"Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape" (7)

Concluded: a disquisition on the aesthetics of volcanoes and alpine landscapes by Kojima Usui, founder of the Japanese Alpine Club

Illustration of Mt Fuji from
an early edition of Nihon Fukeiron

The European Alps have limestone mountains, while ours do not. Limestone is leached away by the carbonic acid dissolved in water trickling down into the ground, or carried in subterranean streams, to form huge caves with narrow entrances, as can be seen in our own mountains of Chichibu and elsewhere. The Japan Alps have a cave known as the Demon’s Castle and the “Tsuitōshi” rock arch near Shirahone hot springs, but these minor masterpieces don’t add much to the landscape as a whole.

For there are no limestone mountains in our Japanese Alps. Thus we have nothing to compare with those Italian dolomite mountains in the European Alps, with their pure violet shadows and their rich array of peacock hues. Fortunately, however, the elegant forms of volcanoes such as Ontake, Norikura and, beyond the Japan Alps, Hakusan create a mountain scenery where – just as the European Alps combine “Swiss ruggedness” and “Italian grace” – the Japan Alps bring together in a balanced composition granite and quartz porphyry, the hard, rugged igneous rocks with the softer outlines of the volcanic rocks, composing a symphony of colour and line that is rarely seen in this world.

And thanks to the interplay of igneous and volcanic rocks in the Japan Alps, and to the ways in which they were extruded or erupted, they form on the one hand sharp sky-raking spires like Yari-ga-take and Kashimayari (depending in the latter case on the angle of view). Granite, on the other hand, generally takes the form of giant blocks, while volcanoes are conical, so that the mountains are built up in lofty domes that recall some magnificent temple framed by human genius. Heaving up their broad shoulders as they do, Hodaka, Kasumizawa, Kasa, Renge, Jōnen, Ōtenshō and Tsurugi are all mountains of this ilk.

Yet the great and gracious sovereign over all these Japan Alps, from north to south, ruling over them by both destiny and deserving, is none other than Mt Fuji. For not only does Mt Fuji surpass them all in altitude, in beauty of form, exquisite colouring and elegance of bearing, but she stands apart from them, as if on a raised dais and disdaining to join the throng of alpine mountains, preferring instead to raise her imperial throne in solitary splendour over the Pacific coast.

As the Japan Alps are inextricably linked with the Fuji volcanic belt in point of geological history, so must they be too in terms of mountain scenery. This being the case, it is unfathomable that anybody could have the presumption or the audacity to exclude our august Mt Fuji from any discussion of the special characteristics of Japan’s mountain scenery.

Reference

Beta translation from Kojima Usui, Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape (日本山岳景の特色), originally published in "Nippon Arupusu" (1910), Vol IV, reprinted in Nippon Arupusu, Iwanami Bunko edition, 1992.

"Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape" (6)

Continued: a disquisition on the aesthetics of volcanoes and alpine landscapes by Kojima Usui, founder of the Japanese Alpine Club

Mikuri-ga-ike on Tateyama
(Photo courtesy of Sunnybeauty on flickr)

When one compares not just Kami-kōchi but the Japan Alps in general with their European counterparts, it’s as if our volcanoes in some way and in certain aspects make up for the lack of glaciers in our Alps of Japan.

In the Swiss Alps, for instance, glaciers have created a wealth of mountain lakes but, in our Japanese Alps, the five pools on the summit of Ontake, Ō-ike and Nyū-ike on Norikura, as well as Midori and Mikuri-ga-ike on Tateyama can all be ascribed to the action of volcanoes.

Indeed, these pools are higher than the alpine lakes, and what they lack in depth and extent, they more than make up in the clarity of their waters. North of Yari-ga-take, below the granodiorite summit block of Washiba, there is a little crater lake around which scorched blocks of lava lie scattered like fragments of coral around a reef.

It is in such sights, I venture to say, which are hardly to be encountered in any other mountain range, that the special character of Japan’s mountain scenery consists.

Continued

Reference

Beta translation from Kojima Usui, Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape (日本山岳景の特色), originally published in "Nippon Arupusu" (1910), Vol IV, reprinted in Nippon Arupusu, Iwanami Bunko edition, 1992.

"Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape" (4)

Continued: a disquisition on the aesthetics of volcanoes and alpine landscapes by Kojima Usui, founder of the Japanese Alpine Club

Once on the heathland of Oiwake, I came upon a young student making a sketch of Mt Asama, the volcano quiescent, as if slumbering in its robes of tawny velvet. Just at that instant, the mountain woke to life with a thunderous explosion, throwing up, one after another, great hydrangea heads of scabrous, sulphurous smoke, into a column that reached up from the crater to the clouds.

In an instant, the mountain took on a sombre, apoplectic tone and the student, seeming to despair of capturing such a sudden change, gave up on his sketch and glancing in my direction, exchanged an uneasy smile with me. Such dramatic scene-changing might be all very well in the play of light falling from a fairweather sky, but how on earth could something as solid, so resolutely un-plastic, as Mt Asama undergo such an instantaneous transformation.

