Cross purposes (3)

Continued: how summit crosses conquered the Alps 

As the debate over the meaning of C D Friedrich’s summit cross paintings showed, symbols have multiple meanings, depending on who interprets them. Those paintings also contributed “not a little” to popularising the idea of summit crosses, says cultural historian, Martin Scharfe. We may doubt, however, whether they contributed much to the population of actual summit crosses. According to Scharfe himself, no more than half a dozen appeared on high alpine peaks during the artist’s lifetime.

Summit cross on the Gross Ruchen, Urner Alps

For peak-baggers who might want to visit their locations, these early summit crosses were set up on the Vincent Pyramid (1819) and the Zumsteinspitze (1820), both in the Monte Rosa massif, the Ankogel in the Hohe Tauern (1822), the Sonnwendjoch in Rofan (1823), and on the Dachstein (1834). In the same year, Swiss climbers put one on the Altels, a mountain in the Bernese Oberland.

To the summit of Clariden, April

Further evidence that mountain symbology did not rank high in most people’s awareness came in the winter of 1852/1853, when a storm wiped Sigismund von Hohenwart’s cross from the Grossglockner’s summit. For decades, nobody bothered to replace it. And, by the time somebody thought of doing so, the sociology of alpinism had changed completely. Middle-class mountaineering had arrived and, with it, the invention of alpine clubs.

Piz Terri, club outing, July 

In 1880, the Austrian Alpine Club, then in its second decade, submitted a humble petition to the Imperial authorities. Their request granted, the Club erected on the Grossglockner a new cross inscribed to the “solemn commemoration by the grateful Austrian people of the familial celebration on 24 April 1879 of the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of their majesties, Emperor Franz Josef I and Empress Elisabeth”.

Austrian mountain guides rescue the Grossglockner cross in 2010
Photo: Bergrettung AT - www.bergrettung.at/

Made of iron, weighing a third of a ton, and anchored to the rock with heavy chains, the cross has endured, just about, to this day. But not the obsequious plaque bearing the original gilt inscription, which vanished in the chaotic period after the first world war. (Piquantly, at a much more recent date, somebody affixed another memorial, this one for the late Jörg Haider, a controversial politician with a liking for Lederhosen. This too has vanished from the cross in its turn.)

Bending to the anti-imperial sentiment of the times, the Austrian Alpine Club re-dedicated the cross as a war memorial. For the mood had indeed changed. Writing in 1928, Eugen Guido Lammer, a “high priest of guideless and solo climbing”, asked “What has the cross to tell us in midst of the mountain wilderness – this memento of the worst judicial murder of all times? Just let the voice of the elements sound clearly so that Nature can speak to you in her authentic voice.”

Summit cross, Rigi

Then, in tones that anticipate those of Reinhold Messner, Lammer decried the “trashy monuments” (Kitschdenkmäler) that he’d encountered atop the Petit Dru, the Géant and “many another peak”. If they wanted to pray, Lammer enjoined his readers, then they should “desist from praying to these sickly-sweet simulacra, and address themselves instead to the divinity that resides in the fearful sublimity of the natural elements”.

Summit cross on the Lagginhorn, Valais Alps

Extreme climbers, then as now, may not be fully representative of their age. For the fact is that many new summit crosses made their appearance after the two world wars, at least if those Tyrolean statistics are to be believed. Most were set up by local communities or mountaineering clubs, often as memorials to a village’s war dead, or victims of a mountaineering accident.

One might take as an example the crosses that used to adorn the Schafreuter (2,102 metres), in the Karwendel range that runs along the Austrian/Bavarian border. The mountain’s first one, an oaken cross standing eight metres high, was put up towards the end of July 1926 by the local alpine club. It was dedicated to the memory of alpinists from Bavaria and the Tyrol who had fallen during the war.

In October 1951, the old cross was replaced by a new one, half as high. Again, it was the local alpine club, represented by its youth section, who took the initiative. Pater Volker, who officiated over the inauguration, said the cross on the summit symbolised eternity and, together with his congregation prayed for world peace, and for the souls of all Germans and Austrians who would never come home after the war.

The Schafreuter summit cross, after the hacking attack
(Photo: Alpenverein Tölz/Die Welt)

And there the cross stood until late August this year, when witnesses passed a man with short light hair and a slight beer belly on his way to the summit. When he reached it, he starting hacking away at the cross with an axe “like a wild animal”, as the Guardian reports, damaging it so severely that it was later taken down. This was the third cross that the unknown axeman had attacked in a matter of months.

