One evening at the Karesawa bivouac (4)

Concluded: a translation of pioneer alpinist Ōshima Ryōkichi's meditation on life and death in the mountains

Itakura "One Day" Katsunobu in 1922

And, indeed, there was much for me to ponder then. Dark, regretful thoughts pursued me; a great burden oppressed my heart. For the mountains exerted this mysterious hold on me, and all I could think was that death on a mountain would be a judgment of fate that I should accept with good grace when the time came.

At that thought, I felt an undertone, an “Unterton”, of youthful spirit and joy; a “Lebensglaube” spread through my heart. However much you think about death – and however strongly you feel it – the bright spirit of youth will shine through the gloom. Though none of us would wish for a death in the mountains, let alone seek one out, we should accept our fate without regret if it should come, as our “Prädestination”.

Above us, the night sky was clearing. The stars glittered in their countless numbers, as if hinting at the depths of eternity and setting in perspective the significance of a single life or the concept of a person’s existence.

And then it happened: a lone shooting star momentarily unfurled its dazzling tail across the sky, as if imparting a revelation. It was as if the world had been created anew. Suddenly, a friend’s voice broke through the heavy silence, as if some bond had been released. He was smiling as if some fount of happiness had overflowed within him:

“Hey, we’ll all die someday, and the mountains too will pass away.” I have to admit that I may not have recorded these events just as they really happened. Yet everything is set down here as it really was, whether that is the experiences on the mountain that I’ve described, or the fragments of our conversations that I’ve woven in. The only thing is that they may have happened at different times in different places. But, for the purposes of the above account, I’ve represented them here as if they all happened at the same time and place.

Every time we met, we talked about mountains, and from every angle. Sometimes, we’d talk about the practical (“praktisch) side of mountaineering, at other times the discussion would range widely over the metaphysical aspects. As we were young, we’d get really self-important while we talked all kind of things through. That kind of passion may be the true mark of youth. On occasion, our unvarnished fervour or “Leidenschaft” must have seemed rather childish. Or, looking backing on it after a while, there was a terribly jejune seriousness about it all. One might go so far as to admit the atmosphere was somewhat odd. But that was all the same to us. I think that people are always groping their way forward.

Yet I doubt whether today is quite the same as yesterday. So it makes no difference how great the gulf or how long the lapse of time since then. That’s why, with the aim of making this a kind of testament to our times, I’ve pulled together this account of things just as they were, without embellishing or making things up. It could be, then, that some of our thoughts might seem naïve, at least in part. But retailing all that wasn’t my intention in writing; this would have been foolish and mistaken. I will say this, though. What drove me to write this piece was to set down a part of what I could grasp in my hands when I had the power to pursue the true path of mountaineering in my youth. Trivial or strange as it may be, this is why I ventured to add this postcript.

References

Translation of Ōshima Ryōkichi, Karasawa no iwagoya no aru yoru no koto (涸沢の岩小屋のある夜のこと), in Yama kikō to zuisō (山 紀行と随想) edited and introduced by Ohmori Hisao.

The bad news about Ueli Steck came in just as Project Hyakumeizan was completing this translation. There is a moving and thoughtful tribute by Steve House on the Patagonia blog. Every generation or so, alpinists like Steck redefine the limits of the possible in mountaineering. Possibly we’ve progressed less far in dealing with the dark side of alpinism, its “penalties and dangers”. As Steve House observes,

When a major climbing figure like Ueli dies, there is always second-guessing and criticism. In my opinion, Ueli got more than his fair share of criticism. Most of the criticism, I believe, was rooted in human insecurity. People didn’t believe anyone could do what he did; their own personal fears were too overpowering to even allow the possibility of his excellence and achievement. Or they believed the risks he assumed were unjustified …

Over a century ago, Alfred Mummery anticipated such criticism in the last chapter of the book that sums up his alpinistic achievements – My climbs in the Alps and Caucasus, first published in 1895, the year that he disappeared while exploring the Rakhiot Face of Nanga Parbat. 

One generation later, in Taishō Japan, Ōshima Ryōkichi, drew on Mummery’s words to set down his own thoughts on the meaning of alpinism. The article translated above was published in the December 1924 edition of a climbing journal. Less than four years later, Ōshima himself fell to his death, on a spring ascent of the north ridge of Mae-Hodaka. He was just 28 years old.

One evening at the Karesawa bivouac (3)

Continued: a translation of pioneer alpinist Ōshima Ryōkichi's meditation on life and death in the mountains

So the four of us held our peace, each of us sensing, in himself, the mood of the others. And we were well aware that what each of us was silently thinking about was the fate that would inevitably befall some of us when climbing mountains. While we’d been chatting after dinner just now, we’d fallen to talking about a companion we all knew, whom we’d lost last winter, and how the previous summer he’d been with us up here, in the rock cave, and we’d spent a pleasant few days together. And then, as if by tacit agreement, we’d dropped the subject and fallen silent. We went outside, sat ourselves down on the rock and fell silent.

Kita-Hodaka: photo from an early editon of Oshima's writings

So, until that moment, we’d all, each in his own heart, been focused on the same thought, as if on a single point of light that appeared in all our minds – when suddenly the sound of a stone falling from the crumbling heights of Karesawa-dake rang out, breaking the silence two or three times as it bounded from the cliff. Then that impenetrable silence descended again.

That was the moment. As if tired of thinking, somebody threw out a question.

“Well, what do you think about dying in the mountains?”

Since we’d all been thinking about the same thing in the same way, it was as if we’d been looking for somebody to break the ice. Then these words were spoken. And, of course, they struck a chord. Up there on the high mountain, in the dark, we’d all been struggling to find the words to describe a new creed about these cruel “Gefahren”, the mountain hazards that could at any time rob us of our friends or even our own lives.

Somebody replied at once:

“Well, if you go climbing mountains, that’s what you’ve got coming to you.”

“Well maybe, but does that mean that everybody who climbs has it coming?”

“Not everybody, of course not. If you’re lucky, you can get away with it. There are people who climb and nothing ever happens to them.”

“And what kind of people are those that get themselves killed?”

“Come to think about it, they’re people like ‘One Day’ (Itakura Katsunobu). That’s what his older brother said to me, when we were on the train together to Toyama, after ‘One day’ was killed. My own brother was always saying to me I’d get what was coming to me in the mountains one of these days, so that was music to my ears. You could say his words caught my attention, although I was also moved by them. They reminded me of what Mummery said – it was something like this, I think: “It is true the great ridges sometimes demand their sacrifice, but the mountaineer would hardly forgo his worship though he knew himself to be the destined victim.” And so I talked with H. all night, so that I was completely exhausted the next day … But when you look at people like Mummery and One Day and see what happened to them. Well, they both got killed, didn’t they. But it’s not just this kind of person who gets killed in the mountains. People who behave recklessly or carelessly, they get killed too. But that’s not the problem, is it? The problem’s getting killed when you take care, you’ve done your homework and you’re sure of yourself. In that chapter by Mummery on the penalties and dangers of mountaineering, he goes into the dangers in detail, and there are a whole bunch of them. But there are a whole bunch of ways of avoiding them, and so winning through. But then he says there’s no way that a mountaineer can avoid bad luck, and that’s when he comes up with the sentence I just quoted. That was what happened to One Day."

"In Mountains and skis, One Day says this: “As far as one can be certain of anything, if you make cautious and modest progress, step by step, then another aspect of the mountains, one you’ve never dreamed of, will gradually start to resonate in your heart.” Maybe that was what drove him; why he was killed. If you go that far, the rest is up to luck; I’m convinced it’s luck. For people like him, mountaineering is not just a hobby or a sport, is it."

These words came vigorously, without a trace of fatigue:

“A sport or hobby? Of course not. For me right now, mountaineering is much more special than a hobby or sport. I can’t say exactly what it is, but it befits me much more than either of those things.”

