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

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.

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)

Hotly debated ice

How a pioneer alpinist helped to push the case for Japan’s vanished glaciers.

Summer 1902 was a pivotal season in the history of Japanese mountain exploration. On August 17, the banker and journalist Kojima Usui (1873-1948) scrambled to the top of Yari-ga-take. “For why?” he later explained, “Because Yari is high, Yari is sharp, and Yari is steep.” This was the first time that anybody had expressed a modern, alpinistic impulse in Japanese. Novel though it was, the rationale soon caught on. A few years later, Kojima founded Japan's first alpine club.

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

In the very same month, a young geographer strode over the summit of Shirouma, another high peak in the Hida mountains. Yamasaki Naomasa (1870-1929) had just returned from Europe, where he'd studied under the greatest glaciologist of the age, and he knew exactly what to look for. On his way down the Great Snow Valley, he found telltale scratchmarks engraved on a streamlined red boulder. To the expert eye, this suggested that an ancient glacier had once scoured the valley.

Yamasaki Naomasa

Back in Tokyo, Yamasaki announced his discovery in a public lecture delivered in September of the same year. “Did Japan really lack glaciers? (氷河果たして本邦に存在せざりしか),” he asked, rhetorically, before setting out the opposite case. This was a provocative thesis for a young academic who’d just started on his first job, as a geography teacher at the Tokyo Higher Normal School.

Few were convinced. Sceptics found plenty of ammunition: where in Japan, they asked, can you find the obvious moraines and “drifts” of pulverised rubble that so obviously marked the extent of Europe’s ancient glaciers? The naysayers had a point: the missing moraines didn't show up clearly until aerial photography revealed them long after the second world war.

Kojima soon got to hear about Yamasaki's first glacier lecture, although he didn’t attend as he’d “only just laid aside his travelling clothes”. Already, an “indelible association” was forming in his mind between Yamasaki, the Hida mountains and glaciers. And he was deeply impressed that the scholar had seen traces of ancient glaciation where they’d been missed by all those expert foreign mountaineers who’d roamed the Japanese mountains in the previous century.

Kojima Usui

When, in September 1904, Yamasaki announced another public lecture at the Tokyo Geographical Society, Kojima was quick to attend. Before Yamasaki came to the podium, the banker had to sit impatiently while another speaker held forth on the phrenology of natives in the Hietsuno district – not a topic that Kojima had much sympathy for. When the geographer did appear, he'd chosen a less tendentious title for his lecture – “Characteristics of the high mountains (高山の特色)” – but the case for ancient glaciers was, if anything, even more strongly argued.

Kojima made his pencil fly over his notebook as he scribbled down Yamasaki’s observations. “My Yari!” he thought, as the geographer showed a sketch of the spire-like peak. Yamasaki went to mention Kuro-dake, Yakushi-dake and Otenshō-dake – a peak that Kojima had never heard of – mountains that had attracted his attention on a recent trip through the Kurobe river valley. “All these peaks are exceedingly sharp, like the blade of a chisel,” the geographer noted. Could it be that ancient glaciers had shaped them?

Some time after this lecture, Kojima joined the Tokyo Geographical Society. His election was proposed by Yamasaki and Shiga Shigetaka, the author who had inspired Kojima's trip to Yari and who was (or would soon be) an honorary vice-chairman of the Japanese Alpine Club.

Yarigatake in 1902

For his part, Yamasaki helped to advertise the new alpine club by publishing an announcement in the January 1906 edition of the Tokyo Geographical Society’s journal. And he was quick to join up himself. His support may partly account for the strong showing of scientists within the club’s membership roll. Yamasaki and Kojima became firm friends – it might have helped that they were more or less the same age and were both born in Shikoku – although it’s not recorded that they ever went on a mountain expedition together.

Meanwhile, evidence continued to pile up for past glaciation in the Japanese Alps. On November 22, 1913, Kojima attended a particularly “unforgettable” lecture at the Geographical Society. After Yamasaki had again spoken about glacial action in the Hida Range, the (rather small) audience crowded round a desk to inspect the disputed “Hettner stone”. This scratched-up block of biotite granite had been discovered beside the Azusa river near the village of Shimajima by Alfred Hettner (1859-1941), a visiting German geologist.

As the room darkened on this winter evening, candles were brought out to illuminate the stone, picking out the fine parallel lines on its pale surfaces. The striations were compared with those on similar rocks brought from Europe, while Jinbō Kotora (1867-1924), a geologist best known for his surveys in Hokkaido, fired off volleys of questions. According to Jinbō, such scratches could easily be explained by ordinary weathering processes or the action of avalanches.

In 1915, Kojima’s bank sent him to the United States to run its Los Angeles and San Francisco branches. A prolific letter-writer, he kept in touch with Yamasaki. In late May 1922, the geographer visited San Francisco on his way back from a geological conference in Brussels. By this time, Yamasaki was well established in his career – he’d moved in 1911 to Tokyo Imperial University as a professor of geography within the natural science department and, in 1919, he’d set up an independent geography department.