There’s a strange twist to the Schafreuter story. The local mountaineering club – the same that set up the original crosses after the two world wars – was quick to promise that it would bring up a replacement next year. But they have been forestalled. Just one week after the axeman’s visit, a group of anonymous young men brought up a makeshift replacement cross and set it in place. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, they were wearing t-shirts that associate them with a right-wing nationalist group.

Summit cross on Vorderglärnisch, Glarus Alps

A police officer investigating the Schafreuter case has speculated whether the axeman had links to the Swiss Freethinkers, an association set up in Zurich in 1870 to defend the interests of non-religious and secular citizens. In 2010, the Freethinkers did call for a moratorium on new summit crosses in the Swiss Alps, although they condemn acts of vandalism.

Standing somewhat aloof from European affairs, Switzerland’s recent history and politics have been less volatile than those of its neighbours. By the same token, its summit crosses have generally stirred up less controversy. There is even a foundation, Croix aux sommets, that pays for new crosses to be set up. But the ruckus in 2010, not to mention the Patrick Bussard case, shows that the cross-currents swirling round the country’s otherwise serene peaks are not, in essence, so different to those that beset nearby regions.

Belayed to the cross, Matterhorn

Wisely, the alpine historian Daniel Anker steered delicately round these flashpoints when he surveyed the history of summit crosses for “Die Alpen”, the house journal of the Swiss Alpine Club – an article on which this post leans heavily. Crosses, we are led to infer, serve many purposes, from religious symbolism through furnishing the backdrop to summit selfies. Anker concludes his article by quoting another author’s account of climbing the Weisshorn. Reaching the top, the mountain guide clips his rope into an arm of the summit cross, so that “while we rested there, we were belayed by Jesus”.

Summit symbolism

There was no need to belay on my ski-tour, ten years ago, on that modest peak in central Switzerland. When I reached the top, the sun was sagging towards the horizon; everyone else had left. But still I needed a summit photo. As the cross stands barely waist-high, I knelt in the snow to angle my Nikon towards the miniature figure at its centre. Through the viewfinder, the arms of the little crucifix seemed to span the world.

References

Daniel Anker, „Das Kreuz mit dem Kreuz“, Die Alpen, 4/2012

Wilhelm Eppacher, Berg- und Gipfelkreuze in Tirol

Martin Scharfe, Berg-Sucht : eine Kulturgeschichte des frühen Alpinismus 1750-1850

Norbert Wolf, Caspar David Friedrich : 1774-1840 : der Maler der Stille, Taschen

Cross purposes (2)

Continued: on the meaning of C D Friedrich's summit crosses

Within a few years, all the German states were feeling the Napoleonic heat. By 1806, most of them were occupied by French troops. Over in Dresden, a young painter started on a remarkable series of drawings and paintings, all featuring crucifixes set in dramatic mountain landscapes. These works culminated in The Cross in the Mountains (the Tetschen Altar), the picture that made Caspar David Friedrich’s name.

The cross in the mountains (The Tetschen Altar) (1807/08)

Many critics found the image inadmissible. One accused Friedrich of trying to smuggle landscape painting into churches and onto altars. But surely that had been the artist’s intention all along. He even designed a frame for the painting, so that it could better serve as an altarpiece. The furore didn’t stop the Countess von Thun-Hohenstein plunking down two hundred thalers and carrying the painting off to Schloss Tetschen.

The story goes that, when the artist wanted to visit the Schloss to see his masterpiece in its new setting, he was repeatedly fobbed off by the Count and Countess – the reason being that they’d hung the work not in the chapel, as Friedrich had hoped, but in their bedroom.

Cross in the mountains (c. 1805/06)

So the critics may have had a point. Friedrich, a pious Lutheran, insisted The Cross in the Mountains was strictly a devotional work. But a close friend was not alone in seeing in his paintings of this period “a specific, I would like to say politically prophetic meaning, references to an invisible hand intervening in the confused affairs of men and in the liberation of Germany from the foreign yoke”. The symbol's significance depended on what you wanted to see in it.

Morning in the Riesengebirge (1810/11)

Symbols, wrote Paul Tillich, a Lutheran theologian, are not signs. While a sign points unambiguously at a universally agreed meaning, symbols grow out of the collective unconscious. They open up levels of reality which cannot be reached in any other way. They cannot be invented; they grow when the situation is ripe for them; and they die when the situation changes.

