Matterhorn versus Mt Fuji

Or can there be “Meizan” outside Japan? Text of a presentation given at the Japanese Alpine Club in Tokyo on 16 October.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Japanese Alpine Club, friends and fellow mountaineers. It is a privilege to be invited to speak in these surroundings. The Club is so deeply woven into the history of Nihon Hyakumeizan – its author was after all your 1,586th member – that a pilgrimage to your offices must be deeply meaningful for any fan of Fukada Kyūya’s most famous book.

Woodprints by Yoshida Hiroshi

Today, the question is whether there can be “Meizan” in countries other than Japan. This interesting topic was suggested by Ohmori Hisao-san in his recent review of the English version of Nihon Hyakumeizan in the JAC newsletter. But, before I try to answer that question, let me say a few words about the translation.

Two decades ago, I spent six years in Tokyo working for foreign banks. It was an average commercial banker’s life except at weekends, when I was a very average all-round mountaineer – belonging to a club affiliated with the Japan Workers’ Alpine Federation (the Shinjuku bloc), and going out every weekend, in a weatherbeaten Subaru, to yama-ski, rock-climb, sawa-noborise, or do alpine routes.

At that time, we had no special interest in “Meizan”. I knew the word, of course, and bought a copy of Nihon Hyakumeizan, but there was no time to read more than a few chapters. It was only when I moved to Switzerland that I had enough leisure to read more. And, although Switzerland has great relief, I sometimes felt nostalgic for the Japan Alps.

One day, I translated the Hakusan chapter to see what it would sound like in English – and then I realized that Nihon Hyakumeizan is a masterpiece. With the help of a friend at Fukui Jin-ai University, we decided to translate the whole book. Soon we were e-mailing and Skyping almost every day. Then we got married.

1. How to translate “Nihon Hyakumeizan”?
If you translate Nihon Hyakumeizan, you first have to translate the title. Soon after the project started, I was able to discuss that question with Fukada Shintarō, the author’s son, over coffee at a Renoir café in Tokyo.

“Famous mountain” is somehow not right, Fukada-san thought. So, in the end, the title of the book in English is just “One Hundred Mountains of Japan”. We didn’t so much translate “Meizan” as skirt the question altogether.

The basic problem, as Ohmori-san points out in his book review, is that there is no equivalent word for “meizan” in any European language. Not in English, nor in German or French or Italian. The word doesn’t exist because the concept doesn’t exist.

2. What is a ‘Meizan’ anyway?
So, before we can go looking for Meizan outside Japan, we have to ask what a Meizan is. How do you recognise one when you meet it?

“Meizan” as a word comes from China. I’m not sure how old the word itself is, but the concept goes back to China’s Warring Countries period (475-221 BC). That was when people started talking about the country’s Five Great Peaks (五岳). Later on, these eminences were joined by Four Sacred Mountains of Buddhism (四大佛教名山) and a similar set for Taoism (四大道教名山). Today, there is Gazetteer of China’s Famous Mountains (中国名山志), published by the China National Microfilming Center for Library Resources – in sixteen volumes. We surmise that China has a lot of Meizan.

Ur-Meizan: The Purple Heaven Palace on Mt Wudang, China

In Japan, the definition of Meizan has varied over time. In the afterword to Nihon Hyakumeizan, Fukada Kyūya mentions Tachibana Nankei’s discussion of mountains (“Meizanron”) in his Tōyuki, the account of a journey to eastern Japan that the writer made in 1785. Nankei names 25 mountains, starting with Fuji, Hakusan and Tateyama, the so-called Sanreizan, or three great sacred mountains of Japan. Indeed, most of the mountains in his list had religious traditions. But Nankei never says exactly what he means by the word Meizan.

About a century later, the journalist and pundit Shiga Shigetaka published his Nihon Fūkeiron (1894), a ‘theory of the Japanese landscape’. His purpose was to illuminate the national character of the Japanese by highlighting what is special about their surroundings. And, for Shiga, what differentiates Japan’s landscape is its volcanic features– plutonic rocks, hot springs and eruptions. So Meizan are necessarily volcanoes. No other type of mountain appears in the book’s woodprint illustrations.

