Mt Fuji at war

How Japan's mountain-top meteorologists rode out the dark years of early Shōwa

War comes to Mt Fuji 

War came to Mt Fuji on July 30, 1945. For months, the meteorologists at the summit station had watched streams of enemy aircraft drone overhead. And so they saw nothing unusual about the six-ship formation that roared past just after 8am. Until two planes peeled off from the main swarm and came howling in towards them. Seconds later, the spent cartridges came spilling from the fighters’ wings and the air was filled with noise, shattering glass and flying splinters…

In retrospect, one might say that the road to war started in the previous decade, on another fine summer's day. It was on August 1, 1932 that Japan’s Central Meteorological Office commissioned its first officially funded observatory on Mt Fuji. Gathered round the small summit hut almost four kilometres above sea-level – yes, that’s Satō Junichi in the photo below, standing in the hut's doorway – the weathermen must have felt themselves as far above the era’s murky politics and foreign policy as “clouds from mud”.

Inaugurating the Mt Fuji observatory on August 1, 1932

Yet the events then unfolding in China would one day embroil these men too. Ten months earlier, the Japanese army had invaded Manchuria. In an act of insubordination that was swiftly termed “gekokujō” (下克上), the local army officers made their move without getting authorization from either the government or, indeed, their own general staff.

Whether or not the military had inspired them, the meteorologists were soon moved to stage an act of gekokujō for themselves. This was because the government had seen fit to approve just one year of continuous weather observations atop Mt Fuji, as part of Japan’s contribution to the Second International Polar Year in 1932-33.

As a single year’s weather readings would be scientifically of little worth, the government’s stinginess made no sense to the weathermen. So, in mid-December 1933, when the last approved summit crew were ordered to bring down the portable gear when they finished their month-long shift, they fell to plotting. How would it be, they mused, if they just sat out the winter in the summit hut, continuing their work in a kind of high-altitude sit-in strike.

No excuses were necessary

The team leader – not to say ring leader – in this enterprise was Fujimura Ikuo, who later went on to head up the observatory in a meteorological career spanning three decades. At first, he and his crew cast about for some plausible-sounding pretexts for disobeying their orders – for instance, the slopes would be too icy to let them bring down delicate instruments, and so they’d have to stay on at the summit to look after the kit.

In the event, they made no such excuses. On arriving at the summit, they simply told the outgoing shift that they would stay until summer and keep up the observations. With that, Fujimura handed over a missive to the Meteorological Office’s directors and, together with his rebel crew, shut himself up for the winter. Fortunately, his resolve wasn’t put to the test. On New Year’s Eve, a telegram arrived from Fujimura’s superiors: “Observations temporarily extended; you are instructed to descend when relief crew arrives.”

The following September, the funding crisis was eased when a foundation set up by the Mitsui zaibatsu stumped up seven thousand yen. A year later, in October 1935, the government switched the summit station’s funding to the regular budget, so that it could continue operating indefinitely. To mark this promotion, the adjective “Provisional” was removed from the observatory’s designation.

Mitsui comes up
with the cash

The government also granted funds to build a new and improved hut close to Ken-ga-mine, Mt Fuji’s highest point – the buffeting airflow at the old site had interfered with pressure readings. There was even talk of a cable car to waft the relief crews effortlessly to the summit, although these plans came to nothing. But the new hut was duly opened in 1937 and one more building in 1940.

By 1944, Japan’s early successes in the war had become a liability. Lines of supply were overstretched. In fact, even keeping in touch with far-flung units of the Imperial forces had become problematic. Thus, the summit of Mt Fuji was the natural place for the military to look when seeking a better way to communicate with the radio relay station on Hachijō-jima, an island about 300 kilometres south of Tokyo. Better still, there was no need to build a new shed for the radio gear – they could house it in the meteorologists’ old hut at Yasu-no-kawara.

Furnishing a power supply was the biggest challenge. The plan was to sling a high-tension cable on poles between the city of Gotemba and the mountain’s 1,600-metre contour. After that, the cable would run underground all the way to the summit. The work of laying the cable was assigned to a squad of five hundred soldiers, who used ‘human wave’ tactics to complete the job in a blistering two weeks.

The new power supply brought more than one benefit – it put an end to the worst job at the summit station; cranking up the generator in winter. When the frigid temperatures had congealed the lubricating oil to candy-like stiffness, the duty man might be spitting blood by the time he got the motor started. Or, if the generator refused to start, the batteries would run flat, forcing the weathermen to cook by the light of candles. Once at least, the candles ran out too and rush-lights were rigged to burn the cooking oil, all this in temperatures of minus 30°C.