This sense of an emotional outburst, or outright rage, really can be evinced by volcanoes I believe, solid and inorganic as they may be. In the same way that you see the blue veins stand out under a person’s sensitive skin, or see his face suddenly change colour, volcanoes too are seething with skins of soft sand, or ash or tilth that form clean-cut lines and shapes when eroded by the flow of water or etched by sliding snow.

Looking at the hundreds of gullies on Mt Fuji – take Dainichi-sawa or Sakura-zawa, for instance – and you see that all are formed by the erosive force of water or snow, and when you start out climbing the mountain by the Gotemba route, you’ll see two hillocks of rubble projecting about a hundred feet above the ashy slopes of Hoeizan, stretching their skirts southwards.

This is Ni-tsu-zuka, the twin volcanoes or side vents (or, as the savants say, parasite cones, although I question whether it is fitting to call them so when they are part and parcel of the parent volcano rather than something alien, as in the plant world, that battens on a host plant of a different species) on whose black sands the wind whistling down from the mountain scours its tracks.

All volcanoes are characterized by a magnificent simplicity, but if you look at them closely, you can see the traces left by the wind and, although this phenomenon is by no means confined to volcanoes, it is on the soft, easily scoured flanks of volcanoes that such traces are most clearly etched.

Continued

References

Beta translation from Kojima Usui, Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape (日本山岳景の特色), originally published in "Nippon Arupusu (1910), Vol IV, reprinted in Nippon Arupusu, Iwanami Bunko edition, 1992.

Image: courtesy of Ueda Cable Vision.

"Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape" (3)

Continued: a disquisition on the aesthetics of volcanoes and alpine landscapes by Kojima Usui, founder of the Japanese Alpine Club

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.

Illustrations of volcanic rocks from Shiga Shigetaka's
Theory of the Japanese Landscape (Nihon Fukeiron) 

If the beauty of volcanoes lies, as many have noted, in their dignified solemnity of form, and that of alpine mountains in their ice and snow and ridgelines, then the beauty of volcanic mountains must consist in their contours and colouring. Compared with alpine mountains, where you sometimes have to climb over ice and snow, the stark, bare boulders of Japanese volcanoes must be tackled as pure rock scrambling.

If this is what you choose, you should not garb yourself in two layers of clothing, or wear crampons and nailed boots over three pairs of socks, or carry an alpenstock, as in some alpine expedition, but tramp onwards in straw sandals and so work your way up to the summit crater, grabbing hold of ochre boulders so that you can at last touch the congealed effusions of former eruptions, like so much frozen bile.

What makes volcanoes beautiful is the way they show the exquisiteness of their form. I’ve read my Ruskin thoroughly, but I find it utterly tedious to read the landscape aesthetics of a person who never experienced volcanoes – in fact, it’s like being preached at in a foreign language. In his Stones of Venice Book 1, Chapter XX, Materials of Ornament, Section XIX, Ruskin describes the line of a small glacier of the second order, about three quarters of a mile long, on a spur of the Aiguille de Blaitière at Chamonix as “the most beautiful simple curve I have ever seen in my life” (he was then thirty-three years old).

To which I say, unhappy Ruskin, that he never saw a woodprint of Hokusai or Hiroshige and thus could never even imagine the exquisiteness of the curve presented by Mt Fuji on its left-hand skyline. This is the great line that falls - if you stand looking up from somewhere between Yoshihara on the Tōkaidō and Iwabuchi - that falls in one strong, bold catenary sweep from an altitude of 3,788 metres, a line that all but thrums with tension as it falls through the pure empyrean of an autumn or a winter sky. Or it is the line that, in the vaporous days of spring and summer, almost fades from sight, like the easy curve of a kite’s string.

Apart from the horizon on land or sea, this is the mightiest line, curved or slanting, that you’ll ever see in our country of Japan, and so I am convinced every time I gaze up at it from the train on that Tōkaidō line.

Continued

Reference

Beta translation from Kojima Usui, Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape (日本山岳景の特色), originally published in "Nippon Arupusu (1910), Vol IV, reprinted in Nippon Arupusu, Iwanami Bunko edition, 1992.

"Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape" (2)

Continued: a disquisition on the aesthetics of Honshu's mixed volcanic and alpine scenery, by Kojima Usui, founder of the Japanese Alpine Club

Cover of an early edition of Shiga
Shigetaka's Nihon Fukeiron

When we compare our mountains with those of the Himalaya and the Alps, certainly those ranges have things ours do not. But, by the same token, our mountains have things that those others do not.

As to what those things are, we have volcanoes in addition to plutonic and sedimentary rocks, and landscapes formed by the creative and destructive effects of those volcanoes, and I don’t believe that anybody would deny that it is this blend of landforms that gives the mountain scenery of Japan its special character.

Mountains of the Himalayan and Alpine type can be formed more or less anywhere as long as the crust of our gradually congealing planet continues to warp and tilt, throwing up large or small elevations.