Not everybody agreed with Shiga’s take on Meizan, even at the time. The Kojiruien was a 51-volume collection of historical documents that was compiled between 1879 and 1914 under the initial direction of Nishimura Shigeki, an official at the Ministry of Education. The encyclopaedia contained a list of 102 mountains, divided into high peaks, volcanoes, and “famous” mountains (Meizan) such as Arashiyama in Kyoto, Kasugayama in Nara and Obasuteyama in Shinano. These are exclusively places that appear in classical poetry. Few or none are volcanic, and most are low (less than 1,500 metres).

However, Nihon Fūkeiron was much the more influential book. A best-seller, it told Japanese readers what they wanted to hear about themselves at a time of unequal treaties and the war with China. A young bank clerk, Kojima Usui, bought a copy in 1896 and was inspired to climb Yari-ga-take. On the strength of this experience, he later introduced himself to Walter Weston, the mountaineering missionary, who suggested the idea of an alpine club.

In October 1905, Kojima and six companions founded the Sangaku-kai, Asia’s first alpine club – this was 110 years ago almost to the day. And Weston and Shiga were elected as the new Sangaku-kai’s first honorary vice-chairmen. This is not to say that Kojima was in complete agreement with Shiga on the subject of Meizan. In an essay about the "Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape", he explicitly distances himself from the Nihon Fūkeiron author:-

Unlike previous theorists of the landscape, I don’t favour volcanoes as special to the exclusion of all other mountains, nor am I taken with the idea, like some young people today, of excluding the volcanoes from the Japan Alps, as if they were some kind of unwanted stepchildren.

Writing half a century later, Fukada Kyūya inherited Kojima’s more balanced view of what makes for a Meizan. Published in 1964, that former year of the Tokyo Olympics, Nihon Hyakumeizan features about 45 volcanoes and 55 other mountains. You might almost say that this all-embracing view of Meizan reflects the liberal and inclusive Zeitgeist of the middle Shōwa years.

Fukada also took the trouble to carefully define what he meant by a Meizan. This is a brief excerpt from the afterword to his book:

First, a mountain must have stature … Mountains, like people, must have character.

Secondly, I attach great weight to a mountain's history. No mountain with deep and long-standing links to humankind could be excluded from my list …

Thirdly, a mountain must have an air of distinction. A mountain with this quality calls attention to itself as surely as a distinctive work of art …. What I look for is an extraordinary distinctiveness.

Apropos extraordinary distinctiveness, I took this picture (above) a few years ago, on an early-morning flight between Tokyo and Osaka. Out of a misguided sense of mischief, I leaned forward and asked the two young ladies sitting in front of me what this mountain might be. Gratifyingly, I got a response that was every bit as incredulous as one might expect. Obviously, the question was absurd. For this Meizan has it all – stature, history and a limitless air of distinction. As Fukada wrote, “Fuji is there for everyone and yet, soaring into eternity, stands for something beyond any man's grasp.”

3. So can you have Meizan outside East Asia?
Having pinned down what we mean by a Meizan, we can turn – belatedly – to the question whether they exist anywhere other than in Japan and China. Fortunately, Fukada Kyūya himself provided a clear answer to that question. When he died in 1971, he was working on a series entitled Sekai no Hyakumeizan, or One Hundred Mountains of the World. The plan was to publish three ‘meizan’ articles a month in Gakujin, a mountaineering magazine. The 41 peaks written up by the time of his death were later published as a book.

Looking at the European Alps, Fukada anoints Monte Rosa, the Marmolada, Mt Blanc, and the Schreckhorn as World Meizan – but, surprisingly, not the Matterhorn. It’s probably fair to assume that Fukada would have included this eminent 4,478-metre peak at a later stage. Be that as it may, this year happens to be the 150th anniversary of the Matterhorn’s first ascent, so I will ask here if the Matterhorn actually qualifies as a Meizan – using Fukada’s own criteria.

Viewed as a cultural property, the Matterhorn has a lot in common with Mt Fuji, the Meizan of Meizan. For a start, there are Matterhorns all over the world, just as local “Mt Fujis” outcrop all over Japan. Ama Dablam is the Matterhorn of the Himalaya, Mount Assiniboine is the Matterhorn of the Rockies, Yari is the Matterhorn of Japan, and so on. So the Matterhorn lacks nothing in the way of “stature” or “distinction”.

