Ariake-yama (2268m)

Being a translation of the “lost chapter” from the original Nihon Hyakumeizan series in Yama to Kōgen magazine.

In the old days, a “meizan” was an attractively shaped mountain that loomed over one of the main highways. By “attractively shaped”, I mean that people of that era favoured regularly shaped mountains, like Mt Fuji, as they had yet to discover the beauty that resides in deformity. In those days, scarcely any mountains of the future Japan Alps made it onto the honour roll of notable mountains, because they were either too remote from civilisation or too uncouthly shaped. One of the few exceptions was Ariake-yama.

Ariake-yama and its triple-crowned summit (Wikipedia)

Today, rather few people know Ariake-yama. Of those who do, not many pay the mountain much regard. And, although the ridgeways between Yari-ga-take and Tsubakuro may be crowded enough to qualify as an Alpine “Ginza”, fewer still pay much attention to Ariake-yama even when they find it rearing up at them on their way to the foot of Tsubakuro. Rather, their eyes are drawn to the more imposing heights beyond. Ariake, it seems, has been consigned to the meizan of past ages.

In former times, though, people would direct their gaze not to those indistinct higher peaks but to the shapely mountain right in front of them, revering Ariake-yama as the Mt Fuji of Shinano Province. In an age when the Northern Alps were still “terra incognita”, Ariake was celebrated by no less a poet than Monk Saigyō:

In Shinano on a day
It sent me awestruck on the way 
To Hosono, the sight 
Of mighty Ariake on the right

And then there are these lines by Monk Yūgyō:

By this moon’s kindly light
 I will not lose the narrow
 Road to Hosono, although
 It leads me under Ariake’s height

Ariake-yama seen from Otensho-dake; print by Yoshida Hiroshi

According to an old chronicle, the mountain was opened in the second year of Daidō (807), when the great avatar Tohanachi Gongen was enshrined there at a place sacred to Ame-no-Uzume, where this goddess of dawn, mirth and revelry had manifested herself as a Buddha to save all living things. The mountain was once called Tohanachi-dake or “Door Away Peak”, in honour of the legend in which the sun goddess Amaterasu shut herself up in a cave and was coaxed out again when the goddess Ame-no-Uzume performed a comical dance. At which the god Tajikarawo-no-mikoto wrenched away the cave’s door and hurled it to earth at this very spot.

I came across this chronicle, the Record of Ariake’s Inauguration (Ariake Kaizan Ryakki), in Mr Kumahara Masao’s book on the dawn of Japanese mountaineering. By this account, the mountain mystic Yūkai, finding it lamentable that people had altogether given up climbing this sacred mountain, set out with his youngest brother in the sixth year of Kyōho (1721) together with fifteen or so villagers from the hamlet of Itadori at the mountain’s foot, and found his way over trackless slopes to the summit. There they stayed overnight and descended the next day.

The first path up the mountain was presumably opened on this occasion, as the chronicle says. And after a small shrine was installed on the summit, people came every summer, from far and wide, in droves to climb the mountain.

For evidence that this custom lasted into the Meiji period, we need look no further than Walter Weston, the mountaineering missionary and so-called Father of the Japan Alps, who climbed Ariake on August 14, 1912, in the first year of Taishō. Presumably he’d heard of Ariake’s reputation as a “meizan” of long standing. Most people associate Weston with Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps (1896), and rather fewer are aware of his later book, The Playground of the Far East (1918), which also concerns itself mainly with the mountains of Japan. This is probably because there is no translation. It is in this later book that he describes his ascent of Ariake.

Weston came to Nakabusa-onsen with the intention of climbing Ariake and Tsubaruko-dake. He was accompanied to the hot spring village by the guide Nemoto Seizō, with whom he’d climbed Myōgi, but set out for the mountain with the landlord of his inn too, as well as three more people; a journalist, a photographer and an artist who happened to be staying there.

The artist, as I learned only a few years ago, was none other than Ishida Ginshō, who is still alive and well in Kiso. From the sketchbook that Mr Ishida took with him on the Ariake climb, and still has in his possession, we see that there was a proper shrine on the summit and that, just beside it, Weston and his companions stretched themselves out on a rock to rest. According to Ishida, Weston was a real gentleman and chanted the mountain pilgrim’s traditional refrain, rokkon shōjō (may the six senses be purified) as they climbed.

In his book, Weston records that they reached the summit in less than three hours, walking up a forested path to reach a summit “bellevue of unusual interest”. As we’ve noted, Ariake was one of the first mountains in the Northern Japan Alps to be opened. Yet it has since so far fallen out of favour with the times that it hardly features even in guidebooks. I’ve heard too that the path has become horribly overgrown. When seen to best advantage, though, from somewhere due eastwards along the Takase River, the summit appears to wear a triple crown and elegantly trails its ridges to right and left. And then it’s easy to understand how Ariake came by its title of Shinano-Fuji.