Sitting there in the dark, somebody else gave a terse reply to the previous speech. There was silence for a while. Then, “Anyway, when people recognize that you can die doing this, they’re not joking about,” murmured somebody, as if cutting himself off. It was one of our company who’d been with our friend when he’d died. Out of all of us, he was the one who’d had the most intense experience at that point. More than any of us, he knew the inner meaning of a disaster in the mountains. Yet, he’d never spoken about this, making no move to reveal his thoughts to the rest of us. But now he had just this to say: “Since then, I’ve had a hard time keeping myself away from the mountains. I loved Tateyama before, of course. But since then I’ve loved the mountain even more.” He said nothing further. Again, our conversation stalled and everyone was left to mull over his own thoughts alone.

(Continued)

References

This is a translation of Karesawa no iwagoya no aru yoru no koto (涸沢の岩小屋のある夜のこと), by Ōshima Ryōkichi, in Yama kikō to zuisō (山 紀行と随想) edited and introduced by Ohmori Hisao.

"Well, what do you think about dying in the mountains?" This question, in the above passage of Ōshima's essay, leads to a discussion that leans heavily on the Edwardian alpinist A F Mummery's defence of alpinism in the last chapter of My Climbs in the Alps & Caucasus. As Ohmori Hisao points out, Ōshima refers to "that chapter by Mummery on the penalties and dangers of mountaineering" - whereas Mummery actually wrote about the "Pleasures and penalties of mountaineering". This may explain why Ōshima's essay ends on a less positive note than Mummery, whose last words are these:-

But happily to most of us the great brown slabs bending over into immeasurable space, the lines and curves of the wind-moulded cornice, the delicate undulations of the fissured snow, are old and trusted friends, ever luring us to health and fun and laughter, and enabling us to bid a sturdy defiance to all the ills and time and life oppose. 

One evening at the Karesawa bivouac (2)

Continued: a translation of pioneer alpinist Ōshima Ryōkichi's meditation on life and death in the mountains

Oshima (centre) and Maki Yuko (right)
on the summit of Yarigatake, March 1922

There were four of us, and we’d just come down through the coire of Karesawa from the north peak of Hodaka. It was now getting dark. Somehow, we’d threaded our way through the rocky debris that obstruct the floor of Karesawa. It was a perfectly clear, calm summer evening, with the sunset clouds still glowing above the jagged ridgeline of Byōbu-iwa, right in front of us.

Down below, not a sound disturbed the silence that had descended over the rock cave that evening. In that all-pervading evening calm, the mountains enfolded us. Now, on Karesawa’s floor, we were just returning to that dusky abode, the rock cave where we’d so often enjoyed a good conversation and rest. Just then, to our right, the sunset’s embers were still glowing on the very spire of Hodaka and the deep purple shadows were stealing upwards toward the top of Sennin-iwa.

Meanwhile, the dark shadow of night was already creeping over the distant valley. It was exactly then that we reached the rock cave and lit our fire of creeping pine boughs. By the time we’d finished our modest supper, night had embraced us. It was a quite splendid night, sprinkled with stars. The silence enfolded everything, as if wrapping the heights in its embrace.

Abandoning the fire, we tumbled out of the cave and sat ourselves down on a rock in the midst of that chill summer evening in the mountains. In the black night sky above us, stars glittered like fish scales in every colour and brightness. We sat there silently, the four of us on that rock, sucking on our pipes, each wrapped in his own thoughts.

Our mood was attuned to everything around us that night. We weren’t in awe of the mountains, as we would have been on a night of thunderous rain and gales; instead, they conveyed to us this tranquility, this peace, this somehow significant silence. “While the mountain may sometimes impress its mood on the spectator, as often the spectator only sees that which harmonises with his own,” writes Mummery in his account of the first ascent of the Matterhorn's Zmutt Ridge, and certainly our mood that evening was of the latter type.

Behind and beside us, rock walls and towers loomed as jet-black shapes in the gloaming, but they neither intimidated nor overawed us. Rather the mountains that more than half-encircled us felt as if they were sheltering the rock-cave in their midst, as if gently rocking us mountain babies to sleep in a cradle. Perhaps my phrasing is too fanciful, but that’s how beneficent the mountains felt to us. Yet this great silence did not tempt us to sing or jest, for the mountains’ mood and our own were in perfect harmony.

(Continued)

References

This is a translation of Karesawa no iwagoya no aru yoru no koto (涸沢の岩小屋のある夜のこと), by Ōshima Ryōkichi, in Yama kikō to zuisō (山 紀行と随想) edited and introduced by Ohmori Hisao.

Ōshima Ryōkichi (1899-1928) crammed a whole lifetime’s worth of mountaineering and writing into a brief decade. In just the year after his compulsory military service, he managed to spend fully 110 days in the mountains. He explored the ranges of Tōhoku and Hokkaidō as well as the Northern Alps. And he learned French, German, English and Italian in order to read alpine literature in its original languages. Two particular influences were A F Mummery and the French-Swiss alpinist Emil Javelle. According to Ohmori Hisao, the opening section of this essay owes something to Javelle’s evocations of the alpine pastoral.

The photo is from this blog.

One evening at the Karesawa bivouac (1)

Translation: a meditation on life and death in the mountains by pioneer alpinist Ōshima Ryōkichi

We were fond of that bivvy rock in Karesawa. It’s hard to think of any other high place that was so welcoming. “Rock cave” (iwa-koya) was the right name for it, formed as it was by the hollow under a big flat rock on top, and surrounded by piles of rock fragments in front. There was no trace of anybody’s handiwork, so that it looked natural, in keeping with its name, which was all the more pleasant. Around it, Japan’s highest, most magnificent rocky peaks rise to more than 2,500 metres.

View from the Karesawa bivvy cave

There are few lodging places to be found so high, so free, and so congenial. Or so splendidly remote from human existence. Lying on a bed of withered creeping pine boughs, you can look out from under its rocky eaves towards the summit of Mae-Hodaka and the spreading snowfields on the ridges (Grat) and corries (Kar) of Byōbu-iwa. The roof is so low that you have to crouch or lie down the whole time. As far as the scenery goes, since the cave lay on the corrie’s floor, all you could see was the peaks of the surrounding crags, the corrie’s walls, and the scoop of Karesawa, and you couldn’t even see the Azusa River valley.

Few people come this way; it’s a quiet place, and that’s exactly what we like about it. After bringing up rice, miso, a few sweet things and a bit to drink, so as to set up camp and settle in here for four or five days, I feel quite refreshed, as if for the first time I’ve come to a place where I can really smell the mountains.

When the weather’s fine, and as soon as we’ve had breakfast, we set off with ropes over our shoulders to tackle any of the surrounding rock walls we fancy, or topping out on one of those nameless “Nebengipfel” (subsidiary summit), we grant ourselves a bit of a “Gipfelrast”, or it might be interesting to clamber up a “Gratzacke” (jagged ridge) and build a “Steinmann” (summit cairn) there.

And when we’ve had enough, we’d come down to the cave and do a lizard on the big rock that forms its roof. When I say “do a lizard”, that’s what one of us said two or three years ago when he came up here, and so that’s the term we use. It means lying down and sunning oneself atop the flat rock, belly flat to the sun-warmed stone, just like a lizard, closing one’s eyes and pleasantly dozing off without a thought in one’s head.

If the weather’s bad, we’re more like mountain rats, though. We don’t think of coming out of our hole until the clouds lift. In fact, we can’t get out; we can hardly move, for fear of accidentally hitting our heads, so low is the roof of our cave. So then I lay my head towards the back of the cave and just lie there. As we’re high up here, when the weather’s bad, it’s very cold. Rain drips from the rocky eaves and seeps through the rock. Wind blows in from nooks and crannies.