Be that as it may, after Napoleon was vanquished, C D Friedrich never again painted a notable cross in the mountains.

The cross in the mountains (1812)

(Continued)

Cross purposes (1)

How Alpine summit symbols have stirred emotions for centuries

One January, I set off to ski-climb a mountain in central Switzerland. Billows of freezing fog rolled aside just below the summit, letting me zig-zag up the final slopes in the slanting rays of the late-afternoon sun. The last few metres were climbed on foot, to a summit cross still hoar-frosted from the mist’s crystalline breath. The sight was unremarkable. Summit crosses – in the Alps, they’re everywhere. And always have been, surely?

Or perhaps not. A decade after that excursion, some seem to be questioning if crosses should stand on summits at all. An unknown axeman has vandalised three of them in Bavaria, recalling an earlier incident in Switzerland. And, should one suppose that such amputations happen only in central Europe, these cases follow one on Ireland’s highest peak – although that cross was apparently felled with an angle-grinder, not an axe.

Now it seems to be Reinhold Messner who has an axe to grind. In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, in which he comments on the Bavarian incidents, he admits that summit crosses are not necessarily to his taste. They are “a relatively recent phenomenon”, he says, originating more as political than religious symbols. In his view, “one shouldn’t clutter the mountains with religious, political and other ideological symbols. These are mostly demonstrations of authority. They’re all about domination.”

When it comes to the facts, Messner is solidly grounded, as one would expect the founder/curator of six mountain museums to be. By coincidence, it is the Tyrol, Messner’s native region, that provides the only summit cross statistics that come easily to hand. These data suggest that 95.3% of all Tyrolean summit crosses were put up in the twentieth century (up to 1955). Of these, almost seven out of ten were dedicated in the decade after the second world war.

Mt Aiguille: the dawn of alpinism, perhaps

If the statistics support Messner, what about the symbolism? Here too, his case is well-buttressed by historical evidence. When, on 26 June 1492, Antoine de Ville forced his way, by means of “subtle engines” (including ladders), to the top of Mt Inaccessible in the French Vercors region, his hand-picked team of seven included two priests. These were employed to celebrate mass on the summit, baptise the mountain and inaugurate three small crosses.

Some commentators dispute whether the first ascent of Mt Inaccessible – or Mt Aiguille, as de Ville re-branded it – really belongs to the history of alpinism. Their beef is that de Ville didn’t set the ball rolling himself. Instead, he was ordered to make the climb by Charles VIII, whom he served in the role of royal siegemaster.

But, for the purpose of this disquisition, that is the point. Those summit crosses marked the successful conclusion of an official act – a demonstration of authority, to use Messner's phrase. De Ville even submitted an official expense claim, for “1533 librae, 8 solidi 5 denarii unum tercium”. Summit crosses never have come cheap; it’s the cost of getting them up there. Incidentally, there are no longer any crosses on Mt Aiguille today.

Weather cross above the town of Klausen in 1561

Indeed, few crosses adorned alpine summits during early modern times. Rather, they were sited to mark passes or boundaries, or they stood within sight of villages to protect them against storms. Such “weather crosses” were numerous enough to irk an Austrian scholar by the name of Thomas Ebendorfer (1388–1464). People who set them up, he said, should be rebuked for presuming to honour the Lord “inadmissibly”.

The admonition was quickly forgotten. In the Tyrol, mountain crosses proliferated during the first half of the seventeenth century, a time of stress. Although the region escaped the direct ravages of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), it fell victim to associated ills such as the plague. Trapped in their alpine valleys, mountain dwellers sought to ward off these evils by setting up simple larchwood crucifixes, often with a protective rooflet over the cross-beam.

A cross of the plague years

So far, nobody – with the possible exception of Antoine de Ville – had thought of planting a cross to mark a mountain’s first ascent. According to Martin Scharfe, a cultural historian, the first to take that step was Sigismund von Hohenwart (1745–1825), who with five companions reached the top of the Kleinglockner (3,770 metres), Austria’s third-highest summit, on 25 August 1799.