But what about its history? Ever since that fateful ascent on July 14th, 1865, the Matterhorn has played a central part in the history of mountaineering. Before that date, though, the mountain was almost invisible to the world. It doesn’t even appear on a map until about 1680 – and, even then, not under its modern name. Local people called it simply the “Horu” (horn) or, on the Italian side, “La Becca” (the rock). Indeed, they still do.

Astonishingly, the earliest depiction of the Matterhorn that I can find is this watercolour (right) by the Zurich-based patrician and pioneer geologist, Conrad Escher von der Linth. It was painted on August 14, 1806. Compare that with Mt Fuji, which has appeared in poems and paintings, many of them masterworks, for more than one thousand years.

Before the eighteenth century, most European scholars and travellers didn’t go far out of their way to look at mountains. Unlike in Japan and China, mountains had little religious significance. In fact, they were seen mainly as useless and dangerous places, as suggested by this fourteenth-century painting of St Nicholas rescuing a traveller in mountainous terrain. In alpine countries, what people were interested in were passes through the Alps, not the Alps themselves.

This started to change in the eighteenth century, as natural philosophers started to take an interest in mountains as places for experiment, or as sources of insight into the origins of the earth. That was what the Swiss scholar Horace-Bénédict de Saussure was looking for when he crossed the pass below the Matterhorn in August 1789. In fact, it was Saussure who invented the modern form of the French name of the Matterhorn: Le Cervin. Two years before, he had made one of the first ascents of Mt Blanc. Not “because it was there”, but to do experiments and study the mountain.

Scientists had a lot to do with the modern exploration of the Alps. Granted, Edward Whymper, who made the Matterhorn’s first ascent, was an artist by profession. But his rival was John Tyndall, a physicist who originally came to the Alps to study glaciers. Although he lost out on the Matterhorn, Tyndall managed the first ascent of the incomparably beautiful Weisshorn a few years prior to Whymper’s triumph and tragedy. Alpinism and science were deeply intertwined in those early days.

By contrast, Japan’s high mountains were first climbed for completely different reasons – and more than a millennium before the high Alps were ascended. According to Nihon Hyakumeizan, Hakusan was opened in the first year of Yōrō (717) by the monk Taichō. Mt Fuji too was almost certainly first climbed for religious reasons, probably in the tenth century, although nobody knows whether the first ascent should be ascribed to the mountain mystic En-no-gyōja or, more likely, a monk with a name like Ransatsu or Konji.

If we stopped here, we might conclude that Meizan is a concept that makes sense only in East Asia, where mountains have a lengthy and rich cultural presence. The exploration of the high Alps had to wait for the advent of modern science, while the motive for early Japanese mountain-climbing was mainly religious. As for the Matterhorn – and the same is true for the rest of the high Alps – it goes only two-thirds of the way towards qualifying as a Meizan. Stature and an air of distinction it has in spades, but the historical and cultural backstory is sadly lacking.

4. Meizan everywhere?
I wonder, though, if matters are really so simple. Not all Japan’s mountains have a long history, even those featured in Nihon Hyakumeizan. Just look at the mountains that Fukada selected in Hokkaidō, for example.

As Fukada notes in his write-up of the very first one: “The earliest reference to Rishiri that I can find is from Makino Tomitarō writing in the second issue of Sangaku, the Japanese Alpine Club’s journal, in its first year of publication. This botanist and his party climbed the mountain from Oshidomari in August 1903 …” So, Rishiri-dake may have even less history than the Matterhorn.


A lack of history doesn’t mean that the mountain isn’t appreciated by the people who live at its foot. When Makino’s party reached the summit of Rishiri-dake, following the faint trace of a path and after spending two days on the mountain, they found a small wooden shrine, showing that local people had already been there.

Some years ago, I climbed Rishiri-dake for myself, in early winter conditions. When I reached the summit, a rather opulent shrine loomed through the freezing fog. Particularly noteworthy were the boat propellers attached to its base, like votive offerings. That suggested to me that the shrine was put there and kept up by local people, looking for help with the fish catch or the kombu harvest.

Much the same is true of the cross on top of the Matterhorn (below). It wasn’t installed by order of some remote government agency or church authority. Instead, the villagers of Zermatt and Valtournanche, at the mountain’s foot, decided around 1900 that their local ‘Horn’ or ‘Rock’ should have a cross.

