; for the first three of these hours, you will follow a fast-flowing river that cuts through granite walls; mountains made of granite rise skywards one above the other; as you leave the river, the mountains become still more precipitous, the view more and more impressive, the granite presenting its mysterious forms as if it were a huge landscape painting; as you continue, you will step onto snow, and at times you will see ptarmigans, bears, and mountain goats (kamoshika). In short, if you want to know the real nature of granite mountains, then you must by all means climb Yarigatake.
It matters little that Shiga probably cribbed much of this appendix from the English-language Handbook for Travellers in Central and Northern Japan, published by Ernest Satow and A G S Hawes a decade or so earlier. Nor that the Japanese author had scant personal knowledge of mountain-climbing. For the effect on Kojima was electric; on reading the passage about Yari, as he later recorded, he felt "as if his heart and soul had been blown away".
Kojima could not set out for Yari right away. For one thing, his bank allowed him a bare ten days or so of annual leave. For another, he knew nothing about mountain travel, even though he resolved now "to get involved more deeply with mountains". His first ventures were modest and it wasn’t until 1899 that he first climbed above the 2000-metre mark, on Asama volcano.
From the start, there was a literary angle to his journeys. The travel essay, or kikobun, he thought, would be "a good way to demonstrate one's writing skills and techniques". He attempted to give a new twist to this well-worn genre by describing places that previous authors had ignored. Published in 1899, his first book, Sentoh Shohkei, draws its materials from rambles on the plains, along rivers or in the low foothills.
In the following year, Kojima made his first foray onto one of Japan's high mountains. Climbing Norikura, an extinct volcano and his first 3000-er, he got a first glimpse of his ultimate goal:-
Jagged peaks heaved themselves into the air like waves, the clear ranges lapped up against my feet, and among them one wave rose higher than the rest, breaking through the violet shadows and shaking the purple light as it thrust from the centre of this raging ocean, and this, my guide said, was Yari.
Actually getting there took a little longer. Among the causes of delay were his parents, who were opposed, a dearth of accurate maps, and – most vexing of all for the prototype salaryman-alpinist – that desperate shortage of annual holidays. Nevertheless, after one false start, Kojima reached Yari's summit in 1902, together with his friend Okano Kinjirō, an oil company employee.
The Yari climb led to an introduction to the English missionary and mountaineer, Walter Weston (as described in the post on Shiga Shigetaka). Acting on Weston’s suggestion, Kojima and six friends formed their own "Mountain Club" in 1905. At first, it was known simply as the "Sangaku-kai", on the model of Britain’s Alpine Club.
A few months later, the club launched its journal, Sangaku ('Mountains'), with Kojima as its first editor. In an early issue, Kojima boasted that "Except for some literary society, I know of no other society that has more poets and writers than ours." By design, mountain writing would be almost as important in the new club as mountaineering itself.
Now opened what Kojima termed "Japan's golden age of mountain exploration". In 1906, the year after the Sangakukai was formed and accompanied by Takatō Shoku, another founder member, he traversed the ridges between Tsubakuro, Jōnen and Chō-ga-dake in the Northern Alps. One of the party’s aims was to verify that a mountain called Ōtensho-dake really existed and, if so, where it was situated. Large-scale maps were still unavailable – although the surveyors were busy doing the groundwork – and so mountain travel still included an element of exploration. In writing up this trip, Kojima was the first to use the word “juso” (縦走) to describe a long traverse across high ridges, now a standard term in the Japanese hiking lexicon.
In the following two summer seasons – when the novel by Nitta Jiro suggests that he was attempting to race the government surveyors to the summit of Tsurugi – he explored the river valleys that run through the Southern Alps, also traversing the Three Mountains of Shirane. It was on this trip that Kojima spotted and named the famous Buttress of Kita-dake.