Volcanoes, however, erupt only along the lines defined by today’s volcanic fronts so that, even in this country of volcanoes, they are arrayed only in specific places. In the Kinki and Sanyōdō, and on Shikoku, among other regions, there are with few exceptions no volcanoes worthy of the name, even if some volcanic rocks have been extruded in the past.

Our country’s most prominent volcanic front is, of course, the Fuji Belt, with Mt Fuji itself as its syntaxis and anchor, weaving southwards through Hakone and the Izu peninsula out to sea, and northwards under Kaya-ga-take, Kana-ga-take and Yatsu-ga-dake.

Standing opposite them, across the graben of the Chikuma River, are the purely sedimentary ranges of the Shirane and Kaikoma mountains, throwing into relief as nowhere else even in Japan the contrast between sedimentary and plutonic rocks, and highlighting the particular character of each.

In those Akaishi mountains and in the Japan Alps, or at their foot, where the clearly defined strata are free of volcanic ash, one would expect to find fossils as a means of assigning them to the appropriate geological eras. So far, alas, although many people have looked for them, no such fossils have come to light and one scholar now active in Shinshū opines, as if with a sigh, that volcanic ash may after all have buried beyond reach such indispensable indicators for the geological timescale.

Yet it is precisely there – where the Fuji Belt converges on the Kamanashi hills cast down from the Kaikoma range, and to the north, where the Ontake and Tateyama volcanoes erupt from the Hida range, that the volcanic and sedimentary rocks of the Japan Alps are thrown together in inextricable confusion – that the unique scenic character of the Japanese mountains creates a landscape unparalleled in the Himalaya, roof of the world though it may be, or in the European Alps with all its endless profusion and variety of peaks.

(continued)

Reference

Beta translation from Kojima Usui, Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape (日本山岳景の特色), originally published in "Nippon Arupusu (1910), Vol IV, reprinted in Nippon Arupusu, Iwanami Bunko edition, 1992.

"Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape" (1)

Honshu's volcanoes and alpine mountains are braided together as if in a chain of platinum and steel, wrote Kojima Usui, the founder of the Japanese Alpine Club ...

When we travelled in our student days, the “famous mountains” of Japan were practically all volcanoes, so that if you’d climbed Mt Fuji, it stood to reason that all other mountains were lower, smaller, less impressive. In those days, apart from the volcanoes of Tateyama and Ontake, all we knew of the mighty range now called the “Japan Alps” was Kiso-komagatake (which is composed mainly of biotite granite). And I can’t help smiling to recall that, when I saw in a list of mountains the name of Shiramine in the Akaishi mountains as the next-highest peak after Mt Fuji, none of us at that time, neither my friends nor my teachers, had any idea where this Shiramine might be situated.

Illustrations from Shiga Shigetaka's Theory of the Japanese Landscape 

I was born in Sanuki on Shikoku, where the Emperor Sutoku lies entombed on a “Shiramine” that is mentioned in both Ueda Akinari’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain, and Kōda Rohan’s acclaimed Tales of Two Days. But joking aside, I thought, it can’t possibly be this Shiramine that is meant.

When I came to read Shiga Shigetaka’s Theory of the Japanese Landscape, I did get to know a little more about mountain names, but this book deals only with volcanoes and mountains of igneous rock. Mountains of sedimentary origin get but a cursory mention, and there’s no way of finding out about Shiramine or Akaishi. In the chapter on granitic mountains, I read that “After those composed of volcanic rock, Japan’s highest mountains are all made of granite (except for the Shirane mountains of Kai, which are formed from chert)”. This was when I realised that the Shirane in Kai was one and the same peak as the “Shiramine” that forms the highest point of the Akaishi range. These days, anybody with the slightest familiarity with mountain geography would know this, but I mention it just an example of how clueless we were and how shallow our knowledge of the mountains except for the time-honoured volcanoes.

Today, of course, the entire Japanese Alps have been traversed by the Army General Staff surveyors and members of the Japanese Alpine Club, from the Akaishi range in the south through the Kiso range in the centre to the uplands and mountains of the Hida range in the north. Untrodden sanctuaries and virgin forests are no more.

As for the 1:50,000-scale General Staff maps, it’s said that the ones covering the Japan Alps and other mountains sell best of all. In contrast to former days, mountaineering buffs now deem only mountain ranges and ridges to be worth climbing, whether of sedimentary or of igneous origin. Volcanoes tend to be looked down on as paltry and second-best. Yet, having put forward a theory of volcanic landscape, I would say rather that one should first climb a volcano to appreciate the sublimity of the Japanese Alps and then launch into those Alps in order to acknowledge the beauty of volcanoes.

Indeed, I would go further. The most remarkable characteristic of Japan’s mountain landscapes is that the Japan Alps and the volcanoes of the Fuji belt, each with its mighty peaks of about 3,000 metres, are braided together as if in a chain of platinum and iron.

(continued)

Reference

Beta translation from Kojima Usui, Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape (日本山岳景の特色), originally published in "Nippon Arupusu (1910), Vol IV, reprinted in Nippon Arupusu, Iwanami Bunko edition, 1992.