With the costs shared by both the Swiss and the Italian villages, the cross was fabricated in Italy and its parts hauled up the mountain in the course of two summer seasons by a team of twelve mountain guides. And there you can see it to this day, with the Latin names for each village worked into the crossbar: Patrumbor and Vallistornench. Perhaps people feel about their local mountains in much the same way, whether they live in Japan, Switzerland, Italy or anywhere else.

It’s time to close. Maybe we should leave the last word to Luc Meynet, a figure in the Matterhorn’s history who has been all but ignored in the razzmatazz of this 150th anniversary year. Meynet (right) was neither mountaineer nor guide – he was a humble cheesemaker from Breuil, the village on the Italian side of the mountain. From time to time, he accompanied climbing parties as a porter, to earn some extra money so that he could look after his deceased brother’s children. On steep ground, he used to console himself that “we only die once”.

In this picture by Edward Whymper, he’s carrying the English alpinist’s tent, during an attempt on the southern side of the mountain in 1862. Meynet didn’t accompany the first ascent party in 1865. But, ten years later, he did reach the summit, in the company of an Italian group. When he reached the top, he is reported to have said “Now I can die happy, for I have heard the angels singing.”

Luc Meynet had no word for “Meizan”. Yet here, I venture to suggest, was a man who perfectly understood the meaning that lies beyond.

Thank you.

The Big White Peak

A forgotten photo collection reveals the Hyakumeizan author climbing in the Himalaya

Second-hand bookshops can be serendipitous. I recently emerged from one near Basel Station clutching, for a paltry five Swiss francs, a collection of faded colour photos of the Himalaya. The photographer's name - Kazami Takehide - had caught my eye. Needless to say, there was a connection with the author of Japan's most famous mountain book.

It happened like this. In the mid-1950s, Fukada Kyūya was a jobbing writer for mountaineering magazines. Perhaps inspired by the French ascent of Annapurna in 1950, he was increasingly interested in Himalayan topics. This led to a series of articles in the mountaineering journal Gakujin from June 1953, just after the first Japanese attempt on Manaslu, the world's eighth highest mountain.

Unfortunately, the income from these articles was substantially consumed by Fukada's almost compulsive purchases of books about the Himalaya, many imported expensively from abroad. To rid the house of tottering piles of alpine literature, his wife later took advantage of her husband's absence on a mountaineering trip to build a book-shed in the garden.

In 1956, the Japanese collected their own 8,000-metre trophy. The veteran climber Maki "Yukō" Aritsune led the Japanese Alpine Club's third expedition to Manaslu, enabling Imanishi Toshio and Sherpa Gyalzen Norbu to reach the summit on May 9. Their success helped to stoke a mountaineering and skiing boom in Japan.

It also fired Fukada's own Himalayan ambitions. A Japanese Alpine Club member himself, he was now well enough known in mountaineering circles to find generous corporate support for a private expedition, although it was organized several years before ordinary Japanese citizens could easily travel abroad.

With three companions, Fukada took ship for Calcutta in the spring of 1958, arriving in Kathmandu some forty-five days after leaving Kobe. With Fukada at the head of fifty porters, an experience that made him feel like Napoleon, the expedition then marched to its base camp in the Jugal Himal.

Their intended mountain, today known as Loengpo Gang (7,083m), had been named Big White Peak three years earlier by a party of Scottish lady alpinists who climbed one of its neighbours. It was a wildly ambitious objective. Three high camps would be necessary to reach the summit, the Japanese party judged.

The comforts of Camp Three were scant. By the time it was established at 5,000 meters, the party's lack of high-altitude climbing experience was starting to tell. Age too may have had something to do with it; as Fukada had put it to a journalist just before leaving Japan, he was "only" 54 years old. Just to clamber in and out of the high-altitude tent's round hatch during a blizzard was a torment that had to be repeated several times a night.

The expedition photographer did manage to reach the east ridge by taking turns to break trail with a Sherpa companion. There the brown plains of Tibet were glimpsed through the clouds. Honour satisfied, Fukada decided to abandon the peak, impressing one colleague with his Buddhist spirit of self-abnegation. The party then moved on to the Langtang Himalaya and, after two months under canvas, back to Kathmandu.