In 1909, he returned to the Southern Alps again, traversing the Akaishi range. That trip gets him one of several mentions in Fukada Kyuya's Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan):
Warusawa-dake was then climbed in July 1909, by those distinguished pioneers of the Japan Alpine Club, Kojima Usui, Takano Yōzō, Takatō Shoku, Nakamura Seitarō, and Saegusa Inosuke. On the summit, they found signs that others had been there before them. Three shrines of unvarnished wood stood there and a rusted iron banner leaned into a rocky niche. And nearby, the pilgrims had left scattered on the ground wooden tablets inscribed with the name of the deity Arakawa Daimyōjin.
In 1910, Kojima essayed a long traverse from Yari via Mitsumata-renge to Washiba, and then followed the headwaters of the Kurobe over to Yakushi-dake. The following year, he traced the ridge between Hodaka and Yari. In 1912, he was on Senjo and Shiomi in the Southern Alps, and in 1913 he visited Sugoroku and Kasa-ga-dake. Then, in 1915, this golden age came to an end when Kojima’s bank posted him to Los Angeles.
The era after the Sangakukai’s founding had also been a golden age for Kojima's writing. All the while, he was adding to his oeuvre at a prodigious rate, his inkbrush (as his brother recalls) fairly hopping and skipping over the manuscript pages. In 1910, he came out with the first of four volumes on the “Nihon Alps”, his choice of title helping to establish the modish new name for these mountain ranges. He also found time for a book on Japanese woodblock prints and landscape art.
At the same time, Kojima was searching for a style that would better suit his subject. His early travel essays were written, perforce, in a conventional literary language, larded with figurative language and Chinese-influenced phraseology. Typical of this period is the following excerpt from his 1902 essay on the exploration of Yarigatake:
In height, a full 11,700 shaku or feet above sea level, Yari surpasses the rain clouds whirling at his foot, he rises head and shoulders above the mountains that surround him, as if abruptly demanding their fealty and their acclaim for his royal majesty. Yes, the mountains of this region may be the greatest and tallest of all Japan, they may exceed all other Japanese mountains in stature, indeed there are none here but lofty mountains of unrivalled magnificence, yet still they bow down before him; none of them would dare flout his command, whether Hakusan of Kaga to the west, Ontake of Shinano to the east, Tateyama of Etchu to the north, or Norikura of Hida to the south. Like the Four Deva Kings, they surround and salute him from far and near, one standing guard with a white band of snow on its forehead, another with an icy sword raised above its head, one riding astride a stout horse that bristles its mane, as if about to trumpet forth a neigh, and if anyone, be they a sentient or a non-sentient being, dares to approach, these guardians would hurl down lethal rocks, let slip their winds, or blow down their mists, never desisting until the trespasser kneels and begs for mercy…
Only a few years later, Kojima decided that this ornate, elliptical language was no longer "fit for the description of nature full of life". Instead, he sought "a new style of Meiji" that would let him depict the natural world as it really is. Kojima was not, of course, the only one in pursuit of a new style. As a part-time literary critic, he would have been aware of parallel efforts such as those of the philologist Mozume Takame (1849-1928), who, In an essay of 1886 entitled Genbun Itchi, had called for written Japanese to be brought closer to the spoken language. A novel that applied that principle, Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo (Drifting clouds) had also recently appeared.
As an aspiring nature writer, however, Kojima would find no exact model among compatriot novelists or essayists. That meant looking abroad for inspiration. English writers impressed him, particularly Byron. The English poet’s works, he wrote, “are more strictly topographical than those of Wordsworth and Shelley, dramatising and giving meaning to places readers might themselves visit, often in vivid and sensuous terms.”
This comment sheds light on the type of style that Kojima was seeking to develop for himself. According to Nobuko Fujioka, the breakthrough came in 1907 with the publication of an essay entitled Umpyō (Above the clouds). As it turned out, though, Kojima's stylistic model was less the poetry of Byron than the prose of John Ruskin, whose descriptions of nature in Modern Painters and elsewhere shaped the literary tastes of several generations. Modern Painters Volume IV - which contains the famous chapter on "Mountain Glory" - was introduced to Kojima by Weston at their first meeting in 1903. "I didn't understand a word of this," Kojima recorded later, "but, when I heard Ruskin's name, I felt like bowing my head."