The Grossglockner without a cross: painting by Markus Pernhart

The arc of von Hohenwart’s career ran almost parallel to that of the Enlightenment itself. As a young geognost, he discovered on his alpine travels a mineral that occurs in eclogite, a rock from deep within the earth. Later, after his appointment as the Bishop of Linz, he helped to root out unorthodoxy. He was probably the author of the inscription carved on the stone base of the Kleinglockner cross: "Eia nunc rara moles, exple finum, crucem exalta, cultum promove!” (Well now here is an unusual monument (mass of rock), fulfil your purpose, raise high the Cross and advance Christian worship!) Raise the cross, promote the faith; the message could not be more explicit.

Returning to the mountain next summer, von Hohenwart made the aery traverse across to the Grossglockner (3,798 metres), which was destined to become modern Austria’s highest peak. There his party set up a much larger cross, almost four metres high. Two years later, it was damaged by lightning.

Traversing from the Kleinglockner to the Grossglockner 

In retrospect, those turn-of-the century summers were a lull before the storm. Austria and its allies were then pausing for breath, having faced down the first onslaught of France’s revolutionary armies. Alas, the respite was short. Two days after von Hohenwart inaugurated the first modern summit cross on the Kleinglockner, a young French general relinquished his command in Egypt and set out for Paris, where he would soon wrest power from a moribund Directorate ...

(Continued)

The days the rope broke

An eerie fascination with severed cordage seems to cut across all cultural barriers

On 14th July, 1865, at 3.45pm - the exact moment would be imprinted for ever on the face of a smashed pocket watch belonging to one of the victims - Douglas Hadow slipped from his stance on the Matterhorn's icy upper slopes, cannoned into the expert guide Michael Croz, who was trying to place the young Englishman's boots into secure holds, and precipitated what is probably the most famous disaster in mountaineering history.

The Matterhorn accident 

Edward Whymper and two Swiss guides, the Taugwalders, father and son, survived only because the rope linking them to their falling companions snapped like twine when the load came onto it. The weak rope, which can still be inspected in Zermatt's alpine museum, became a focus of the official enquiry and much subsequent speculation - why had the Taugwalders used it when, according to Whymper, the party still had plenty of stronger cordage on hand?

In the end, the Taugwalders were acquitted of blame, but the lingering damage to their reputations was so severe that the elder man emigrated to America, only returning to Switzerland shortly before his death.

Now, on the 150th anniversary of the Matterhorn's first ascent, a Swiss TV documentary has sought to rehabilitate the Swiss guides. They used the weak rope, so the journalists hypothesise, because Whymper had hastily cut his way out of a "good" rope, a few hours before the accident, so that he could race Croz up the final snowslopes to the summit. So Whymper himself was to blame for the Taugwalders' actions, by ruining one of the party's stronger ropes.

Whymper's ropes in the Zermatt alpine museum

Strange to say, this theory had a previous airing - exactly fifty years ago. To mark the "Matterhorn centenary" in 1965, the eminent ski-mountaineer and travel entrepreneur Sir Arnold Lunn brought out a book with that title. In it, he takes more or less the same line as this year's Swiss documentary makers - that Whymper created the problem for which the hapless Taugwalders took the rap.

For his pains, Lunn earned himself a stern riposte from two writers in the Alpine Journal, the official voice of Britain's Alpine Club. In reviewing Matterhorn Centenary, D F 0 Dangar and T S Blakeney pronounced as follows:-

A story that Lunn seems to wish to accept as true is the yarn that Whymper had himself cut the rope, at the time when he and Croz were preparing to race to the summit of the Matterhorn . Hearsay stuff of this sort cannot be accepted; it came to one of us from G. E. Howard, who had had it from A. E. W. Mason, who said he heard it said by Whymper after a very good dinner, where the wine had flowed freely. Almost anything might be said or thought to be said in such circumstances; we would need to know, before taking it seriously, how sober the diners were, Mason as much as Whymper. Did Mason hear Whymper aright? Did he recount what he heard aright? Considering the utter needlessness of cutting the rope on this occasion - it would be much simpler to loosen the knot than to have to grope for a knife and then cut the rope and considering the improbability of Hudson standing by silently, and not objecting to the cutting taking place, we submit that, unless it can be well authenticated, to accept this story is simply absurd.

Far be it from this blogger to rekindle a controversy that is best allowed to smoulder out. Instead, the aim of this post is to highlight the emotions and symbolism that swirl around the humble alpine climbing rope. What is it about a rope? The idea that one might break is enough to send a frisson down the spine of any climber. As for deliberately cutting the rope - embodying as it does the ties of trust and mutual reliance that bind a mountaineering party together - the mere thought conjures up a sensation of almost metaphysical horror.