The high-climbing expedition photographer was none other than Kazami Takehide. In the blurb to the English-language edition of his photobook The Himalayas, he is introduced as follows:-

"The author . was born in 1914. In 1943 he joined the Japanese Navy, where he did a three-year tour of duty, after which he managed a Ginza camera shop and and then the Sanei photo library, both in Tokyo. He has made several journeys in India and Southeast Asia. His most absorbing interest has always been high-mountain photography, and he is author of several books on the subject."

In his preface to The Himalayas, Kazami is curiously reticent about his participation in Fukada's expedition. All he vouchsafes about that experience is this: "In 1958 I spent a couple of months in Nepal, where I fell in love - with Nepal." To be sure, most of the photos in the book were taken on a later trip, in 1964, which he undertook specifically to take photos of the land and people.

Yet a few images from the Fukada expedition do creep into The Himalayas. On page 112, for example, there is an image of a Camp 3 in the Jugal Himal (see picture left). The mountain is not identified but the height given - 23,240 feet - makes it clear that the peak in the background is Big White Peak or Loengpo Gang. One glance at those Big Bad Ridges shows why Team Fukada would never get anywhere near the top.

Looking again at the photo, my attention was drawn to the figure standing in the foreground. As there were only four Japanese mountaineers on this trip (or was it three?), this is likely to be Fukada himself. The comb-over hairstyle is also a giveaway. But there is no way of knowing for certain.

As an expedition, the attempt on Big White Peak was somewhat of a fiasco. That's not to say that the effort was wasted. Sometimes it takes an overseas trip to make you appreciate your native land. The Himalayan trip may have done that for Fukada. On returning to Tokyo, he revived a project that he had been mulling for years - to portray one hundred of Japan's most eminent mountains. And the rest, as they say, is history.

References

Tazawa, Takuya, Hyakumeizan no Hito, TBS Britannica, 2003.

Photos from Kazami, Takehide, The Himalayas, Kodansha International, 1967.

Cirques of controversy

How pioneer Japanese alpinists weighed into the great debate over Japan’s vanished glaciers

"Viewed from afar, the gentle lines of its skyline suggest a serene and settled character. The splendid accents of the ridgeline save the mountain, despite its huge mass, from any hint of ponderousness. These accents are the three cirques that carve deeply into the upper slopes, adding to their form a note of tension … The snow lingers longer in these amphitheaters, outlining them crisply." (Nihon Hyakumeizan, Senjō-dake)

Senjō-dake (photo courtesy of Yama to Keikoku)

When writing up Senjō-dake, a mountain in Japan’s Akaishi range, Fukada Kyūya (1903–1971) pays tribute to the mountain’s elegant cirques. But no guess is hazarded as to how these “splendid accents” could have formed. Fukada may have had reason to avoid this question. For cirques like these lay at the focus of a long-running controversy that lasted well into the writer’s own lifetime. And, like Fukada himself, several of the protagonists were members of the Japanese Alpine Club.

It was Yamasaki Naomasa who started this one. As we have seen in a previous post, it was in the summer of 1902 that the young geographer discovered evidence for an ancient glacier beside Shirouma’s Great Snow Valley. And, on returning to Tokyo, he wasted no time in announcing his findings.

Evidence for ancient glaciers? The striated "Red Rock" on Shirouma

Asking rhetorically, “Did Japan really lack glaciers?” (氷河果たして本邦に存在せざりしか), Yamasaki’s public lecture sent a frisson through academic circles. A summary that appeared in a newspaper article was translated into English – by a Bank of Japan official, no less – and picked up in the February 1903 edition of Science, then as now the most prestigious of scholarly journals.

Alas, few accepted his arguments. Where in Japan, they asked, do you see obvious moraines and deep “drifts” of pulverised rubble –the debris that clearly marks the paths of ancient glaciers all over the Alps or the Himalaya? Undismayed, Yamasaki continued to press his case. In a second public lecture, delivered in September 1904, he suggested that ancient glaciers might have honed the razor-sharp ridges of Yari-ga-take and other high mountains.

Side moraines on the Morteratsch glacier, Switzerland

Still, his peers were underwhelmed. In 1911, the palaeontologist Yokoyama Matajirō published a paper on fossils from the Bōsō Peninsula that purportedly showed that Japan had enjoyed a tropical climate during the Ice Ages. Two years later, this conclusion was overruled by another geologist, Yabe Hisakatsu, who found that the fossils dated from after the Ice Age. But, still, nobody could find the missing moraines and drifts.