Kojima clearly followed up on Weston's hint. Indeed, the great Victorian sage – who, like Kojima, was both an art critic and (briefly) a member of an alpine club – is cited by name in an essay on Mt Fuji that Kojima published after his return to Japan in 1927. In that essay, the characteristic concave curve of the volcano's slope is described as follows:-
The arc described from the contour of the summit shrine, some ten thousand feet above sea level, down to Ōmiya, at the foot of the main route up the mountain – this arc, slanting, somewhat steeply, yet always in an easy, serene, almost carefree way, across a flawless sky – this gigantic line is, except for the sea horizon, the mightiest that the eye will ever see in this country.
It’s surely not too much of a stretch to see Ruskin's influence in the great arc of this perfectly controlled periodic sentence, slanting as it does, in easy, serene and almost carefree clauses, towards that dramatic and irrefragable conclusion.
Be that as it may, this passage happens to be the only quotation from a modern writer that Fukada Kyuya chose to adorn the Mt Fuji chapter of his Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan), which was published in 1964.
This tribute was no more than Kojima’s due. For he did much more than just found the Japan Alpine Club – of which Fukada was the 1,586th member – and kick off a golden age of mountain exploration. By inaugurating the journal Sangaku, he provided his literary successors, especially Fukada, with a treasure trove of material and quotations. Even more importantly, Kojima invented a way of writing about mountains and encouraged others to find their own voice. Where once samurai had pursued ‘the way of the ink-brush and the sword’, Kojima saw to it that henceforth Japan’s mountaineers would go out onto the hill with an ice-axe in one hand and, figuratively speaking, a pen in the other.
(Continued: How Kojima assembled the six other founder members of the Sangaku-kai.)
References
Details of Kojima Usui’s early life, climb of Yari, and literary development come mainly from Nobuko Fujioka's article, Vision or Creation? Kojima Usui and the Literary Landscape of the Japanese Alps (Comparative Literature Studies, Vol 39, no 4, 2002).
Details of Kojima's climbing career come mainly from 多才なアルプニスト：小島烏水 article by 瀬戸島政博 (Setoguchi Masahiro) The Japan Journal of Survey, September 2008.
Thoughts about the influence of Ruskin on Kojima’s writing were prompted by Miyashita Keizo's Nihon Arupusu: Mitate no Bunkashi, a book on the Japanese interpretation of the Alps published in 1997.
And Project Hyakumeizan is indebted to the Sensei for the translations from Nihon Fūkeiron and from Kojima Usui’s Yarigatake no Tankenki (Account of an exploration of Yarigatake). Translations from Nihon Hyakumeizan from the forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan.
Photo of Kojima Usui copyright of 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).
I had long thought of climbing Yari-ga-take.
Why was this?
Because Yari is high, Yari is sharp, and Yari is steep.
These words introduce the account of Japan’s first alpine excursion. The motivation is recognisably modern – to climb a mountain not to worship it or survey it, but simply because it is high, sharp, and steep. Because it’s there.
The story of this climb begins in 1896 when a 23 year-old bank clerk emerges from a bookstore in Yokohama clutching a copy of Shiga Shigetaka's best-selling Theory of Japanese Landscape (Nihon Fūkeiron) in its sixth edition. This purchase leads directly to a pioneering ascent of Japan's fifth highest mountain, a meeting with an English missionary, and the founding of the Japan Alpine Club, as well as a tradition of mountain literature that is the equal of any in the world.
The future bank clerk was born in Takamatsu, on the island of Shikoku in 1873, the year in which the samurai class was officially abolished. His father – of samurai stock - was a customs official at the city's harbour. While Kojima Kyuta was still a boy, his father moved the family to the growing international port of Yokohama, a city of greater opportunity. Kyuta was enrolled in the Yokohama Commercial High School, where he received a good grounding in English. "Knowledge of commerce would be the thing for the new generation," his father thought.Graduating in 1892, Kojima dabbled in journalism, contributing numerous articles to Bunko, a literary journal. One essay, “About Miss Higuchi Ichiyō”, impressed the editors so much that they invited Kojima to join the magazine's editorial board. By this time, he’d already exchanged his given name, Kyuta, which he'd always disliked, for the nom de fudè of Usui.