Soon the summit crews had more to worry about than scanty provisions and the icicles that formed in their sleeping quarters. Yajima Hiroshi had only just joined them on the mountain when he was called up for military service. On December 3, 1944, in a ferocious blizzard – the wind was gusting at a hundred kilometres an hour – Yajima set off with two colleagues to fight his way down to Gotemba. After that, he shipped out to Io-jima and was never seen again.

On March 13, 1945, one of the weathermen climbed the observation tower above the hut and, looking westwards in the direction of Nagoya, saw a reddish glow in the sky, beyond the shoulder of Akaishi-dake. Soon the spectacle would be repeated, and in almost all quadrants of the compass. Feelings of despair overcame the summit crews as, night after night, they watched these false dawns.

On July 18, five men from the army’s own meteorological service came up to the summit to launch weather balloons. Their brief was to check if the incendiary balloons then being launched by the military were flying high enough to ride the jet stream all the way to America. In fact, the balloons were already doing enough damage for the US authorities to impose a news blackout. One device even cut the power supply to the Hanford plutonium plant in Washington State.

Hacking ice from the instrument tower

By chance, it was at the end of the same month that the two enemy fighters made their strafing attack on the summit observatory. By a miracle, nobody was killed although some of the weathermen suffered bruises and scratches from ricocheting debris. And, although the 50-calibre bullets riddled the observation towers and smashed an instrument box, most of the precious equipment was unscathed.

In the end, Mt Fuji itself was a far more dangerous adversary than anything the Americans could launch at the meteorologists. The first casualty came in a snowstorm in April 1944, when 19 year-old Imamura Ichirō lost the way during a routine ascent as a member of the monthly relief crew. He stumbled blindly down the mountain before succumbing to exposure near the fourth-station level. The rescuers found him propped against a rock, as if he’d sat down to rest and never woken up.

The next mishap occurred in December 1946, when Koide Mutsurō slipped and fell from the ninth station. He was just 28. It is surely no coincidence that, of the four fatalities during the summit station’s six decades of operation, these two accidents closely bracketed the war’s end. As if climbing the mountain in winter was not already dangerous enough, the deck would have been stacked higher still against the weathermen by short rations, the blunted ice-axes and crampons, the lack of proper winter mountaineering kit.

Were these sacrifices worth it? This blogger cannot say what the Mt Fuji station might have added to the sum of meteorological knowledge. But by proving that men could survive and work in the extreme conditions of the summit, the summit crew did pave the way for a yet more ambitious project than year-round weather observations – the mountaintop radar that went into service in 1965 with the aim of saving thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands, of Japanese lives. This, though, is another story.

References

Fuji-san: oinaru shizen no kensho, Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1992; also for images of summit hut, ice clearance and radar station.

Timeline for Mt Fuji's modern history, from the project to re-utilise the summit station.

Summit of achievement

How Satō Junichi revived the dream of an all-year weather station on Mt Fuji

When, much against his will, Nonaka Itaru was rescued from his self-imposed ordeal atop Mt Fuji in December 1895, he did what any self-respecting Chikuzen samurai would do and composed a defiant tanka:

As the catalpa bow
Springs back, so will I;
Do not believe
That for long I go

Alas, the would-be meteorologist never did get together the money to build a better summit hut. Worse still, there were many who wrote off his efforts to take mid-winter weather observations: "Nothing of serious value resulted from his enterprise," sniffed Frederick Starr, an anthropologist and Mt Fuji devotee, writing in 1924.

Mr & Mrs Nonaka
(from a movie version of their story)

But this may be unfair. Nonaka and his wife Chiyoko, who loyally supported him during their 82-day sojourn, had proved that human beings could survive, if only just, on Mt Fuji in mid-winter.

And Nonaka’s goal – to take a year-round series of high-level atmospheric pressure readings – was one that would have been endorsed by any contemporary with an interest in the accuracy of weather forecasting. Indeed, one such contemporary was no less than a prince of the realm.

By profession, Yamashina-no-miya Kikumarō (1873–1908) was a navy man. He attended the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy and received a commission as a sub-lieutenant in 1894. At about the same time, he was sent to attend the staff college of the German navy, where he no doubt got to grips with the latest meteorological thinking. Back in Japan, he decided to make his own contribution to the science and, in 1901, put up the funds to build a weather station on Mt Tsukuba.