Sangaku: the first edition

Given the orographic nature of the subject matter, it was all but inevitable that the debate would spill over into “Sangaku” (‘Mountains’), the journal of the newly formed Japanese Alpine Club – which Yamasaki had joined within a year of its inauguration. Indeed, Yamasaki had contributed an article on the snows of the high mountains (高根の雪) to the very first volume of “Sangaku”, published in 1906.

But Yamasaki was not party – at least, directly – to the controversy launched in the same pages a few years later. In the November 1911 edition, two articles were published, one putting the case for ancient glaciers and the other opposing it. The first, (日本アルプスと既往の氷河) argued that former glaciers had carved out the shapely cirques found on many high ridges throughout the Japanese Alps. A map was included of these suspected glacial landforms, the first ever attempted.

The author was Tsujimura Tarō, then a 21 year-old university student. Tsujimura’s enthusiasm for mountains was such that he too had joined the Japanese Alpine Club just after its inauguration, making him its youngest member. If his “Sangaku” article read like an uncritical redaction of Yamasaki’s views, this should not be surprising: on entering Tōkyō University, Tsujimura had immediately started attending the professor’s lectures.

In 1911, the editor of “Sangaku” was Kojima Usui, the banker and part-time writer who, six years before, had brought together the founding members of the Japanese Alpine Club. Kojima had taken a close interest in Yamasaki’s theories since 1902 and made a point of attending his public lectures. Yet he never allowed his personal friendship with the geographer to sway his independent judgment on the glacier question.

As editor, it is likely that Kojima had the chance to see Tsujimura’s contribution before setting down his own views. His own piece, which was placed after Tsujimura’s, dealt ostensibly with the permanent snowfields of the Japan Alps, with reference to the Hodaka massif, the 3,000-metre peaks that anchor the southern end of the Northern Alps range (日本アルプスと万年雪関係附穂高山論). Effectively, though, Kojima delivered a 29-page rebuttal of Tsujimura’s 19-page article.

The Hodaka massif from Tokugo Pass

Japan’s cirques were formed differently to those of Europe, Kojima noted; their headwalls were less steep, implying that permanent snowfields, not glaciers, had carved them. In this, he followed John Tyndall (1820–1893), the British physicist and pioneer alpinist, who had proposed that snowfields could slip downhill like glaciers, imitating some of their erosive powers.

As for the moraines and the striated rock that Yamasaki had found on Shirouma in 1902, Kojima hadn’t seen them for himself and so he wasn’t able to judge their worth as evidence for ancient glaciers. And he concludes by suggesting that his fellow Japanese alpinists should take up the search for moraines and other glacial landforms.

Yamasaki Naomasa

 In the re-worked version of the article that appears in his collected works, Kojima added a further argument. Japan’s volcanic craters, he observed, only retain their pristine shape if the parent volcano is still active; the moment a volcano falls silent, erosion starts to destroy its features. By the same token, Japan’s cirques are too crisply defined to have been created by glaciers that vanished 20,000 years ago; instead, they must be the product of some continuing agency – namely, the perpetual snowfields that scour them.

At first sight, Kojima’s scepticism seems difficult to explain. After all, the banker was just then tirelessly promoting “The Japanese Alps” as a term for the high mountains of central Honshū. In fact, he’d chosen the title “Nippon Arupusu” to adorn his collected mountain writings, of which the first volume came out in 1910. Not all his peers welcomed this neologism. Yet evidence for ancient glaciers could only have strengthened the case for awarding the alpine brevet to the Hida, Kiso and Akaishi ranges.

Could it be that Kojima picked up his glacial scepticism from Walter Weston (1860–1940), the English missionary and mountaineer? The question is raised by Ono Yugo, Japan’s pre-eminent glacier expert of modern times, whose paper on the 1911 Sangaku debate is the main source for this post. Kojima certainly did take over the concept of the Japan Alps from Weston, who had embedded them in the title of his own memoirs – Mountaineering and Exploring in the Japanese Alps, published in 1896.