Even so, there is nowhere as pleasant to be as this cave; it’s a tolerable place in both fine and rainy weather. We say what we want to say, eat what we want to eat, and climb to our heart’s content. From time to time, we toy with the idea of having a hut worthy of the name, but only in winter or spring. But we don’t need one in summer, if we can find a natural one like this more or less anywhere. Even in summer, though, our rock can be buried in snow if you come up here too early in the season.

Anyway, one of the pleasures of visiting Kamikōchi in the summer is to come up here with my companions, talk things through, and climb our hearts out. I write here, though, about one particular summer evening with my friends at the rock cave. My hope is in some way to record our companionship at that particular time.

(Continued)

References

This is a translation of Karesawa no iwagoya no aru yoru no koto (涸沢の岩小屋のある夜のこと), by Ōshima Ryōkichi, in Yama kikō to zuisō (山 紀行と随想) edited and introduced by Ohmori Hisao.

Ōshima Ryōkichi (1899-1928) was one of the student mountaineers mentored by Maki Yūkō when he returned from his first ascent of the Eiger’s Mittelegi Ridge in 1921. Ōshima took part in Maki’s ski ascent of Yarigatake the following winter, also a first. In this heady but dangerous epoch, the young climbers were rapt with enthusiasm for developments in European alpinism – hence the German terms embedded here and there in Ōshima’s essay above. At the same time, their ambitions too often ran ahead of their experience in the high mountains. The first victim was Itakura Katsunobu, son of a Meiji-era prime minister, who died in a snowstorm on Tateyama in January 1923. The essay translated here is a meditation on the death of Itakura, known as “One Day” to his friends, and what it meant for Japan’s pioneer alpinists.

The photo, showing the view from the rock cave bivvy in Karesawa is from this blog. According to the same blog, the rock cave no longer exists.

The making of a Meiji mountaineer (5)

Concluded: a translation of Kogure Ritarō's A talk about mountaineering

In this way, the people of a congregation would go on long pilgrimages to their special mountain for a week or more, or even several weeks. Thus, most of the notable mountains had already been climbed, except for those in a small part of what’s now known as the Japan Alps. But if there had been any indomitable monks like those pioneer mountain mystics of old, who tirelessly opened up new mountains and proselytised their faith, I can scarcely imagine that they would have left any mountain untracked. So this is a piece of good luck for us.

Climbing a snow valley at Harinoki, woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi (1926)

The important thing to note is that most of these mountaineers were commoners. While the city-dwelling aristocracy and the literati were celebrating Mt Fuji simply as something to look at, the commoners were climbing mountains all over the place. Of course, the power of faith is part of the explanation, but one can’t help feeling that the vigour of this mass mountaineering movement and that commoners were organising group ascents from quite early times can be put down mainly to the fact that Japan’s mountains are easy to climb in the summer.

These mass ascents meant that there would be thousands or even tens of thousands of climbers, but except on their chosen route, the mountain wasn’t devastated. For example, when we had to relieve ourselves, we dug a hole, did our business on a sheet of paper, and tidied up afterwards; we were always extremely reluctant to desecrate the mountain. Standing on the top of Shirouma, I couldn’t help feeling sad at the way that beautiful sward was being trampled from end to end. As we keep climbing the mountains that our forebears opened for us, in new ways, and pass them on to the next generation, surely we should want to avoid passing them on in a shop-soiled state.

As my mountain-climbing evolved from such circumstances, it’s only natural that I can’t entirely escape my origins. So I wear Japanese garb over my straw sandals and leggings, don a rush mat against the rain, keep an oiled paper cape ready, hang my baggage from panniers, and wear a hat of cypress bark instead of a straw one. I’ve been told by Mr Fujiki that this makes me look like an itinerant swordsman of old, and indeed there could be some similarities, as this was the traditional garb for travelling. Of course, as a pilgrim, I didn’t carry a short sword or a fighting staff, but fortunately I was able to keep climbing mountains in this way up to the end of the Meiji years, without any accidents, and it was only when I first met the new city-dwelling type of climber, never having heard of such a thing, that I realised to my amazement just how many people like climbing mountains. And among those people are the founders and inaugural members of the Japanese Alpine Club.

Sunrise on Mt Fuji (Goraiko): woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

The downside of traditional mountaineering dress is when a storm hits. As you can’t put up an umbrella, all you can do is wrap it tightly in the straw mat and tough things out. I once got caught in this way while climbing Kaikoma from the Todai valley, and I still remember how we struggled to avoid succumbing to the cold. In those days, we’d stay the night at the summit, so as to enjoy the view of sunrise at leisure on the next day, as we felt safe sleeping on an open summit, even if it was colder, rather than camping in a gloomy wood. As for food, I sometimes walked carrying enough large balls of baked rice for three days, but I doubt if such tribulations can be imagined by anybody who hasn’t experienced them.

Well, I’ve rambled on for long enough with my talk, but if you’ve learned something from it about the way mountain-climbing was in those days, then I will consider myself more than amply rewarded.

References

This is a beta translation of a chapter (登山談義) from Mountain Memories (山の憶い出), as republished by Heibonsha in 1999 and edited by Ohmori Hisao. Kogure Ritarō (1873-1944) grew up in a mountain village where people still made regular pilgrimages to Mt Fuji and Ontake. He made his way via the new Meiji educational system to Tokyo, where he joined the Japanese Alpine Club a few years after it was founded, and later became its president. For more about the celebrated mountain meeting at Kirigamine in August 1935, see the introduction to One Hundred Mountains of Japan.

Putting Mt Fuji on the map

Who was the first Westerner to portray Japan's top mountain?

Some visitors to Japan are more productive than others. In a stay of just two years, the naturalist and physician Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716) catalogued the country’s flora, discovered that the ginkgo tree was far from extinct, as then believed in Europe, made two visits to Edo, and presented himself to the Shogun.

"Fusino Jamma: een zeer hooge en Zonderlinge Berg"
Detail from a map in Engelbert Kaempfer's History of Japan (High Dutch edition)

On his way to and from the capital, Kaempfer passed close by the foot of Japan’s top mountain. In his History of Japan, published posthumously in English in 1727, he lauds "The famous Mount Fuji in the province of Suruga, which in height can be compared only to Mount Tenerife in the Canaries". Fuji, he continues, "is conical in shape and so even and beautiful that one may easily call it the most beautiful mountain in the world .... The poets and painters of this country never end praising and portraying the beauty of this mountain".

Map of Suruga Bay, showing Mt Fuji (top right)

The German doctor never got the chance to make the first gaijin ascent of the iconic volcano, leaving that honour to Rutherford Alcock a century later. Instead, according to Professor H Byron Earhart (see References), he may have made its first graphic depiction by a Westerner. A sketch appears within an engraving of the Tōkaidō route through Suruga Province that illustrates his book. Interestingly, the summit region is shown as divided into three peaklets.

Mt Fuji: the traditional view

Japanese artists had long depicted the mountain with three peaks – as shown in a famous ink painting of Mt Fuji and the Seiken temple once attributed to Sesshū (1420-1506). Yet this configuration had less to do with ground truth than with an artistic convention, probably rooted in Buddhist numerology, that sacred mountains should have triple crowns. It seems fitting, somehow, that Kaempfer's pioneering image of Mt Fuji should pay homage to this centuries-old tradition.

References

H. Byron Earhart, Mount Fuji: Icon of Japan, University of South Carolina Press, 2011.

Map images: courtesy of the East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley

The making of a Meiji mountaineer (4)

Continued: a translation of Kogure Ritarō's A talk about mountaineering

When they went unescorted by a sendatsu, one might think it would be quite problematic for these unversed pilgrims to make their way safely on unfamiliar mountains without maps, but the fact is that the way was well thought-out, the route was always the same, as were the stops for food and lodging, so that they would eventually reach their preacher as long as they followed this routine. Then too, there were at least three signs on each of the guesthouses that clustered around every post station, marking them as the lodgings for various congregations such as the New (一新講), the Original (故信講), the Reverent (崇敬講), the Divine Wind (神風講) and the Kantō Schools (関東講).

