Snow records, past and present

Mt Ibuki's record-breaking snows give way to an ominous sign of the times

The Financial Times rarely troubles itself with Japan’s hundred mountains. But last week, the pink pages celebrated Ibuki-yama, Fukada Kyūya’s Hyakumeizan no. 89. Writing in the FT’s travel section, Nick Middleton, an Oxford University geographer, marked the anniversary of the world’s deepest-ever snowfall, which was recorded 90 years ago on the summit of this 1,377-metre mountain near Nagoya.

Snowy Ibuki-san: woodprint by Hashiguchi Goyoh

On 14 February 1927, the snow was already more than nine metres deep on Ibuki, when an “astonishing” 230 centimetres fell in 24 hours, bringing the total depth to 11.82 metres. Japanese meteorologists call these large mountain snowfalls “yamayuki” (mountain snows), notes Middleton. They occur when cold, dry air sweeping in from Siberia picks up heat and moisture on its way over the Sea of Japan. You get the drift.

Unsurprisingly, most of that snow falls on the mountains lining the Japan Sea coastline. Yet Ibuki sits as close to Japan’s sunny Pacific seaboard as it does to the traditional “snow country”. This apparent anomaly might be resolved by a glance at the map below. It reveals a gap in the Japan Sea coastal range, through which those cold winter winds can blow through onto Ibuki. (There’s more detail on this blog.)

Some years ago, a mid-winter summit climb by meizanologists Chris White and Wes Lang showed that Ibuki-yama still likes to defend her snowy reputation. (The female pronoun is surely justified, as Wes has since named his daughter for the mountain.) If you want to emulate their feat, though, you might want to hurry. Last December, Ibuki set a more ominous record. The first snow fell 22 days after the average date, the most delayed "hatsu-kanmuri" (first snow crown) ever seen on this mountain.

References

Financial Times, "A Geographer’s Notebook: the world’s biggest snowfall", 17 February 2017

Wes Lang, Tozan Tales, Ibuki – the search for beauty

Chris White, i-cjw blog, Mountain redeemed

A meizanologist's diary (8)

October 16: “Ara-mah!” The Sensei’s exclamation of surprise is more than justified. For what could be more improbable than a chance meeting, well into the twenty-first century, on a local train somewhere in Hokuriku, between the instigator of Nihon Hyakumeizan, a book first published in 1964, and its translators more than half a century later.

Yet, without a doubt, the figure balancing carefully towards us along the swaying railcar is none other than Ohmori-san – who, as a young magazine editor back in 1959, saw fit to commission a series of essays about one hundred selected Japanese mountains. We first met him last year, at the Japanese Alpine Club in Tokyo.

The Fukada Kyuya Museum at Daishoji

The three of us are on our way to Daishōji, the small town between Fukui and Kanazawa that numbers the Hyakumeizan author as one of its most famous sons. We’ve been invited to a seminar on the book’s translation by officials of the Fukada Kyūya Yama no Bunkakan, a museum to the writer’s memory.

The Bunkakan is a graceful old wooden building, shaded by a magnificent gingko tree in its courtyard. In Fukada’s youth, it housed the offices of a textile firm. In an aery first-floor room, floored with tatami, I expound on the role that the “white mountain” Hakusan played in the Englishing of Japan’s most famous mountain book.

Hakusan was Fukada Kyūya’s native mountain. It was the first high one he climbed – indeed, the same is true for his translator. While a student in Kyoto, I climbed Hakusan with the Sempai.

Then, when I was at a loss on how to research the book’s introduction some years ago, it was the Senpai who brought me a copy of Heibonsha’s “Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka” (Why do people climb mountains?). This very readable history of Japan’s mountaineering history was co-edited by a certain Ohmori Hisao. Yō no naka wa semai, na …

After the seminar, we are invited to pay our respects to Fukada’s grave. The Sensei and I decide to walk there, taking in the author’s childhood home on the way. There is still a small printshop at the address, just as there was in Fukada’s day, although the business has since passed out of the family. A photo at the Bunkakan shows a young Fukada (with bicycle) standing in front of the house.

The Fukada family's printing shop, then and now

Daishōji is still a quiet country town where, if you listen carefully, you can catch a few echoes from Fukada’s evocation in Nihon Hyakumeizan:-

My native mountain is Hakusan. You could see it from the top floor of the house where I was born, from the gates of our primary school, from the banks of the river where we used to catch minnows, from the sand dunes of the beach where we swam, in short from just about anywhere in our town. There it was, right in front of us, noble and beautiful. As the name promises, it was a white mountain for fully half the year.