Be that as it may, scholar-alpinist Claire Éliane Engel noted in 1950 that the Zermatt affair had touched off an entire subgenre of mountain literature, all of it revolving around severed ropes. According to her seminal A History of Mountaineering in the Alps:

The Matterhorn accident suggested a new and exciting notion to non-climbers. Alpine ropes are liable to break or be cut, though it is surprising to think of the violent jerks they can sustain. Thus it came about that the cut rope became one of the typical features of novels written by non-climbers, and occasionally by a climber. In Tartarin on the Alps, Alphonse Daudet has the rope simultaneously cut by the two men who are tied to it. The cut rope makes a majestic reappearance in one of the short stories of La Croix du Cervin, by Charles Gos - a story which greatly agitated the guides of Zermatt. It comes out again in the fantastic setting of Rex Warner's Aerodrome, where the villain of the plot, having had his rope duly cut by his rival, falls an unrecorded number of hundreds of feet without being killed.

Had Mrs Engel published her history a few years later, she could also have mentioned Japan's best-known mountaineering novel in the paragraph above. For Inoue Yasushi's Hyōheki (The ice wall) also hinges on the failure of a climbing rope.

The story was serialised in the Asahi Shimbun for two years before Shinchōsha published it in book form in 1957. Later, the novel was to spawn two different TV dramas and a full-length feature film. Commercially speaking, it was almost certainly among Inoue's most successful productions.

The action unfurls when top alpinists Uozu Kyōta and Kosaka Otohiko attempt a first winter ascent on the fearsome east face of Mae-Hodaka. Just before they reach the summit, in a blizzard, Kosaka takes a fall - and vanishes into the abyss. The rope has broken! Or has it? The climbers were using one of the new nylon ropes, supposedly indestructible, and people soon start to suspect that the rope didn't break of itself. Was it cut, indeed?

Just before the accident, Kosaka had confided in Uozu that he was having an affair with a wealthy businessman's wife, and soon Uozu too finds himself more closely involved with the glamorous Minako than is altogether prudent. Meanwhile, it emerges that the company that employs Minako's husband supplied the nylon fibres to the manufacturer of the lethal rope...

Leaving these romantic and melodramatic embellishments aside, Inoue took the mainspring of his plot directly from real life. On the second day of 1955, first-year university student Wakayama Goro was climbing with two colleagues on the east face of Mae-Hodaka when he slipped. The 8mm nylon rope, guaranteed to take a strain of one ton, parted where it ran over a rock above Wakayama's head, causing him to fall to his death.

Scene of the real-life 1955 accident on Hodaka-dake

A public controversy now erupted. The victim's brother, an engineering graduate, demonstrated that an 8mm nylon rope would fail under just body weight if it ran over a sharp edge. For its part, Tokyo Rope insisted that its nylon ropes were many times stronger than the old-style hemp climbing ropes, and held a public demonstration in April 1955 to prove the point. This made it seem as if Wakayama's mountaineering club, the Ganryō-kai, had been mistaken to question the safety of nylon ropes.

The Ganryō-kai's next step, in July 1956, was to self-publish a 310-page report on its concerns about nylon ropes, which it sent to mountaineering organisations and publishing companies. At first, official bodies including the Japanese Alpine Club, took little notice. However, Inoue Yasushi appears to have heard of the report and to have interviewed Wakayama's brother and another member of his party while researching Hyōheki.

Hyoheki: the Saturday TV drama version

Meanwhile, the Ganryō-kai's case was strengthened by several more accidents involving rope failures. Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry later estimated that up to 20 climbers might have lost their lives in such accidents. Yet it wasn't until June 1975, more than twenty years after Wakayama's fatal fall, that Japan became the first country in the world to introduce official safety standards for climbing ropes. By that time, it was no longer regarded as safe to climb on 8mm ropes, even if they were doubled up for use as twin ropes.

There is a curious echo of the "nylon rope affair" in Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan), which like Hyōheki, was published by Shinchōsha. The chapter on Hodaka-dake ends with a threnody on the mountain's dangers:-

Not a few have failed to return. Ōshima Ryōkichi and Ibaraki Inokichi are just two who gave up their lives on Hodaka. Winter climbing too takes its annual toll. Kosaka Otohiko and Uozu Kyōta are two more names, albeit fictional, in a roll that will never end. And with its cruel beauty the mountain will continue to lure men to their doom.