Avenue of cryptomeria trees: woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

As most of these names were used to show that the congregation so identified stayed here, the effect was somewhat provincial. For example, I seem to remember that the Divine Wind congregation came from the shrine of Ise, while the Reverents (Sūkei) were probably worshippers of Kompira. As for the New Congregation (whose name was also written as 一新講社), this was a widespread association of inn-keepers that was probably formed around 1881 or 1882, although I haven’t investigated the matter thoroughly. Anyway, there was at least one guesthouse with its sign at every post station.

A guide booklet, as issued by the New Congregation to its pilgrims

When staying at a guesthouse of the New Congregation, the landlord of the first lodgings would give a first-time traveller a booklet of about ten sheets of paper, of 3-5 size (about 9cm x 15cm). The cover was printed with the character for open (開) in white within a red circle, and the characters for the New Congregation (一新講社) below that. The landlord would write his name and stamp his seal in the book and give the traveller a letter of introduction to the next lodgings. Unlike one’s baggage, one would always keep the letter of introduction on one’s person, so that there would be no fear of dropping it or handing it to the wrong person on the way. The letter of introduction would say:-

此御客様御案内申上候に付御入宿相成候はゞ御大切に御取扱之段御願申上候以上

I’d like to introduce this guest to you; please look after them well during their stay.

or

此御客様御さし宿仕候間御着の砌には万事不都合無之様御取扱のほどねがひ候也

This guest stayed with us; when they arrive, please ensure they are well looked after and take good care of them.

Or, sometimes we were given a printed letter from the lodging house we were due to stay in next, and in that case there would be the following additional remarks:

私方より宿引差出不申若外宿引のもの旅人体になり私方を悪しく言ひ外宿をしんせつらしく御すゝめ申か又人力ひきも右様に申候共決て御取上なく御投宿冀望候也

We don’t send out touts. If touts from other lodgings pretend to be travellers and try to do you a favour by speaking ill of us and recommending another lodging house, or if rickshaw men say such things, please don’t listen to them and stay with us.

In this way, one could find the way to one’s destination quite easily, especially when travelling alone, and the letters were extremely valuable as a way of making a booking, as the custom was in the old days. Apart from showing the way between post stations, they had very useful maps to mark the sights and ancient monuments along the way.

Pages of a pilgrim's booklet, showing route and sketch maps

Of course, the paper and print quality of these booklets was poor, and the script would sometimes fade, leading to misunderstandings. In the booklet for the Nakasendo route to Kyoto that I got at the Tsutaya in Kiso-Fukushima, it said you could climb Kisokomagatake either from Agematsu or Nezame, and so I changed my plan to climb from Agematsu and saw the splendid sights of Nezame-no-toko before tackling Kisokomagatake on the following day. According to the map, there was a pond on the summit known as Tama-ike, but when I topped out I found only a hut and no pond. Then, when I found Nō-ga-ike, another pond, I thought this must certainly be Tama-ike and wrote it up as such in my account of the journey for my school magazine. Later, I was sorry to see that this passage was quoted, without much alteration, by Professor Yamasaki Naomasa in the Kisokomagake section of his Geography of Greater Japan.

However, after talking about this at the mountain meeting, when I got back to Tokyo, I found another booklet, which happened to have been issue in October, in which I saw that Tama-dake and Nowaka-ike were written side by side. As the characters other than “tama” and “ike” had been effaced in the notebook I originally looked at, it turned out that I’d carelessly confused this Tama-ike with Nō-ga-ike, so that I’m forced to redouble my apologies. However, in fact, it may be that the pond really was called “Nowaka-ike” because the katakanaワdoes not look as if the small stroke on top of that character (which would make it an ウ) had faded. Thus Nowaka-ike must be the correct name, which was later corrupted into Nō-ga-ike. The notebook also writes what seems to be the Kanekake Rock as Kanesashi Rock. So, if the current name is correct, then the notebook is mistaken. Even with the odd mistake like the one noted above, however, the notebooks were much more useful for people who rarely made journeys than today’s 1:200,000-scale maps.

Style of the well-dressed pilgrim
(Image courtesy of Kotobank)

Congregations like these were organised everywhere, not just in our village and, when on pilgrimage, the groups were led by experienced leaders. Interestingly, these leaders, the so-called sendatsu, often came from the lowest orders of society, and by some rigorous but unwritten agreement, as soon as a group came together, whether its members were rich or poor, and regardless of social status, every body was on an equal footing and the sendatsu’s word was law, so that to oppose it was unthinkable. Speaking of these arrangements, there could be no question of washing these precious garments, as the pilgrims’ white robes had received the inky stamp of each sacred mountain visited, so that one couldn’t help reeling back in disgust if one ever got into a carriage with them. Even in this age of the train, there must be quite a few people who have felt a bit faint if they’ve had the misfortune to be seated with such people.

The members of the congregation, except for the sendatsu, were allowed to wear their ordinary clothes while travelling to the mountain but, as soon as they reached it, they had to change into what we called gyō’i (行衣) or pilgrim’s garb. Even today you can see such scenes. Although this may be less true of congregations from the countryside, groups from the city tend to be fairly riotous and their sendatsu have lost the authority they used to have. So even if they don’t stink out their fellow passengers, they get on their nerves with their drinking and carousing. This is inevitable, as serious pilgrimages fade away, to be replaced with trips that have the atmosphere of a light-hearted mountain excursion. This is not to say that there wasn’t a pleasure-seeking element even in those mountain pilgrimages of old, once the pilgrims were away from the mountain, but the religious element has now greatly faded, leaving the pleasure-seeking to dominate.

Continued

The making of a Meiji mountaineer (3)

Continued: a translation of Kogure Ritarō's A talk about mountaineering

Later, in my high school days, I dragged quite a few friends with me to the mountains, doing my best to sell them on my own enthusiasms. As we were in Sendai, we went out one Saturday to Izumi-dake, a mountain nearly twelve hundred metres high about five leagues northwest of the city that is so ideal for weekend expeditions. We camped out for the night, then climbed to the summit on Sunday and looked out at all the mountains bordering Ōu province, before descending. In April, one could slide down a fairly long snowfield, but even though everyone agreed that this was fun at the time, only two or three of my companions decided they liked mountains and went on climbing them afterwards.

Pilgrims on Mt Fuji (Umagaeshi): woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

One of these, for some unknown reason, became a devotee of waterfalls, and so, one summer, he went out in search of waterfalls that I’d never heard of, such as Shōmyō, Hirayu and Hakusui, and as he walked along the Itoigawa highroad towards Matsumoto, he saw the high mountains of the Tateyama and Ushiro-Tateyama range and, discovering that quite a few of these mountains keep their snow into summer, he learned the peculiar names of some of them, such as North and South Goryū. When we met up back at the dormitory, and he asked if I know these mountains, I was embarrassed. So I asked if he’d actually climbed them, and when he admitted he hadn’t, I told him he had nothing to boast about then and felt somewhat relieved. As Shiga Shigetaka's Theory of the Japanese landscape hadn’t yet come out, there was no way of discussing the matter further.

The mountains in question may have been South Goryū or Kashimayari-ga-take. Later, I realised that I should have dug into the matter more thoroughly. But I had no way of knowing, as I had no detailed knowledge of the place. This man later caught a lung infection and died on the island of Hachijōjima just last year. After this episode, my first mountain friend was Tanabe Jūji, who was originally a devotee of the sea but, as everybody knows, has since achieved great things in the mountaineering world.