We wander into a shrine on the wooded hill that bounds Daishōji’s southern edge. Entering the peaceful grove, we realise that, not for the first time, we are uncertain of our position.

Back in the street, a random passer-by must be accosted. Fukada Kyūya’s grave? Certainly – you’ll find him up that flight of stone stairs, through the gateway. It’s good to be in a town where everybody knows your favourite author.

Fukada’s gravestone is a simple granite stele. You could see Hakusan from here, our guide tells us, until yonder pine tree grew up. We then walk to Enuma Shrine to visit another, more elaborate, memorial to Fukada.

The stone panel is engraved with one of the author’s best-known poems.

Before supper, we have a few minutes in the Yama no Bunkakan’s museum.

Ohmori-san and I linger beside a cabinet with one of Fukada’s manuscripts, a copy of Bungei Shunjū, one of Japan’s leading critical monthlies, and a 1959 edition of a now-defunct mountaineering magazine. Together, these items sum up the genesis of Nihon Hyakumeizan, but it’s best if Ohmori-san tells the story:-

As Hōbundō was a small company, I had to do everything by myself. While editing books, I also had to help edit magazines. Thanks to this, I acquired the necessary skills on the job. One day, the editor of the monthly magazine Yama to Kōgen (Mountains and Highlands) retired, and I was asked to take on this work.

Just then, I came across Mr Fukada’s essay on “Uncrowded Meizan – in pursuit of repose and solitude,” which he’d written for a special issue of Bungei Shunjū. It was in this article that he first floated the idea of ‘a hundred famous mountains of Japan’. “That’s it!” I thought to myself – this would definitely make an excellent project.

You see, I wanted to make something more of this magazine than just something for outdoor or mountaineering club members. And the literary prowess and the mountain experience that Mr Fukada brought to the table was exactly what I had in mind. So I called on him at his home in Setagaya, did some negotiation with him, and got his agreement to write.

Regrettably, you won’t find this history in the introduction to One Hundred Mountains of Japan – that’s because I only learned it after we went to press. But I hope to correct this omission, if there is a chance to reprint the book one of these days.

Over supper – we are now in a fine ryōtei – we are introduced to Oki Masato, a retired professor of architecture, who has recently published an authoritative book on the Indian Himalaya. Even without this information, I can see by Oki-sensei's bearing that I’m sitting opposite a veteran of the Greater Ranges.

In the early 1960s, Oki-sensei was one of many young climbers who visited Fukada Kyūya at his Setagaya home to seek advice on unclimbed Himalayan peaks. In 1965, as a member of the renowned Meiji University mountaineering club, he took part in a first ascent of Daulaghiri II (7751m). It is probably no coincidence that Fukada reminds us in his Hakusan chapter that Daulaghiri is the ‘white mountain’ of the Himalaya.

Our conversation is momentarily drowned out by some lively demonstrations at the other end of the table. One of our hosts is to be heard toasting Ohmori-san on commissioning Nihon Hyakumeizan. Ohmori-san brushes aside the compliment: “It was the obvious thing to do.” Our host is unabashed: “It’s a book that brings people together” he insists. And with that nobody can cavil.

The passport issued to "Kyuya Fukata" for his Nepal expedition

A meizanologist's diary (5)

October 12: As the Tateyama Museum lies on a pilgrims' route, it’s only right that getting there should be a bit of a mission.

You waft into Toyama on a sleek Shinkansen – so far so good – then, warping back some decades, change onto a rattletrap railcar, which rocks and rolls up its single track, stopping at every weedgrown halt, until it deposits you – the only passenger to alight – at a deserted platform on a wooded slope above the Jōganji River.

From there, it’s a two-kilometre hike (unless you try assuming a taxi) up a winding road to the village of Ashikuraji. In this season, the country air tingles with the smoke of bonfires burning waste straw, and you nod to the farmers as you stroll past. Everyone has time to greet each other out here.

Finally, you walk past a torii fronting an age-old cedar grove – this must be one of the most important shrines on the pilgrimage route – and turn left into the grounds of the Museum.