It was Weston too who, on his second visit to Japan, had originally suggested the idea of an “Alpine Club” to Kojima. The proposal was floated during a conversation over a pot of tea at Weston’s flat in Yokohama in early 1903 and the club itself was formed two years later, in October 1905. For this contribution, the newly formed “Sangaku-kai” or Japanese Alpine Club promptly elected the Englishman as its first honorary vice-chairman.

Walter Weston 

When it came to ancient glaciers, Weston was firmly in the camp of the sceptics. As recorded in his second book about Japan, The Playground of the Far East, he had personally seen no relic landforms during his mountain travels in Japan. All in all, the evidence for ancient glaciers was “slight and inconclusive”, he wrote, and, therefore, “it seems reasonable to conclude that the claims that have been advanced on behalf of glacial action in the Japanese Alps are not as yet sufficiently substantiated to merit acceptance.”

Although Weston published these words in 1918, long after his return to England, he most probably formed his opinions long before. During his second stay in Japan, he had taken an interest in the glacier debate and, just before leaving the country in May 1905, he had received an English version of Yamasaki’s original 1902 paper. According to Kojima, who commissioned the translation, Weston was unimpressed by the evidence presented there.

Whether or not Kojima was influenced by Weston, he certainly stayed true to his friend’s position. While never finally excluding the possibility that glaciers had once existed in Japan, he kept firmly to a neutral stance on whether the evidence adduced by the glacier enthusiasts actually supported that conclusion. And, as Ono Yugo points out, some of Kojima’s reservations about that evidence were well founded. For example, the moraine-like rubble heaps found within the basins of some Japanese cirques are not actually moraines – rather, they are “ramparts” formed from stones bouncing and rolling down from the snowfields above.

Alfred Hettner

But the case for ancient glaciers did not rest only on cirques. Soon after the “Sangaku” debate, geologists started to find signs that glaciers had once reached much lower altitudes. In 1913, Alfred Hettner, a visiting German geographer, found a scratched-up boulder in the Inekoki gorge of the Azusa River, above the village of Shimajima. Glacier supporters interpreted it as evidence for an ancient moraine; naysayers said that water erosion could equally well account for the stone’s markings.

In 1931, Ogawa Takuji, a geologist at Kyōto University, published a paper arguing that ancient low-altitude glaciers had created the moraine-like debris found at around the 1,000-metre mark on Yatsu-ga-take, an extinct volcano, and at other sites in Nagano Prefecture. This time, the case was strong enough to prompt a renewed search for glacial relics throughout the Japan Alps and in Hokkaidō.

Ogawa Takuji

One such foray was made by none other than Tsujimura Tarō, who had recently succeeded his mentor Yamasaki as professor of geography at Tōkyō University. For the locus of his search, he chose Senjō-dake in what were now known – irrevocably, thanks to Kojima – as the Southern Japan Alps.

Climbing into one of Senjō’s elegant cirques in the summer of 1932, Tsujimura found the evidence he’d been looking for: so-called “gekritztes Geschiebe” (scratched-up debris) in the terminology borrowed from German geologists. The parallel grooves on their smooth granite surfaces clearly showed that these boulders had been ground under a body of moving ice.

Five years before the Senjō discovery, Kojima Usui had returned to Japan after a twelve-year stint as manager of the Yokohama Specie Bank’s branches in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The chance to see live glaciers in America’s coastal ranges had not changed his mind on the question of ancient ice-streams in Japan. That didn’t stop him from continuing to write voluminously about the artistry of snow and ice in the mountains.

Just a few months before Kojima’s death in 1949, he returned to the glacier question in an essay on “The Hettner Stone revisited”. His last words on the matter hint at a softening in his stance: “If these cirques and roches moutonnée were to affirm the former presence of great glaciers in the Hida, Kiso and Akaishi ranges, then there would be nothing for it but to bow down our heads at the infinitely creative ways of Nature, this strange and mysterious shaper.”

References

Main source is Ono Yugo (2010): Kojima Usui and Tsujimura Taro — Arguments in “Journal of the Japanese Alpine Club (Sangaku)”over glacial landforms in the Japanese Alps. Journal of the Japanese Alpine Club（ Sangaku），105，138-154.（in Japanese）小野有五（2010）: 小島烏水と辻村太郎—日本アルプスの氷河地形をめぐる『山岳』での論争—．山岳，105，138-154．

For the importance of Ogawa Takuji’s 1931 paper, see R H Grapes, History of Geomorphology and Quaternary Geology, page 185.