At the end of the day, the reason that the friends who originally came with me to the mountains didn’t end up as mountain aficionados is that they found the effort of climbing too much of a grind. If you can’t appreciate mountains while accepting the grind of climbing, then it’s only natural that you’ll fall by the wayside. Although we ourselves are apt to say that a climb was more strenuous than amusing, mountaineering gives us so many interesting experiences that we’d never dream of giving it up. But thirty-five or six years ago, people didn’t think like that. Now that mountaineering has parted from religion, and has become a mere hobby, people have lost their motivation to improve their skills, no matter what their potential, in line with the trend of the times. I can’t help being amazed how far “fashion”, if I may be permitted to use the word, holds sway over people.

Speaking of fashion, I can’t deny that the “fashion” (if that is the right word) for mountain pilgrimages in my village helped to attract me towards mountaineering. Every year in August, in the slack season, congregations of twenty or thirty people would set off from Mt Fuji or Ontake or Hakkai-san, while smaller groups of three, four or five people, or just individuals, would seek out more distant places, such as the Three Sacred Mountains of Dewa, Ōmine in Yamato province, or Osore-zan in the Nambu region.

Misty morning at Nikko: woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

Closer to home were Mitsumine, Kōshin and Nantai. Of course, this was mountaineering for a religious end, so people’s knowledge of these mountains was rather sketchy, and they were only vaguely aware of whether a mountain was high or low, or how many passages were rigged with chains and so on. For instance, if you asked people who’d climbed Ontake if there were any high mountains nearby, you’d likely hear that there weren’t, except that Mt Fuji looked fairly high. So I was gobsmacked when I later climbed Ontake for myself and saw Kisokoma-ga-take, Norikura and other high peaks staring me in the face.

Even so, when the congregations came back, handed their thank-you gifts and souvenirs round the village, and spent half a leisurely day telling their travellers’ tales, there is no doubt that these mountain mysteries, wrapped round in strange legends, held my attention and made my eyes bulge with amazement, stoking both my fascination with mountains and my desire to climb them, whether I was aware of it or not. I can see myself sitting there, a shaven-headed lad, snotty nosed, mouth agape, listening for all I was worth to the loud voice of the man telling the tale, right by me, in a tea-house, served with pickled plums, or candied red-pickled ginger, or stuff like that.

(Continued)

The making of a Meiji mountaineer (2)

Continued: a translation of Kogure Ritarō's A talk about mountaineering

In those days, farming villages weren’t distressed as they are today; they were very peaceful places, bustling with people, women too, and in our hill country – although what we spoke of as “mountains” included flat ground with forests and dry fields – we used to go out collecting bracken in spring and mushrooms in autumn. I enjoyed these forays too, although rather more the mountain-climbing than the bracken-harvesting or mushroom-picking. It was probably then that I caught the mountaineering bug.

Village near Mt Fuji: woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

The lure of high places is also felt in our childhood tree-climbing; perhaps everyone has felt this. In a small way, it’s how an adventurous, aspiring spirit expresses itself. In his Theory of the Japanese landscape, by way of introducing the charms of mountaineering, Shiga Shigetaka writes how he once climbed up to a high tower and describes how he felt looking down at the people going back and forth below. Although, if it’s a sense of superiority you’re looking for, I’d say that climbing a tree always beats going up to a second-floor window, as I’m sure you’d agree, and this is probably because the second floor is not enough to satisfy an adventurous, aspiring spirit.

We used to vie with each other in climbing trees on the way home from school. Once I clambered about a hundred feet up a sawtooth oak, and, when I looked down, I saw how small my friends had shrunk to tiny heads with their arms poking out from them, as if their heads were walking by themselves. Then I felt dizzy, and I was too afraid to climb down, so that I had to be rescued by a grown-up. In mountaineering terms, you could say I’d got myself into a pickle.

But I am straying from the subject; the first mountain I ever climbed was Akagi. When I was six, my grandmother took me along to Yu-no-sawa, where she was going to take the waters but, as I don’t remember much except being frightened by stories of tengu, being surprised at the lake on the mountain, and ice being carried away from an icehouse, I doubt if this contributed much to my later love of mountains.

Then, at the age of thirteen, I climbed Mt Fuji. Today, when a nine-year old girl has climbed the mountain and a youngster of eleven can brag about having scaled Ko-Yari, this may not sound particularly novel, but in those days it was almost beyond imagining. There were adherents to both the Fuji faith and the Ontake faith in my village and, as our family belonged to an Ontake congregation, I normally wouldn’t have been allowed to climb the other sect’s Mt Fuji before I’d had the chance to climb Ontake for the first time. But it turned out that another boy of my age was going up Mt Fuji, and I was so envious and made such a fuss that the sendatsu, the Mt Fuji guide, made an exception for me as I was just a child and let me tag along.

Pilgrims on Mt Fuji: woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

The Fuji congregation in my village had the strange custom of ritually drinking water along the way. Whereas the Ontake congregations made ablutions in water, the Fuji ones drank it. As to how this custom arose, all the old folks have passed away, and now we have no way of knowing. We drank one cup of water on the first day, two on the second day, and so on until we got up to five cups on the day we started on the mountain from Fuji-Yoshida. Since we drank the water after breakfast, just before starting out every day, this was quite an effort. We’d try to eat breakfast as early as possible so that we could take our time getting ready. The guide had a wooden bowl with a lanyard hanging from his belt. The aluminium canteens that we use today may owe something to this practice. Anyway, the bowl held about eight measures of water, so about five bowlfuls meant four gō (almost a litre), and we’d drink that off in one swig, and we used to practise this water-drinking before setting out.

As on Ontake pilgrimages, one wasn’t allowed to circumambulate Mt Fuji’s crater on one’s first visit, but I managed to persuade the guide to let me do so, as I was only a child and so it wouldn’t count as a transgression. What I remember fairly well from this trip is the crowds in the mountain huts pressing in on me, eating mochi as the other food was so dreadful, and drinking delicious sweet sake. My memories of the mountain itself have faded to a blur. But the fine mid-August weather held, so that the views were good and you could take in the surrounding mountains with one sweep of the eye. Among them, I remember recognising Akagi when it was pointed out to me, and being delighted when I saw the sea for the first time ever. Also I remember being shocked when I realised that the simple skyline that I saw from my village was, in reality, a much more complicated affair.

What I took away from my Mt Fuji trip was quite simple; that mountain-climbing was very much for me. That is to say, I thought that climbing to high places was for me; it was only much later that I learned to appreciate the true joys of mountaineering. I might grumble that, if only I’d found a proper mentor and undergone the right training, I would have made something of myself as a mountaineer. Anyway, I did discover, by luck more than judgment, that mountaineering was the best way of satisfying that youthful spirit of curiosity and adventure, and that was a feat in itself.

(Continued)

The making of a Meiji mountaineer (1)

Translation of A talk about mountaineering originally given by Kogure Ritarō at the mountain meeting on Kirigamine in the Japan Northern Alps on August 20, 1935.

“Talks” are something that, traditionally, only old geezers give, as we see so often in “Another talk? Don’t strain yourself, now.” But, as you have to listen to the maunderings of an old man whether you like it or not, I’m grateful to Mr Ishihara for choosing just the right topic – “a talk about mountaineering” – and I apologise up front if anybody finds it boring.

Kogure Ritaro on a mountain
(photo: courtesy AACH)

I have to confess that, although I’ve been climbing mountains for a while, unlike young Tanabe Jūji and many other friends, I’ve made no effort to do what I can’t do, namely look at mountaineering from an intellectual point of view – or, still less, a philosophical and scientific one – to ask what mountaineering means or what effect it has on us. That’s just not my thing. If I did try to climb mountains this way, however many times I tried, the results would be pretty meagre and unlikely to contribute much to the mountaineering world. If I couldn’t stop analysing things to death, as people do nowadays, I’d end up leading an amazingly foolish kind of life. I just like mountains, singing their praises, and enjoying them – as I always have done and always will do. If there are any young mountaineers around like me, then I take pity on them as being similarly afflicted.