The two ladies seem pleased to see me at the ticket desk (¥300, not including the special exhibition), perhaps because so few meizanologists happen through their doors on a weekday morning. That’s a pity, because this is a museum that no self-respecting mountain fan should miss. The recommended route through the permanent exhibition starts on the third floor with a reproduction beech wood and a display of the local geology. These I give shortish shrift, as I prefer to inspect my trees and rocks in situ.

Pay dirt, so to speak, is struck on the second floor, which devotes itself to the Tateyama faith, its origins, and the rituals surrounding Onba, a kind of earth mother deity. My eye lights on two wooden figures of the Buddha, each with a hole in the left breast (yakizu). This reminds me of the relevant passage in the Tateyama chapter of Fukada Kyūya's Nihon Hyakumeizan:

Tateyama was among the first of Japan’s mountains to be climbed. While Saeki-no-Ariwaka was provincial governor of Etchū, in the first year of Taihō (701), it is recorded that his son Ariyori pursued a white hawk deep into the massif’s fastnesses. There he saw a vision of the Three Great Buddhas and, swept up in adoration, straightway established the Tateyama Daigongen shrine.

It turns out that Fukada’s account is incomplete. The full story is that, after pursuing the hawk into the mountains, Ariyori shot an arrow at a bear. On searching for the wounded animal, he found to his horror that he’d hit a figure of the Amida Nyorai instead – hence the hole in the statues. The shrine was founded as an act of penance.

By feudal times, the Tateyama faith had spread across the country. Again, Nihon Hyakumeizan takes up the story:

That the mountain has been celebrated from ancient times is probably due to the prestige of the Tateyama Gongen or avatar. Until the Meiji government took steps to disentwine the Buddhist and Shinto religions, monks thronged the temples at the mountain’s foot, at Iwakura-ji, as well as Chūgū-ji within Ashikura-ji. In serving the avatar, each monk visited his followers all over the country every year, giving out amulets and urging people to climb Tateyama to pay their respects at the summit shrines. Etchū’s trade in herbal remedies may have originated in this way.

Making my way via a video of Utō, a Tateyama-themed noh play, and past an opulent mandala, as well as a mock-up of a sacred cave, I come at last to the objects I’d come so far so see – the crozier and spearhead found atop Tsurugi, Tateyama's rugged neighbour, on the mountain’s first modern ascent, in July 1907.

In a display cabinet that could have been borrowed from some high-collar bijouterie, the ritual implements are somehow smaller than I’d expected, yet otherwise look just as Fukada describes them: “The spearhead looks all but uncorroded, while the tip of the staff has acquired a beautiful green patina.”

Traditionally, the objects were assigned to between the second half of the Nara period and the early Heian period. Recently, though, an assay of their metals has cast doubt on this thesis – although without suggesting any definite alternative date. Looking at the artefacts in their brightly lit cabinet, I find myself wondering how they could possibly be so well-preserved if they’d lain exposed on a mountaintop for twelve hundred years.

Let prospective visitors to Ashikuraji be warned. You’ll need more than an hour or two here. There’s more to the village than just the Museum. There is a Panorama Hall, with a video presentation on the history of the Tateyama faith, there’s a perfectly preserved example of a traditional lodging house for pilgrims, and there’s a separate small museum on the mountain’s climbing history.

Alas, I’m out of time, if I’m to get home at a reasonable hour. I spare a few minutes to glance at the Museum’s special exhibition on depictions of the Buddhist hells. There were eight levels of eternal damnation, apparently, graded by degrees of turpitude, much as in Dante. Then I step outside.

For my sins, a fox has made off with the fine morning while I've been occupied, and he's wrapped the mountains in cloud. I start down the road towards the station at a rapid trot, trying to outpace a squall rolling in from the opposite direction.

All in vain; the first drops spatter onto the pavement. Just at that moment, a white car sweeps to a halt just ahead. The driver gets out, points a camera at something in the road, and gets back in again. The car starts off, then – as if thinking better of it – stops again. The near-side window winds down: “You’d better come with us,” says a woman’s voice from the passenger seat – surely, it’s the driver’s wife – “it’s going to rain properly now.”

And they’re right. So heavy is the downpour that nobody sees the turnoff to Chigaki station. But not to worry; perhaps they could drop me further down the line, and in the meantime I can thank my rescuers properly for their kindness. They are a retired couple from Shikoku, making a tour of the Hokuriku region.