References

Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen, Tatort Matterhorn, documentary broadcast on 13 July 2015

A Word For Whymper: A Reply To Sir Arnold Lunn, by D F 0 Dangar and T S Blakeney, Alpine Journal, 1966

Hyōheki (The ice wall), by Inoue Yasushi - available in German translation as "Die Eiswand".

Nihon Hyakumeizan by Fukada Kyūya, translated into English as "One Hundred Mountains of Japan", University of Hawaii Press, 2014.

Death March on Mount Hakkōda

Timeless lessons on mountain leadership from a master of documentary fiction

Such was the prestige of the Imperial Army that civilians were once prohibited from owning books about the disaster. But thanks to a film made in 1977, almost everybody in Japan today knows the story - that, just over a century ago, almost 200 soldiers perished in a blizzard on Hakkōda, a mountain in northern Japan. The film took its cue from a deeply researched novel published in 1971 by the meteorologist-turned-writer Nitta Jirō.

The historical facts underlying Nitta's novel are simple. In preparation for the coming war against Russia, the Japanese army embarked on a series of winter exercises designed to train units for combat in Siberia or Japan's northern territories.

Two platoons, one each from the 31st of Hirosaki and the 5th Regiments, set out to traverse the Hakkōda massif in January 1902. The platoon from the 3lst completed the exercise as planned but a ferocious blizzard, probably the worst in the century, caught the men of the 5th out on the open mountain. Of the 210-strong platoon, 199 soldiers froze to death.

Men of the 31st Regiment
on winter manoeuvres

In Death March on Mount Hakkōda, these facts are woven into a story of epic quality. Epic here may be taken in both its mountaineering sense of a miserable time and its literary meaning of a narrative with universal significance.

Partly because the authorities did their best to suppress the facts at the time of the disaster, the author has taken certain liberties with history. The two exercises were, in fact, unrelated, on different dates and followed different routes. But for the purposes of the novel, the platoons are vying for the honour of the first winter crossing of the mountain and it is their rivalry that leads to the disaster.

So, on one level, the book is a study of The Platoon that Got It Right versus The Platoon that Got it Wrong. On one hand, we have good planning, competent leadership, adaptability, proper equipment, careful navigation.

On the other, there is a confused chain of command, inadequate preparation, inflexibility in the face of impossible conditions and the inevitable outcome. The lessons are trenchant and universal. So much so, that, when the novel was first published, one Japanese company bought fifty copies to distribute to their management to impress on them the danger of failing to communicate with their staff.

But there is more than a dry analysis of an accident to this book. Born in 1912 in Nagano, trained as a meteorologist and having survived the war in Manchuria, Nitta Jirō knew his army, weather and mountains. So his account of the 5th and the 31st has the force of personal experience behind it. The feeling of threat as the blizzard approaches, the growing confusion and personality clashes as the 5th's platoon loses its way - these are moments that will be familiar to many a mountaineering leader. Here is Lieutenant Kanda of the ill-fated 5th as he loses control of the situation:

When Kanda turned to Shindo to explain to him, map in hand, why he thought he had been mistaken, Yamada grabbed Shindo's lantern and shone its light on the stump of the branch. "Look, someone cut a branch off this beech to mark the road to Tashiro. Now, go quick and tell the platoon leaders that we've found the way there. That ought to cheer up the men." Kanda had been unable to get a word in. He stood still. A wave of despair washed over him.

The 5th and the 31st are history but the mountain is still there, the winter skies still loom menacingly dark over the snowy ridge, and the panda grass still flutters in the north wind where the gusts have stripped the snow from the crest (Nitta's eye for detail bespeaks long acquaintance with the winter mountains).

And the same mistakes are still made in the mountains, with consequences from which modern Gore-Tex and fibre-pile are sometimes not enough to save us. For these lessons too, Death March on Mount Hakkōda is recommended reading for all summer, winter or armchair mountaineers.

References

Nitta Jirō, Death March on Mount Hakkoda, translated by James Westerhoven, The Stone Bridge Press, California.

Black-and-white photos are from Yama to Keikoku illustrated history of Japanese mountaineering (目で見る日本登山史 by 川崎吉光、山と渓谷社)

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).