But since I haven’t ever asked myself why I like the mountains so much, this might have been just a chance freak of my character and its surroundings. For, as Mr Ozaki has observed at a small gathering of the Japanese Alpine Club, “everybody has the kind of temperament that could love mountains”. My home village had only hills of a mere two or three hundred metres, about a league away, but six leagues away was Akagi-san, the closest real mountain. As for the mountains you could see from the village, they weren’t as many as you can see from Tokyo, but there were quite a few, including Nantai, Sukai, Kesamaru and Hotaka, as well as Onoko, Komochi, Haruna, Asama, Myōgi, Arafuna, Mikabo and the Chichibu mountains. Tateshina and part of Yatsugatake could also be seen, as could Kusatsu-Shirane, Yokote, Iwasuge and Shirasuna in the Jō-Shinetsu direction, all gleaming whitely in the month of May. Mt Fuji, alas, could not be seen from the village, but from just a league to the east, it showed itself rising to the left of Bukō-san, above Mt Mitsudokke. Only to the southeast were no mountains to be seen. Of course, not even the old men of the village who’d been on mountain pilgrimages could name all these mountains exactly; I had to seek out the names at a later stage. But the strange legends surrounding these mountains, their varied forms and the way their colours varied from morning to evening – all this was more than enough to waken my infant curiosity to the spell of their mystery, deepened as it was by my viewing them at such a distance.

(Continued)

References

This is a beta translation of a chapter (登山談義) from Kogure Ritarō's Mountain Memories (山の憶い出), as republished by Heibonsha in 1999 and edited by Ohmori Hisao. Original text can be found on this webpage. Kogure (1873-1944) grew up in a mountain village where people still made regular pilgrimages to Mt Fuji and Ontake. After making his way via the new Meiji educational system to Tokyo, he joined the Japanese Alpine Club a few years after it was founded, and later became its president. For more about the celebrated mountain meeting at Kirigamine in August 1935, where this talk was first given, see the introduction to One Hundred Mountains of Japan.

A mountaineering marriage

How a Taishō-era couple defied convention and explored the Japan Alps together

In those days, eyebrows tended to levitate at the mere report of female mountaineers  – although, as we have seen, that didn’t stop the ladies doing as they pleased, with or without male company. So it was a bold, even subversive, idea to go climbing with one’s spouse.

Hojiro and Hisa in front of their favourite tent
Minamisawa, July 1920

Takeuchi Hōjirō (1885-1972) saw no good reason why he shouldn't travel to the mountains with his wife. He'd married Okada Hisa (1898-1934) midway through Emperor Taishō’s reign, when he was 32 and she was 19, two years out of high school. By then, Hōjirō was already established in his career as an engineering officer on one of the NYK Line’s prestigious ships. And long sea passages to Europe were compensated with generous shore leave - the ideal set-up, indeed, for lengthy summer tours in the Japan Alps.

Descending Kasa-ga-dake via Anage-sawa, August 1923

From the start, they were fit. On the way back from their honeymoon, in October 1917, Hōjirō  and Hisa walked all the way from Seki in Gifu Prefecture via Hida Takayama to Sasazu in Toyama Prefecture. Although they didn’t take in any summits, this expedition must have reassured Hōjirō that his wife was strong enough for future mountain trips.

Or it may have been the other way round. For the idea of more ambitious mountain tours seems to have come not from Hōjirō but from Hisa’s elder brother. To Okada Yōnosuke (1895-1946), mountain climbing had long been an adjunct to his other passion, for plant-hunting and the natural world.

Hisa and Yonosuke climbing Tsurugi, July 1920

It’s unclear when Yōnosuke decided to become a botanist; probably it was while helping his father cultivate the plants in the family’s greenhouse, or watching nearby farmers till their fields of wasabi.

Yonosuke on the Jungfrau,
in 1932

What’s certain is that Yōnosuke was fascinated by alpinism from an early age. As a middle school student, he’d attended an annual general meeting of the recently formed Japanese Alpine Club at the invitation of Kojima Usui himself, the club's founder and a friend of the family. The guest speaker was Shibasaki Yoshitarō, the Army surveyor who initiated the first modern ascent of Tsurugi.

Hisa did not accompany her brother on mountain trips before her marriage, but she shared his intellectual curiosity and avidly read his copies of Sangaku, the alpine club’s journal. Later she would use Sangaku articles to plan routes, and quote them in her own mountain writings.

The Okada family lived in Yokohama, a melting pot for foreign influences and a liberal atmosphere prevailed at home. At the same time, the Okada parents set great store by education, as one would expect from a family with a distinguished samurai background, and Hisa too went to a good high school.

When Yōnosuke became a member of the Japanese Alpine Club a year after his sister’s marriage, the stage was set for him to discuss longer expeditions to the mountains with his new brother-in-law. The engineer and the budding scientist were already firm friends; in September 1917, Yōnosuke had walked up Mt Fuji with Hōjirō on what was the latter’s first high mountain trip. The experience clearly agreed with Hōjirō; ten days later, he repeated the ascent, by himself.

Starting in 1919, Hōjirō and Hisa made six tours into the Japan Alps over three separate summer seasons. In July 1919, they climbed Shirouma and a neighbouring peak, and made a second trip later in the month to Tsubakuro, Ōtensho and Yarigatake.

Hisa and Sue on Washiba-dake (?)

In 1920, they went to Kashimayari and Harinoki Pass, before crossing the Kurobe valley and climbing Tateyama and Tsurugi. On this trip, Yōnosuke came with them. In July 1923, the Takeuchi’s switched their attention to the Southern Japan Alps, climbing Kaikoma, Senjō, Ai-no-take and Kita-dake, Japan’s second-highest peak.

Climbing Chojiro-dani in July 1920

Later in the same month, they spent ten days in the Kurobe region, climbing Yakushi-dake, Mitsumata-renge and Kasa-ga-dake, accompanied by Hisa's younger sister, Sué. That seems to have been their last long trip to the mountains together, although Yōnosuke continued his mountain explorations both at home and abroad – in 1932, by which time he was a professor at Tohoku Imperial University, he summited the Jungfrau in the Bernese Oberland during a study trip to Europe.

On the summit of Tsurugi, July 30, 1920
Hisa and Hojiro, with guides Kitazawa and Nishizawa

Mr and Mrs Takeuchi documented their forays meticulously. Both kept journals of their travels, and when Hisa reached the summit of Tsurugi – the first known ascent by a woman – the feat was written up by Hōjirō for Sangaku and by Hisa herself for Shufu no tomo (below), a woman’s magazine.

Hōjirō’s article was introduced by none other than Kogure Ritarō, a long-standing editor of Sangaku and later the club’s president, who confessed himself not entirely in agreement with the concept of husband-and-wife mountaineering. From this we may surmise that Hōjirō and Hisa were somewhat ahead of their times.

In addition, Hōjirō left an exceptional photographic record of these mountain excursions. For any gearheads out there, his cameras of choice (above) were a Kodak Autographic Special and a Sanderson De Luxe, from Houghtons of London, both bought on trips abroad. For his part, Yōnosuke had a Zeiss Ikon, from the Carl Zeiss works in Jena.

Hisa in Chojiro-dani, July 1920

The photos show that Mr and Mrs Takeuchi felt at home in the high mountains. Take the expedition to Tsurugi, an ambitious objective for what was only their second alpine season. In the Chōjirō gully, where today’s climbers might use crampons, Hisa is shod only in straw sandals (see photo above). Yet she stands there, perfectly poised, on the steep and slippery snow. Hōjirō too adapted quickly to mountain life: he liked to forecast the weather with a home-made barometer and, on at least one occasion, persuaded the guides that the tent should be moved to a less exposed place.