“It was lucky we stopped just then,” explains the driver. “I travel around the country photographing drain covers, and I’d just spotted a good one when we overtook you.” This is an unusual pursuit, I'm about to remark - when I reflect that, as hobbies go, drain-spotting makes a lot more sense than flogging the length and breadth of Japan to pursue a list of peaks selected, on purely subjective grounds, by a hard-up writer half a century ago. “Naruhodo,” I say, and leave it at that.

The car’s satnav seems to soak up some of the couple’s geniality. As the first convenient station for my drop-off, it picks out Iwakuraji – one the villages mentioned in Nihon Hyakumeizan. In days gone by, pilgrims would make this their last stop on the lowland plains, before winding up into the hill country of Ashikuraji, their base for the Tateyama ascent. Now, thanks to the Shikoku couple, I can visit both centres in a single day.

After waving my benefactors goodbye, I walk into the station building and look for somewhere to buy a ticket. Failing to find a vending machine, I look into the stationmaster’s office. To my surprise, it contains a stationmaster. In a quiet monosyllable or two, he issues me a ticket to Toyama and tells me the next train will be along in half an hour.

To pass the time, I start inspecting a row of faded photographs arrayed along the wall of the waiting area. They show men and women in Meiji-era dress. Clearly a film set of some sort, though it’s hard to see how they relate to this somnolent station.

Before I have a chance to ask, the stationmaster is at my side. He’s obviously quite proud of these pictures. “When they made Tsurugi – Ten no ki,” he explains, “they used this building to stand in for Toyama station. It was the only place left that looked old enough.”

Now, I remember. An old friend brought me the DVD from Japan soon after it came out. In the film’s opening scene (above), the young Army surveyor steps down from his train into a bustling crowd at Toyama station (above) - it is, of course, the summer of 1907.

Soon he’s ordered to make Tsurugi’s first ascent, for the honour of the Army. And one of the last scenes (below) is set on the summit, where Uji Chōjiro, the veteran guide, catches sight of two unfamiliar objects lying in the grass – the bronze crozier and a spearhead, both remarkably well preserved. This incident too is immortalised in Nihon Hyakumeizan:

At last the day came when Tsurugi was stripped of its mystery. On the thirteenth of July 1907 (Meiji 40), a government survey party reached the summit. It turned out that they were not the first to visit what they had assumed to be an untrodden peak. In fact, the mountain had been climbed long before, as the surveyors realized when they discovered on the summit a spearhead and the tip of a priest’s staff...

I turn to thank the stationmaster for making this connection. Meizanologically speaking, he’s made my day.

A meizanologist's diary (4)

October 11: to Kanazawa, first to take a turn around Kenrokuen. The famous garden is approached through the grounds of the old castle.

This was where Fukada Kyūya did his military training in the pre-war years, when the castle housed an army base. In off-duty hours, it’s recorded that the future Hyakumeizan author would climb a tower and console himself by gazing through the wooden gratings at distant Hakusan, his native mountain.

Kenrokuen was supposed to combine the six aspects of a perfect garden: spaciousness and seclusion, artifice and antiquity, water-courses and panoramas – I take this from the excellent website of the prefectural authorities.

Yet one wonders how much of the original vision has survived fire, repurposing as a public park, the depredations of war – the pines were tapped for fuel – and repeated restorations. Never mind, the sacred mountain of Horai is still there. Indeed, by some accounts, there may even be two of them, one floating in the Hisago-ike pond, and another in the Kasumi-ga-ike.

Then to the prefectural history museum, which occupies a fine brick building that once served as an arsenal. The meizanologist’s eye was caught by a wall tableau showing a dense network of temples across Hokuriku that were dedicated to mountain religions. Not all of them belonged to the Hakusan faith.

On the way back to the station, there was just time to drop in on the Ishikawa Institute of Modern Literature, which inhabits part of the former Ishikawa No.4 Higher Normal School buildings. An exhibition on mountain writers runs until November 27, to mark the new “Mountain Day” national holiday (August 11) and front-run next year’s 1,300th anniversary of Hakusan’s first ascent by Monk Taichō. (We will hear more about him soon.)

Pride of place was accorded to Fukada Kyūya, as a native of Ishikawa – he was born in Daishōji, halfway between Fukui and Kanazawa, and lived in the latter city for a few years after the war, until his wife got fed up with the snowy winters. Poignantly, one photo showed the Hyakumeizan author on his last mountain (below).