For account of research on Senjō-dake, see Tsujimura Tarō's 1961 paper in Chigaku Zasshi (辻村太郎、本州山地の氷河堆積物)

The golden decade

Mountaineering in the days before modern maps

Everyone has a golden age. Kojima Usui’s started in 1905, when he instigated the Japanese Alpine Club, and lasted until the mid-teens of the century. That was when the Army surveyors started publishing the first modern maps of Honshū’s high mountains, stripping them of mystery. Until then,  the gentlemen alpinists had to follow their noses and, of course, their expert guides.

On the col below Warusawa-dake (photo taken on Kojima's 1909 expedition)

Within a year of its first meeting, the new club attracted several hundred members. Many were quick to fan out into the mountains. In 1906, Ogino Otomatsu led a party across "the innermost mountains of Sunshū Tashiro" (soon to be rebranded as the “Southern Alps) and discovered, or at least identified, Warusawa-dake. Originally written up in Sangaku, the club’s journal, the story is re-told in Nihon Hyakumeizan:

"From time to time, we could see through the trees, on the other side of the valley, a mighty peak, bare-topped and reddish, in the midst of the Akaishi range. When I asked Kōhei, our hunter-guide, what it was, he called it Warusawa on account of the extremely dangerous gully that drains the waters of this mountain into the Nishimata. This sounded much as if he had just said the first thing that came into his mind. As there are neither books nor people to tell you the names of the mountains, rivers, and places hereabouts, I am recording everything just as I hear it from Ōmura Kōhei."

Survey marker on Mae-Hodaka (1909)

There was even a golden year within the golden age. According to Kojima, this was the exceptionally productive season of 1909. In July, Sangaku-kai men climbed rugged Tsurugi, a first for amateur mountaineers. On the summit, they found the survey marker erected by the Army surveyors, two years previously.

Such encounters were not uncommon.  For all of Japan’s high mountains had been climbed before – indeed, people had been climbing most of them for centuries. So there was base alloy in this golden age. Kojima had borrowed the term from the early European alpinists, who'd fought their way to the top of icy unclimbed peaks. In Japan's golden age, by contrast, the first ascents had all been done long ago.

This was a truth that repeatedly obtruded. Back in 1902, Kojima had hoped to make the first ascent of Yari-ga-take, then thought by some to be Japan's second-highest mountain. Instead, he found an Army survey marker waiting for him on the summit. Much the same thing happened in 1909, when he led an expedition into the Southern Alps. Atop Warusawa-dake, his party 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. (Nihon Hyakumeizan).

Survey tower on Akaishi

When they got to Akaishi-dake, they found a more modern memento – a survey tower of such heroic proportions that they felt obliged to have their group photo taken in front of it. And there they all are, the leading activists and pioneers of the early Sangaku-kai: Kojima Usui himself (second from left, front row), Takano Takazō, the naturalist, Takatō Shoku, the club’s bankroller, Nakamura Seitarō, the fledgling artist, and Saegusa Inosuke, who could claim the first modern ascent of Kita-dake.

Still, a golden age is what you make it. In the same memorable summer, Udono Masao, a civil servant on leave from Korea, achieved what was almost certainly the first crossing of the Dai-Kiretto. No monk or surveyor had ever ventured onto this fearsomely exposed ridge between Kita-Hodaka and Minami-dake in the Northern Alps.

And sometimes the Sangaku-kai men made genuine geographical discoveries, as when, in 1907, Shimura Urei, a teacher and pioneer mountain photographer, looked down from the summit of Washiba-dake:

Kojima's expedition sets out
(sketch by Ibaraki Inokichi)

"I saw a small pond below and to the south, for all the world like an eruption crater … this crater on Washiba is probably a surprise for the world."

Soon, the surveyors would come out with accurate 1:50,000-scale maps of the Northern Alps, eliminating the last opportunities for such finds. With the maps would come mountain huts and new hiking trails. Many more people would be able to enjoy the mountains - yet something would be lost. As Fukada Kyuya would one day put it, “Today, mountaineering is much more convenient but it has lost this element of surprise and wonder.”

References

All 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).