This was in 1896, a turning point in Kojima Usui's life. In the same year, he joined the Yokohama Specie Bank, the forerunner of the Bank of Tokyo, a career change that consigned his writing to the evening hours. It was around this time too that he made the fateful purchase of Shiga Shigetaka’s masterpiece.
If Kojima had been looking for something more in his life, he certainly found it in Nihon Fūkeiron. He read the book again and again, "carefully trusting it as though it was the scripture of natural beauty". What especially captured his attention was the appendix to the book, curiously entitled "Tozan no kifū wo kōsaku subeshi" (Cultivate the mountaineering spirit). And, within that treatise, one passage in particular haunted him:
Start out from the village of Shimashima. After ascending for about eight hours, you will reach the hut on the Tokugō pass at about 1,500 metres in altitude; from there, in about three leagues, you will find the Miyagawa hut, which you can regard as the foot of the mountain proper; from Miyagawa, climb six leagues or seven hours, and you will reach the summit; for the first three of these hours, you will follow a fast-flowing river that cuts through granite walls; mountains made of granite rise skywards one above the other; as you leave the river, the mountains become still more precipitous, the view more and more impressive, the granite presenting its mysterious forms as if it were a huge landscape painting; as you continue, you will step onto snow, and at times you will see ptarmigans, bears, and mountain goats (kamoshika). In short, if you want to know the real nature of granite mountains, then you must by all means climb Yarigatake.
It matters little that Shiga probably cribbed much of this appendix from the English-language Handbook for Travellers in Central and Northern Japan, published by Ernest Satow and A G S Hawes a decade or so earlier. Nor that the Japanese author had scant personal knowledge of mountain-climbing. For the effect on Kojima was electric; on reading the passage about Yari, as he later recorded, he felt "as if his heart and soul had been blown away".
Kojima could not set out for Yari right away. For one thing, his bank allowed him a bare ten days or so of annual leave. For another, he knew nothing about mountain travel, even though he resolved now "to get involved more deeply with mountains". His first ventures were modest and it wasn’t until 1899 that he first climbed above the 2000-metre mark, on Asama volcano.
From the start, there was a literary angle to his journeys. The travel essay, or kikobun, he thought, would be "a good way to demonstrate one's writing skills and techniques". He attempted to give a new twist to this well-worn genre by describing places that previous authors had ignored. Published in 1899, his first book, Sentoh Shohkei, draws its materials from rambles on the plains, along rivers or in the low foothills.In the following year, Kojima made his first foray onto one of Japan's high mountains. Climbing Norikura, an extinct volcano and his first 3000-er, he got a first glimpse of his ultimate goal:-
Jagged peaks heaved themselves into the air like waves, the clear ranges lapped up against my feet, and among them one wave rose higher than the rest, breaking through the violet shadows and shaking the purple light as it thrust from the centre of this raging ocean, and this, my guide said, was Yari.
Actually getting there took a little longer. Among the causes of delay were his parents, who were opposed, a dearth of accurate maps, and – most vexing of all for the prototype salaryman-alpinist – that desperate shortage of annual holidays. Nevertheless, after one false start, Kojima reached Yari's summit in 1902, together with his friend Okano Kinjirō, an oil company employee.
The Yari climb led to an introduction to the English missionary and mountaineer, Walter Weston (as described in the post on Shiga Shigetaka). Acting on Weston’s suggestion, Kojima and six friends formed their own "Mountain Club" in 1905. At first, it was known simply as the "Sangaku-kai", on the model of Britain’s Alpine Club.A few months later, the club launched its journal, Sangaku ('Mountains'), with Kojima as its first editor. In an early issue, Kojima boasted that "Except for some literary society, I know of no other society that has more poets and writers than ours." By design, mountain writing would be almost as important in the new club as mountaineering itself.