On display were some of the manuscripts for Nihon Hyakumeizan: the blocky yet serviceable script recalled Fukada’s remark that his best-known book was written with a pair of mountain boots. Below the manuscripts could be seen a copy of Yama to Kōgen, the mountain magazine where the essays that were to form Nihon Hyakumeizan first appeared.

It was good to see the English version accorded the honour of a display cabinet too:

Also on show were books by Inoue Yasushi (“Hyōheki/Die Eiswand”), Izumi Kyōka (“Kōya Hijiri”), Nitta Jirō (“Hakkōda-san/Death March on Mt Hakkoda”) and Tani Kōshū, a manga and science fiction writer.

The photos of Inoue Yasushi visiting the Japan Alps (above) and practising with an ice-axe (below) help to explain why his famous mountain novel has the ring of authenticity.

Alas for English speakers, the only translation of Hyōheki is in German. Now there’s a challenge for somebody….

A meizanologist's diary (2)

October 9: to Daishōji, the birthplace of the Hyakumeizan author, to hear a slide presentation by Tanaka Yōki. The self-styled adventure racer is the first and only person to have completed a round of Fukada Kyuya’s one hundred mountains of Japan “by fair means” only – that is, entirely on foot, except for the sea crossings, for which he used a sea kayak.

More recently, he’s completed the second 100 mountains of Japan – that is the Hyakumeizan 200, less the ones he climbed before – again on foot and by kayak. The strait between Wakkanai on the Hokkaido mainland and Rishiri island alone took ten hours. Altogether, Tanaka covered more than 7,800 kilometres and climbed 110,000 metres, solely on human power.

There’s a brief outline of his original journey on this blog, and more detail on the second 100-mountain “Great Traverse 2” on an NHK website (in Japanese). By way of conclusion, Tanaka said he wanted to live an “arigato to ieru jinsei” – a life to be grateful for. Or should that be a life filled with gratitude? Either way, it sounds like a good way to live.

The seasons of Shibutsu

Unexpected perspectives from a spring ski-tour in a forest

The beech woods, as we skied through their bare arcades, looked somehow familiar. We were back in Tokyo before it came to me. Those cloister-like perspectives fading into shadow, the gaudy figures flowing through them, these came straight out of a painting I’d seen. Only, instead of admiring the Hunt by Night on a gallery wall, we'd traded places with the very courtiers that Paolo Uccello once painted. Or so it seemed for an instant.

Shibutsu is a mountain of unemphatic charms. Its time-worn layers of serpentinite can’t compete with the volcanic sprezzatura of Hiuchi, just across the valley.

The reason some Hyakumeizan fans save it till last, writes Wes Lang in his guide to Hiking in Japan, is that the characters of its name (至仏) mean “go to the Buddha”. This makes the summit an auspicious place to end a quest for all One Hundred Mountains.

In Nihon Hyakumeizan, Fukada Kyūya pours a dash of cold water on this idea. Probably, the mountain’s original name had nothing to do with Buddhism, he says. Instead, the characters were just used to spell out a local place-name in an ad-hoc way. “Be that as it may,” he continues, “the name Shibutsu both sounds and looks good. It strikes an almost literary note.”

For Fukada, the worth of Shibutsu lay in its views. “I believe that was the first time I had ever looked down on the fabled plain of Oze," he recalled after climbing up here in the autumn of 1926. "The lambent, ochre-coloured expanse stretched away to the foot of Hiuchi’s pyramid in the distance. I thought myself a happy man to have seen the beauty of Oze for the first time from the summit of Shibutsu.”

On a grey March day, the plain of Oze is not in the least lambent. Under its blanket of waterlogged snow, the marsh looks more like a deserted carpark. Those beech woods, though, in their winter dignity, they might, if you’re lucky, let you ski for a moment through the depths of a Renaissance panorama.

Paolo Uccello's "Hunt by Night", courtesy of Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Meizan spring & autumn (3)

Fujisha-ga-dake: following in the footsteps of Fukada Kyūya

Maitta, na. The poem wasn’t there – there was still a wooden post in the ground, but both plaque and poem were gone. Oh no, said the Sensei. I can’t say I was bothered, though. It was too splendid a day to worry about one tanka or haiku more or less.

Sometimes I suspect that Hokuriku folk are playing the Seattle game – they talk up their fogs, mists, rains and snows to put off potential migrants from the overcrowded cities on the Pacific coast – who might otherwise surge over the mountains, in zombie-like hordes, and turn these rural provinces of Ura-Nihon into another concrete wasteland...