On the north ridge of Yakushi-dake, July 1923

If mountaineering agreed with them so well, why didn’t Hōjirō and Hisa continue their tours after the summer of 1923? It's none of our business, of course, if there was some change in their working or family circumstances. But larger forces may have been at play.

Some weeks after the couple returned from their last excursion together, the Great Kanto Earthquake devastated their home town of Yokohama. Some historians see that disaster as the true watershed between the genial years of Taishō and the difficult times that followed. It seems also to have brought the curtain down on the alpine idylls of Japan’s first mountaineering couple.

References

Source of all information and photos above is a monograph from the Tateyama Museum of Toyama:

登嶽同道 : 竹内鳳次郎・ヒサ夫妻の山 : 富山県「立山博物館」平成22年度特別企画展


Copyright: The Tateyama Museum of Toyama

Three takes on Harinoki Pass

Images-and-ink accounts of a historic mountain crossing

Climbing a snow valley at Harinoki, woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi (1926)

I. From A Handbook for Travellers in Central and Northern Japan by Sir Ernest Mason Satow and A. G. S. Hawes (1884)

From Nagano to Toyama over the Harinoki Pass.

The greater portion of the following itinerary and of the description given below must be regarded as approximate only, the difficulty of keeping communication open across so rugged a country being peculiarly great. There is no possibility of crossing the pass before the yama-hiraki, or "mountain opening", on the 20th June. Even during the summer months, communication is often entirely interrupted, and none but the most experienced mountaineers can hope to succeed in forcing a way for themselves.

Difficulty is sometimes experienced in obtaining the services of hunters to act as guides, the Harinoki-toge being now seldom crossed even by the natives, and the huts formerly existing on the way being nearly all destroyed, whilst the central portion of the original track has, owing to avalanches and landslips, been practically effaced. Still, the route remains one of the grandest, as well as one of the most arduous, mountaineering expeditions in Japan.

II. From A Diplomat In Japan Part II: The Diaries Of Ernest Satow, 1870-1883, edited by Ian Ruxton

July 23. Left Noguchi at 5 a.m. The clouds gradually rose, and disclosed Yahazugatake, Rengedake or Gorokudake. Jiigatake and Tsubeta or Tsumeta, going from left to right. The Harinoki pass, over which we go, is just north of Rengedake Pass, through Oide, which is on the left bank of Takazegawa and across a stream which does not flow out of the three lakes. Then over a moor covered with woods for a long distance.

Hemerocallis flava (Wikipedia)

Ex-voto on trees, either inscribed "In honour of the mountain god'', or else two rusty iron spear heads, this kind of thing several times. Left the valley of the Takaze and continued up that of the Kagawa at the head of which our pass lies. Immense quantities of Funkia ovata, Hemerocallis flava, Magnolia hypoleuca. Through over-luxuriant brushwood, tall umbellifers and itadori over twelve feet high to the house at Shirazawa, where one can easily pass the night.

Here the river has to be crossed to the right bank, and the path goes on continually ascending thro' woods; large adenophera and yellow Tricyrtis (?) abundant; proceeding on, we shortly crossed the bed of the torrent. Here I found a (species of?) dianthus in quantities, a large arenaria and a hypericum.After this a splendid specimen of Lilium cordifolium in full flower, over six feet high, and another tall lily, unknown.

Lilium cordifolium (source ?) 

We then came to the hut called Kuroishizawa, where is an excellent little stream of pure cold water. Some time after this we arrived at the foot of the snow, and started boldly on it, but after a while, perceiving a path on the bank, we betook ourselves to it again, & ascended until said path disappeared under the snow. At this point, which is 5,500 feet above the sea, found Schizocodon Soldanelloides [ko-iwa-kagami], two kinds of vaccinium Diewilla in bud and a bed of what is Glaucidium palmatum. Birch just struggling into leaf.

Schizocodon Soldanelloides (Wikipedia)

We ascended the snow to a point where it seemed to end, and took our lunch, about 6,500 feet. After this, we did a little more snow, and found ourselves on a very steep zigzagging path, which led up to the summit ridge by the side of the snow, which filled the bottom of a narrow watercourse. Great variety of new & curious species along this path & and most of all at the top, anemones. Ranunculus, saxifrage, vacciniums. Height about 7,500 or 8,000 ft. It began to rain. We had been nearly I0 hours getting to this point, being much kept back by the baggage coolies …

Roofs at Ohmachi: looking towards Harinoki-toge
(illustration from Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps)

III. From Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps, by Walter Weston (1896)

During the first few years after the path – such as it was – was opened, several parties of foreign travellers, including Satow, Chamberlain, Atkinson and others, crossed the pass without much difficulty. Soon, however, the ravages of those influences we call the tooth of time began to tell; avalanches and landslips, with the heavy autumn rains, before long had battered the track out of all recognition, and the Harinoki-tōge became a mere wreck of its former self. For practical purposes, it was soon abandoned – indeed, almost buried – and its epitaph has been already written Tōge fuit….

Masters of the Mittellegi (2)

Continued: an attempt to follow Maki Yuko up the Eiger's northeastern ridge

“A storm is coming,” says the junior guide, though it’s not actually raining yet. Do we really have to give up so soon? I pull out my mobile phone but, with the dispatch of a patented Bergführer, Martin Burgener is already looking at his. The radar picture shows that the storm is an isolated cell and moving northwards. With luck, it’ll miss. We carry on, keeping a weather eye out.

Maki’s party was climbing a gully towards the ridge when the three-metre pole slipped from Brawand’s shoulders. The young guide launched himself after it, losing his footing just as he managed to grab the falling pole. Steuri, in turn, managed to arrest his tumbling colleague on the rope. Bravand was recovered intact, except for a scraped arm. Maki scolded him for risking his life, but they were all aware that without their secret weapon, the clawed pole, they had no hope of success.

Just getting to the ridge was a struggle – in one or two places, the leader had to stand on a colleague’s shoulders to get past an overhang. It wasn’t till shortly before five in the evening that they found a bivouac site, a cranny on the south side of the ridge, not far from the present hut. Ice-axes were used to rake gravel into a ledge. After supper, Maki lay down at the back of the recess while the three guides took it in turns to sit outside – only one of them could lie down at a time. The night was cold.

At six in the morning, they roped up again, leaving the blankets and bivouac gear in the rock niche. There was no point starting earlier; you had to see what you were doing. Now their way led out over a rocky knife-edge, views plunging into the abyss on both sides.

Again, ‘combined tactics’ were used – standing on each other’s shoulders – to get over rock steps. Scaling a 30 metre-high gendarme, they clambered into a notch at 3,500 metres. In front of them, the ridge reared up into the near-vertical “Aufschwung” that had so far rebuffed all attempts on the Mittellegi.

Full light now, the sunlight already playing on the summit snows – two small figures are striding down the ridge on the far side. They must have bivvied up there, says Martin. The sky is blue now – no trace of that pre-dawn storm – but strange waves and bars of vapour are forming. The foehn wind is strengthening.

Maki’s party took a break in the notch, bracing themselves for the struggle ahead. Three alpine jackdaws sailed past on an updraft, their unlovely screeches bringing home the rock barrier's rebarbative loom. As gusts of wind whirled spindrift in his face, Maki noted how the limestone strata tilted inimically downwards.

The men got to their feet. Now it was time to put the wooden pole to work. Steuri, the second man, drove the twin spikes at its foot into a crack and bore down on the shaft with his full weight to wedge it in place. Amatter, who was leading, looped the climbing rope through the hook at the top of the pole, to give himself some protection from above. Then, using his axe to chip out tiny footholds, he inched himself upwards.