Now opened what Kojima termed "Japan's golden age of mountain exploration". In 1906, the year after the Sangakukai was formed and accompanied by Takatō Shoku, another founder member, he traversed the ridges between Tsubakuro, Jōnen and Chō-ga-dake in the Northern Alps. One of the party’s aims was to verify that a mountain called Ōtensho-dake really existed and, if so, where it was situated. Large-scale maps were still unavailable – although the surveyors were busy doing the groundwork – and so mountain travel still included an element of exploration. In writing up this trip, Kojima was the first to use the word “juso” (縦走) to describe a long traverse across high ridges, now a standard term in the Japanese hiking lexicon.
In the following two summer seasons – when the novel by Nitta Jiro suggests that he was attempting to race the government surveyors to the summit of Tsurugi – he explored the river valleys that run through the Southern Alps, also traversing the Three Mountains of Shirane. It was on this trip that Kojima spotted and named the famous Buttress of Kita-dake.
In 1909, he returned to the Southern Alps again, traversing the Akaishi range. That trip gets him one of several mentions in Fukada Kyuya's Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan): Warusawa-dake was then climbed in July 1909, by those distinguished pioneers of the Japan Alpine Club, Kojima Usui, Takano Yōzō, Takatō Shoku, Nakamura Seitarō, and Saegusa Inosuke. On the summit, they found signs that others had been there before them. Three shrines of unvarnished wood stood there and a rusted iron banner leaned into a rocky niche. And nearby, the pilgrims had left scattered on the ground wooden tablets inscribed with the name of the deity Arakawa Daimyōjin.
In 1910, Kojima essayed a long traverse from Yari via Mitsumata-renge to Washiba, and then followed the headwaters of the Kurobe over to Yakushi-dake. The following year, he traced the ridge between Hodaka and Yari. In 1912, he was on Senjo and Shiomi in the Southern Alps, and in 1913 he visited Sugoroku and Kasa-ga-dake. Then, in 1915, this golden age came to an end when Kojima’s bank posted him to Los Angeles.
The era after the Sangakukai’s founding had also been a golden age for Kojima's writing. All the while, he was adding to his oeuvre at a prodigious rate, his inkbrush (as his brother recalls) fairly hopping and skipping over the manuscript pages. In 1910, he came out with the first of four volumes on the “Nihon Alps”, his choice of title helping to establish the modish new name for these mountain ranges. He also found time for a book on Japanese woodblock prints and landscape art.
At the same time, Kojima was searching for a style that would better suit his subject. His early travel essays were written, perforce, in a conventional literary language, larded with figurative language and Chinese-influenced phraseology. Typical of this period is the following excerpt from his 1902 essay on the exploration of Yarigatake:
In height, a full 11,700 shaku or feet above sea level, Yari surpasses the rain clouds whirling at his foot, he rises head and shoulders above the mountains that surround him, as if abruptly demanding their fealty and their acclaim for his royal majesty. Yes, the mountains of this region may be the greatest and tallest of all Japan, they may exceed all other Japanese mountains in stature, indeed there are none here but lofty mountains of unrivalled magnificence, yet still they bow down before him; none of them would dare flout his command, whether Hakusan of Kaga to the west, Ontake of Shinano to the east, Tateyama of Etchu to the north, or Norikura of Hida to the south. Like the Four Deva Kings, they surround and salute him from far and near, one standing guard with a white band of snow on its forehead, another with an icy sword raised above its head, one riding astride a stout horse that bristles its mane, as if about to trumpet forth a neigh, and if anyone, be they a sentient or a non-sentient being, dares to approach, these guardians would hurl down lethal rocks, let slip their winds, or blow down their mists, never desisting until the trespasser kneels and begs for mercy…
Only a few years later, Kojima decided that this ornate, elliptical language was no longer "fit for the description of nature full of life". Instead, he sought "a new style of Meiji" that would let him depict the natural world as it really is. Kojima was not, of course, the only one in pursuit of a new style. As a part-time literary critic, he would have been aware of parallel efforts such as those of the philologist Mozume Takame (1849-1928), who, In an essay of 1886 entitled Genbun Itchi, had called for written Japanese to be brought closer to the spoken language. A novel that applied that principle, Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo (Drifting clouds) had also recently appeared.