But, if that really is their game, they’ll need to keep quiet about days like this one. The morning shrugged off its last mists as the Sensei drove her van up the mountain road. A sturdy suspension bridge took us across a reservoir’s tea-green snowmelt and then in the strengthening day we’d rambled up through the beech woods.

On this May morning, the light roared vertically down onto our summit from a cloudless zenith. The glare picked out every leaf and shrub in hyper-real viridian. Westwards, the ultramarines of the Japan Sea merged into an azure sky.

Was it a day like this when Fukada Kyūya, the future Hyakumeizan author, was captured by the mountains? “My hometown is Daishōji, in Ishikawa Prefecture,” he records in an essay on the mountains of Echizen, “but my mother was from Fukui, and that’s why I went to Fukui Middle School (today’s Fujishima High School). So the blood of both Kaga and Echizen courses through my veins. And, in my final year at primary school, the first mountain I ever climbed was Fujisha-ga-dake, which straddles the border between the two prefectures. Although it is only 942 metres high, the mountain that overlooks my hometown is elegantly formed.”

Fujisha-ga-dake, a "Fuji-imitating peak"
(Photo courtesy of Yama to Keikoku magazine)

In the next paragraphs, Fukada explains what set him on the path towards his famous One Hundred Mountains:

People don’t just fall in love with mountains. They need some kind of impetus. In my case, somebody praised me for being a strong walker – if you want to get somebody to do something, the first thing to do is flatter them. In my hometown, there was a lad called Inasaka Kenzō, five years older than me, who was already studying medicine in Kanazawa at the time I started middle school. Ken-chan was a mountain-lover who was already doing climbs in the Northern Alps, and it was this great sempai who first taught me mountain ways. And a good guide is the second thing you need if you’re going to really get involved with something.

On this blindingly bright top, the first thing that involved me was to slap on more sun-cream. And the second was to sit down on a convenient log and sink my teeth into one of the Sensei’s industrial-strength onigiri – we’d had an early start. Around us, couples and families were spreading out picnic cloths and tucking into their Hello Kitty lunch boxes – Fujisha is still a good mountain for children. Primus stoves were roaring too, so that sybarites could sip hot soup or filtered coffee while gazing out into the blue distances.

Equipment choices were simpler in Fukada Kyūya’s youth:

I climbed many of our local mountains while I was in middle school. For seven and a half sen, you could buy a sheet of the Army General Staff’s 1:50,000 scale maps, and I liked to mark mine up with red pencil lines to show where I’d been. There were still no rucksacks and so I just slung my schoolbag over my shoulder and set off in straw sandals and leggings. By the time I went on to high school in Tokyo, I’d fallen completely in thrall to the mountains.

In high school, he fell for poetry too. Under the nom-de-fudé of Kyūzan (“Nine Mountains”), he churned out haikus and, with friends from his native Hokuriku, started a school literary journal. His enthusiasm for seventeen-syllable effusions faded after he moved on to Tokyo University – short stories and novels were more the thing now – but he kept composing the odd verse all through his life. It was one of these later poems that the Sensei wanted to show me. Somebody had recently put it up on this mountaintop, she said.

We walked over to a neighbouring clearing but found it empty, except for that telltale post. The poem had flown. Or somebody had taken it down. Probably Fukada would have preferred it this way – not a few of his Nihon Hyakumeizan chapters end with acerb comments on people who try to embellish mountaintops with statues, monuments and other tat: “You never saw such things in the old days and, speaking for myself, I prefer my summits unencumbered with them,” he wrote in the chapter on Senjō-dake.

In the end, we didn’t need a text – the Sensei discovered that she could remember the poem and, on the way down the mountain – note to potential visitors from Omote-Nihon: this path is horribly slippery even in fine weather – she recited it to me:-

山の茜を顧みて／一つの山を終りけり／何の俘のわが心／早も急かるる次の山

Yama no akane wo kaerimite/hitotsu no yama wo owarikeri/nan no toriko no wagakokoro/hayamo isogaru tsugi no yama

Still the evening peaks are burning
And though our climb is hardly done
My captive heart’s already yearning,
Aye desperately, to find our next one.

When the meaning of these words had trickled through, I looked at the Sensei with amazement. It was as if old Fukada had just read our minds. “So, where will you take us next?” I asked.

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.