Stone splinters rained down on the waiting trio below him, peppering their hands and faces with scratches. When the leader had found a stance, he brought the others up, and then the whole process started again. As the last man, Maki had to climb with one hand – with the other, he had to drag the pole after him. Often he dangled on the rope, looking past shreds of mist down to the green valley far below. By then, he’d lost all sense of time; fear too had long since faded away.

Like Maki’s party before us, we come to the foot of the 30-metre tower. The wind finds us now, blowing the rope’s slack into a billowing arc. Over my shoulder, while we wait for another party to clear the pitch, I glimpse a silvery UFO hovering over the Schreckhorn. Instead of snow, the gusts fling flakes of grit into our faces; our teeth grate on them...

The guides had just started on an almost vertical, 50 metre-high wall when – catastrophe! – a dark shadow flitted through the air, tumbling past Maki into the abyss. He grabbed the rope in alarm, only to hear Amatter’s calm tones: “Not to worry, Herr – I just dropped my sack, that’s all.” And then the guide got back to work, as if nothing had happened.

The wind is buffeting, trying to shoulder us bodily off the mountain. Overhead, the sky is bright blue, except for a long bar of cloud that lies athwart the ridge. Despite the gale, it stays magically fixed in place, cresting an invisible wave of air flowing over the mountain.

At last, the rock’s angle started to ease. They’d taken eight hours – from nine in the morning to five in the evening – to wrestle themselves upwards by just two hundred metres. And yet, to Maki and his guides, no more than an hour seemed to have passed, so intense had been their concentration.

Scrambling onto the top of the steep section, they realised they’d won. Yet nobody had the strength left to cheer. Without a word, Steuri scratched the date onto a rock – 10.9.1921. Then he snapped the wooden pole in two and tied his headcloth onto the shorter section. Amatter took the makeshift flag and thrust it into a cairn that he’d piled up in the meantime.

We realise we’ve lost when we cross a narrow gap between two towers. Stepping onto the tightrope fillet between them I feel the wind catch my pack and tilt me towards Grindelwald’s airspace. I grab a projection on the far side before I topple. Strictly speaking, you can’t take the so-called tour of the north face from here, because we’re not yet above that yawning declivity. But the difference will be academic if we get blown off the mountain. “The wind will be much stronger on the summit ridge,” says Martin, pointing out the obvious.

Moving like robots now, Maki’s party continued up the snows of the summit ridge, reaching the top shortly after seven in the evening. The cold drove them onwards after a five-minute pause. Roping up in a new order, Brawand bringing up the rear, the party started carefully down the western ridge – the day’s snowmelt had already frozen, glazing the rocks with ice as hard as enamel.

Amatter led downwards, lantern in hand. The light reached back only to Maki, leaving Steuri and Brawand to grope their way in the dark. After a while, they realised they’d gone astray – on one side was a sheer cliff down to the Eiger Glacier, on the other an equally sharp drop towards Grindelwald. Arduously, for an hour and more, they had to retrace their steps upwards and downwards, without making any real progress.

They were hungry: most of the food had tumbled off the mountain in Steuri’s rucksack. The water too was gone; only a little brandy was left. Steuri suggested licking butter to slake their thirst. To Maki’s surprise, and slight revulsion, the ploy worked.

In pitch-darkness, they stumbled onto the moraines of the Eiger Glacier, almost at the limits of their strength, reaching the Eigergletscher station at three in the morning. To their surprise, people poured out of the nearby restaurant to welcome them – they’d been expected.

Some hours after turning back, we’re sitting under a parasol on a café terrace at Kleine Scheidegg, sipping coffee with whipped cream, and looking up at the sombre recess of the Eiger’s north face. Shreds of cloud are scouring the summit ridge. If we’d gone on up there, we’d have been crawling across on hands and knees. “So how about it then – same time next year?” Martin asks. I nod.

On returning to Grindelwald, Maki was hoisted onto the shoulders of two Englishman, a tribute that the modest Japanese alpinist would probably have preferred to decline. For there was much to do. First, he had to write up testimonials for his guides: “When we were climbing on the Mittellegigrat from the side of Kallifirn,” Maki recorded in Sam Brawand’s Führerbuch, “he lost the wooden pole which was most important instrument for this climb. At this moment, he threw himself after the pole and got it back. Not thinking of a bit after his own safety! I couldn't keep from the tears came down.”

Then Maki invited his companions and their wives to a celebratory dinner in the Hotel Adler. And, to pay for the construction of the first refuge on the Mittellegi Ridge, he made a handsome donation to the local guides’ association. The new hut opened in 1924. The bill came to sixteen thousand Swiss francs, of which Maki provided the lion’s share.

A new hut, with twice the capacity, replaced the old refuge in 2001. It is still owned and operated by the Grindelwald guides. Maki’s old hut was helicoptered off the ridge and is now a tourist attraction at the mountain’s foot. As for the Mittellegi, climbers no longer need to take along a three-metre pole; fixed hawser-laid ropes take the sting out of the steep sections. The Eiger is still the Eiger. A week after our failed attempt, lightning struck a party of Czech climbers near the hut, killing one and injuring another.

Maki also set about purchasing top-quality alpine gear – ice-axes, crampons, rucksacks – for his university mountaineering club in Japan. The investment paid off. Inspired by Maki’s example, Japan’s alpinists raised their sights to big ridges that required technical climbing skills. Less than a year after the Mittellegi ascent, parties from Waseda and Gakushūin universities raced each other up Yari’s Kitakama ridge, opening a new decade of climbing exploration in the Japan Alps.

Alpinistic enthusiasm percolated up to the pinnacle of Japanese society. Maki returned to Switzerland in 1926, to organise a mountaineering summer for Prince Chichibu, the emperor’s younger son. Sam Brawand helped guide some of the warming-up climbs, although military duties prevented him joining the Prince’s traverse of the Matterhorn. Maki went on to make the first ascent of Mt Alberta in 1925, again with Swiss guides. After the war, he crowned his alpine career by leading the successful expedition to Manaslu, Japan’s 8000-metre peak, in 1956.

A year later, he was at Haneda Airport to welcome his old friend from Grindelwald. Brawand had meanwhile become a local politician and sat on the old Swissair’s board as the cantonal representative. In this capacity, he seized the chance to fly on the airline’s inaugural flight to Japan in 1957. The DC-6B took off from Geneva on 1 April and arrived in Tokyo on the fifth.

And there to greet him was a delegation of alpinists headed by Matsukata Saburō and Maki Yūkō. More old friends came to meet him at a reception hosted by the Japanese Alpine Club. Even Princess Chichibu was there, widow of the climbing prince. Brawand was so moved that the words in his old Führerbuch floated into his mind: “I couldn't keep from the tears came down”.

Memories of the Mittellegi linger in Maki’s homeland. On a recent count, there were at least 14 businesses with the name “Eiger” in Japan, including a maker of stained glass. And, for quite a few years after Maki himself passed on – this was in 1989 – Japan’s mountaineering traditionalists still favoured a distinctive kind of broad-beamed pack. These were known as “Kissling”, after the eponymous workshop in Zermatt that supplied the rucksacks for Maki’s student climbers. It's been years since I last saw one, though.

References

Prime source is Maki Yūkō’s account in his memoir, Sankō (“Mountain journeys”), which is still in print from Chuō Kōronsha.

A summarised version of Maki’s account was translated by Miyashita Keizō into German for Daniel Anker’s mountain monograph, Eiger: die vertikale Arena (AS Verlag, Zurich, 1998, revised 2000).

Additional reminiscences of the climb and subsequent events come from Samuel Brawand's memoir, Erinnerungen an Yuko Maki. Incidentally, Maki (and Miyashita) give the length of the wooden pole as six metres; Brawand, more credibly, says three metres.