As an aspiring nature writer, however, Kojima would find no exact model among compatriot novelists or essayists. That meant looking abroad for inspiration. English writers impressed him, particularly Byron. The English poet’s works, he wrote, “are more strictly topographical than those of Wordsworth and Shelley, dramatising and giving meaning to places readers might themselves visit, often in vivid and sensuous terms.”
This comment sheds light on the type of style that Kojima was seeking to develop for himself. According to Nobuko Fujioka, the breakthrough came in 1907 with the publication of an essay entitled Umpyō (Above the clouds). As it turned out, though, Kojima's stylistic model was less the poetry of Byron than the prose of John Ruskin, whose descriptions of nature in Modern Painters and elsewhere shaped the literary tastes of several generations. Modern Painters Volume IV - which contains the famous chapter on "Mountain Glory" - was introduced to Kojima by Weston at their first meeting in 1903. "I didn't understand a word of this," Kojima recorded later, "but, when I heard Ruskin's name, I felt like bowing my head."
Kojima clearly followed up on Weston's hint. Indeed, the great Victorian sage – who, like Kojima, was both an art critic and (briefly) a member of an alpine club – is cited by name in an essay on Mt Fuji that Kojima published after his return to Japan in 1927. In that essay, the characteristic concave curve of the volcano's slope is described as follows:-
The arc described from the contour of the summit shrine, some ten thousand feet above sea level, down to Ōmiya, at the foot of the main route up the mountain – this arc, slanting, somewhat steeply, yet always in an easy, serene, almost carefree way, across a flawless sky – this gigantic line is, except for the sea horizon, the mightiest that the eye will ever see in this country.
It’s surely not too much of a stretch to see Ruskin's influence in the great arc of this perfectly controlled periodic sentence, slanting as it does, in easy, serene and almost carefree clauses, towards that dramatic and irrefragable conclusion.
Be that as it may, this passage happens to be the only quotation from a modern writer that Fukada Kyuya chose to adorn the Mt Fuji chapter of his Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan), which was published in 1964.
This tribute was no more than Kojima’s due. For he did much more than just found the Japan Alpine Club – of which Fukada was the 1,586th member – and kick off a golden age of mountain exploration. By inaugurating the journal Sangaku, he provided his literary successors, especially Fukada, with a treasure trove of material and quotations. Even more importantly, Kojima invented a way of writing about mountains and encouraged others to find their own voice. Where once samurai had pursued ‘the way of the ink-brush and the sword’, Kojima saw to it that henceforth Japan’s mountaineers would go out onto the hill with an ice-axe in one hand and, figuratively speaking, a pen in the other.
(Continued: How Kojima assembled the six other founder members of the Sangaku-kai.)
References
Details of Kojima Usui’s early life, climb of Yari, and literary development come mainly from Nobuko Fujioka's article, Vision or Creation? Kojima Usui and the Literary Landscape of the Japanese Alps (Comparative Literature Studies, Vol 39, no 4, 2002).
Details of Kojima's climbing career come mainly from 多才なアルプニスト：小島烏水 article by 瀬戸島政博 (Setoguchi Masahiro) The Japan Journal of Survey, September 2008.
Thoughts about the influence of Ruskin on Kojima’s writing were prompted by Miyashita Keizo's Nihon Arupusu: Mitate no Bunkashi, a book on the Japanese interpretation of the Alps published in 1997.
And Project Hyakumeizan is indebted to the Sensei for the translations from Nihon Fūkeiron and from Kojima Usui’s Yarigatake no Tankenki (Account of an exploration of Yarigatake). Translations from Nihon Hyakumeizan from the forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan.
Photo of Kojima Usui copyright of 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).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)