Checking into the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, Yamasaki wasted no time in paying a visit to the Kojima family at their bank-owned residence in Pine Street. Lacquered boxes of “gomokuzushi” were served and Kojima was gratified to see how Yamasaki cleaned his bowl down to the last grain before laying his chopsticks neatly down: the professor seemed to have a pent-up appetite for Japanese food after subsisting for so long on western fare.

Then Kojima took his guest on a sight-seeing drive round San Francisco. At the Golden Gate Park Museum, they admired a landscape by Sadahide. The ukiyoe print may have intrigued Kojima, the art critic and collector, more than it did Yamasaki, the scientist. At any rate, the conversation during Yamasaki’s stay centred mostly on glaciers. By this time, of course, Kojima had seen plenty of glacial landforms for himself, on excursions to the Sierra mountains.

But what about those ancient glaciers of Japan? Yamasaki reported that Professor Penck, on seeing a photo of Yari, had said that it suggested a glacial horn. As Albrecht Penck (1858–1945) had elucidated Europe’s four most recent ice ages, this was a powerful endorsement. Of course, it was also an endorsement of Yamasaki himself, who’d studied under Professor Penck in Vienna during his European study tour around the turn of the century. By 1922, glacier sceptics were starting to lose ground in Japan; within the geographical community, Jinbō Kotora was the most prominent hold-out.

To round off his visit, Yamasaki wanted to visit Yosemite, famous then as now for its towering glacier-carved cliffs. But this could not be; all accommodation in the valley was booked out for a conference of national park employees and not even Kojima’s formidable web of connections could get them a room.

In the end, the Yosemite impasse may have been no more than a minor disappointment. By this time, after all, mountain topography represented only a minor focus within the magisterial sweep of his academic interests: Yamasaki's magnum opus, completed in 1915, was a 10,000-page regional geography covering all of “Great Japan”.

By the same token, it’s unclear what the geographer gained from his contact with the Japanese Alpine Club beyond a sympathetic hearing for his glacial theories. His most important field trips to the Japan Alps appear to have been undertaken independently of Kojima or other club members.

In the opposite direction, though, Yamasaki’s influence was profound. Wielding his ever-busy pen, Kojima was quick to tackle the subject of glaciers. Yamasaki’s theories feature in an essay on “High mountain snows” (高山の雪) published in 1911 in a magazine for students – although Kojima chose to stay neutral in this venue on the question of whether glaciers actually had existed in Japan.

Why should a banker and hobby writer bother with the science of ice and snow at all? As if to justify straying from his usual journalistic terrain, Kojima takes care to explain himself in the essay’s opening section:

I believe that, just as things go in or out of fashion, there are old and new styles of nature. … Modern man can’t be satisfied with appreciating nature in the time-worn shape of famous places and set-piece sceneries such as the Eight Great Landscapes of the Home Provinces or Dawn over Futami-ga-ura. Rather, it is the unknown and the untracked that attracts the spirit of exploration which surged forth so remarkably in the nineteenth century, allied as it is with the spirit of scientific enquiry. As a result, mountaineering clubs have now been established in every civilised nation, first in Europe and America, and latterly in Japan. For what are the mountains but vast vertically framed museums or galleries for the panoply of natural phenomena? Nothing could be more fitting, then, as a subject for investigation than snow.

Viewed in this light, the scientist and the alpinist are kindred spirits. There’s an element of legerdemain in Kojima’s exposition, given that science had played little or no part in the original inspiration for a Japanese alpine club. Yet, once the club was established, scientists did flock to join. And, quite naturally, glaciers did loom large in the minds of the early alpinists. Arguments for and against their former existence in Japan flew to and fro in early editions of “Sangaku”, the club’s journal. And, when it was debated in the same pages whether Honshu’s highest mountains might be dignified as “Alps”, glacial landforms were adduced both for and against the case.

Ultimately, both Yamasaki and Kojima prevailed. The "Japanese Alps" were well on their way to taking root before Kojima left for America. Glaciers took longer to establish. As late as 1918, no less an authority than Walter Weston would side with the naysayers after weighing up the rival arguments. And it wasn't until after Yamasaki's death that the majority of geologists were persuaded that ice-streams had once coursed through the high mountains of Japan.

A final vindication for Yamasaki came just a few years ago when researchers found “live” relic glaciers  under permanent snowpatches on and around Tsurugi-dake. A century or so after the pioneer alpinist and the young geographer explored the Hida mountains, Japan at last has both Alps and the glaciers to go with them.

References

Main source for this post is Kojima Usui's essay on "How I met Yamasaki Naomasa in San Francisco" in Arupinisto no Shuki ("An Alpinist's Journal"), Heibonsha edition, page 85ff. Kojima's article on high mountain snows is republished in "Nippon Alps", Iwanami Bunko, page 240ff.

Walter Weston summarised the debate on Japan's glaciers in "The Playground of the Far East" (1918), Chapter IX "The Northern Alps Revisited", pages 190-96 in the original edition.

Details of Yamasaki Naomasa's academic career are from this outline biography by Brian Welde (University of Missouri) and Mark Eiseman (Valparaiso University).