Prince Yamashina at the
battle of Tsushima

As all Hyakumeizan fans will know, at a mere 877 metres, Tsukuba is the lowliest of Japan’s One Hundred Mountains, and building an observatory on its summit was intended only as an interim step. For Prince Yamashina’s ultimate purpose was the same as Nonaka Itaru’s – to site the world’s highest year-round weather station atop Mt Fuji. But the Nonakas’ experience may have served as a caution not to be too ambitious at the outset.

A young meteorologist by the name of Satō Junichi (1872-1970) was appointed to oversee the Tsukuba observatory. Like the Nonakas, Satō was born in northern Kyūshū – the obstinacy sometimes attributed to natives of this region may be a not irrelevant character trait when it comes to siting weather stations atop high mountains. In 1893, he’d gone up to Tokyo to study at a scientific institute (東京物理学校).

In January 1907, twelve years after the Nonaka adventure, Satō scaled Mt Fuji to see for himself if it would be possible to survive up there in mid-winter. The weather was fine and the successful climb filled him with confidence. Then came an unexpected blow: in May the following year, the sudden death of Prince Yamashina deprived the Mt Fuji project of its main patron and sponsor. Satō was forced to look for alternative employment.

Satoh Junichi

In 1920, he shipped out to Japan’s recently acquired territory of Karafuto for a four-year stint as the head of the meteorological observatory. In his novel about Satō’s life, Nitta Jirō speculates that the meteorologist was attracted by the island’s extreme climate – in mid-winter, trees are said to explode with the cold. Indeed, the parallels between Sakhalin and the summit of Mt Fuji in winter cannot have escaped the would-be high-altitude researcher.

Two years after Satō’s return to Honshū, in 1926, a private benefactor (鈴木靖二) offered to fund the construction of a Mt Fuji observatory and Satō was appointed to lead the project. The following year, a small hut, large enough for Satō and a few government meteorologists, was completed at Yasu-no-kawara, a flattish area on the south-eastern rim of Mt Fuji’s crater. For the time being, though, observations would only be taken during the summer.

That would not satisfy Satō for long. And time was pressing – he was now 56 years old. In December 1927, he set off from Gotenba, accompanied by a few young meteorologists, to attempt another winter ascent of Mt Fuji. But the upper slopes were frozen so hard that their crampons wouldn’t bite, and they were forced to turn back. A similar attempt in December two years later also failed. Now time was running out.

On January 3, 1930, Satō set out again, this time accompanied only by the porter, Kaji Fusakichi (1900-1967), who would one day be famous for climbing Mt Fuji a record 1,672 times during his lengthy career. This ascent has taken on the stature of a minor epic within the annals of Mt Fuji.

Somewhere above the seventh station, in a storm of wind, Satō lost his footing and took a long, battering fall down the icy slope, knocking himself out on the way. But Kaji revived him, and the pair reached the summit hut as night was falling.

Once there, they settled in for a long stay. Too long, perhaps. Deprived of fresh food, Satō started to suffer from beriberi, a deficiency disease that probably increased his vulnerability to frostbite. Yet when Kaji urged him to retreat, he retorted that he didn’t want to become “a second Nonaka Itaru”. And so they held out until February 7 before descending. By that time, some of his fingers had been blackened by the frost back to the second joint.

Commissioning the summit observatory atop Mt Fuji
on August, 1, 1932

In the end, Satō did not risk his digits in vain. His exploit - and, no doubt, his gaman - had impressed the public and, even more importantly, the meteorological establishment. In the following summer, the summit hut was rebuilt, expanded and, on August 1, 1932, formally put into commission as the Provisional Mt Fuji Summit Observatory of the Central Meteorological Office.

On that August day, after the ceremonies and the group photograph, Satō prepared to descend the mountain. He was 61 years old; from then on, the station would be run by alternating monthly teams of young Met Office staff, year in, year out. He would no longer be needed.

Before he left, though, there was one more note to write up in the hut logbook: “Anemometer contacts are worn; need to be replaced.” And with that injunction, the old meteorologist set off down the burning slopes of the Gotenba trail for the last time.

References

Frederick Starr, Fujiyama: the Sacred Mountain of Japan, 1924

Chiyoko’s Fuji: Selected excerpts from the English translation of Fuyō-Nikki, 1896, translation by Harumi Yamada, 2013

Fuji-san: oinaru shizen no kensho, Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1992

Obituary for Satō Junichi from Japan Meteorological Society Journal