References

Ohmori Hisao, Yama no tabi, Hon no tabi (A journey in mountains and books), Heibonsha 2007.

Fukada Kyūya, Hyakumeizan igai no 50 meizan (百名山以外の名山50), Kawade Shobō Shinsha.

See previous post for the story of how this essay was dropped when the original Hyakumeizan series was republished in book form. But why was it dropped? History does not, it seems, relate. You decide...

Hyakumeizan 101

On chance and contingency in one man's choice of Japanese summits

The One Hundred Mountains of Japan were never meant to be definitive, even if they're now marked on every Japanese hiking map. When Nihon Hyakumeizan came out in 1964, the author Fukada Kyūya said that, if the book were reprinted, he might well change a mountain or two. His contemporaries didn't take his list too seriously either. The whole idea was no more than "the witty conceit of a literary man", as scholar/alpinist Imanishi Kinji remarked.

Iwasuge-yama in Nagano - once a Meizan, but no more (photo: Wikipedia)

Imanishi was right. No list of mountains based on purely subjective criteria could possibly be definitive. Fukada chose his mountains for their stature ("height alone is not enough"), their historical significance, and their "air of distinction". He did stipulate a minimum height of 1,500 metres, but even that was negotiable - two of the one hundred, Tsukuba and Kaimon, come in below this bar.

In the afterword to his book, Fukada makes it clear that his choice is an entirely personal one. Moreover, his taste in mountains may well have changed with every peak he climbed:

Ex-Hyakumeizan:
On the way to Hoken-dake.

When asked which mountain is my favorite, my answer is always the same. It is always the mountain I have last climbed, the one that has left the freshest impressions on my senses. It is probably the same with the above-mentioned mountains. If I had climbed them more recently, they might well have been included in the list. Choosing among favorites is always difficult.

Choosing is always difficult: Fukada's words are borne out by the pre-history of his most famous book. He made his first attempt at selecting one hundred eminent mountains in the late 1930s. Of the twenty or so that he wrote up before the series was abandoned (and the magazine folded), four didn't make it into the canonical post-war Hyakumeizan - for those who might like to climb them, the ones that fell by the wayside were Iwasuge-yama, Hōken-dake, Tarō-yama, and Yu-no-maru.

As related elsewhere on this blog, what we know as today's Nihon Hyakumeizan started as another, completely new, series of monthly articles, published between 1959 and 1964 in Yama to Kōgen magazine. Then these articles were collected in a book. But not quite all of them - for some reason, Fukada decided to drop one of the magazine articles and replace it with an essay about a different mountain.

The "new" mountain is Oku-Shirane-san (Chapter 37 of the book), a volcano in the Nikkō region. And the one that was dropped was Ariake-yama, in the Japan Northern Alps. That, of courses, raises an intriguing question -why was Ariake, a handsome triple-crowned peak, deep-sixed? So that readers can make up their own minds, a translation of the original article will be published on this blog soon.

Or, better still, you could climb the mountain yourself. You might think of it as Hyakumeizan number 101.

References

Ohmori Hisao, Yama no tabi, Hon no tabi (A journey in mountains and books), Heibonsha 2007.

Meizan of the mainland

Why meizanologists must start their researches in the Middle Kingdom

Sumimasen, but, when writing up the introduction for One Hundred Mountains of Japan, I didn’t delve far into the origins of the word "meizan”. The Japanese characters 名山 are often translated as “famous mountain”, but as you’ll learn from Craig McGinty’s pioneering study on the meaning of meizan, “famous” might overstate the case. But let’s not go there right now.

Ur-Meizan: The Purple Heaven Palace on Mt Wudang, China

Suffice it to say, the introduction to the English version of Japan’s most famous mountain book does not add much to McGinty’s findings. It takes a brief look at Tachibana Nankei and Tani Bunchō, two Edo-period luminaries who respectively wrote up and painted a selection of Japanese "meizan", before it moves on to Japan’s modern period of mountain exploration.

Recently, I was reminded that the origins of the meizan concept go back a long way further than the Edo period. Indeed, they go back further than Japan itself. A few weeks ago, Marcus Hall, who teaches environmental history at the University of Zurich, was kind enough to point me towards an essay on the famous mountains of China by Mei Xueqin and Jon Mathieu. Their scholarly dialogue opens up a perspective on the mainland origins of meizan.

Any truly authoritative study of meizan, it seems, would have to start with China’s Five Great Mountains (五岳), a grouping that dates back to the Warring Countries period (475-221 BC). It would also have to take in the hardly less venerable Four Sacred Mountains of Buddhism (四大佛教名山), and the Four Sacred Mountains of Taoism (四大道教名山). And this is to say nothing of mountains that may have acquired their fame more recently.

China must have a lot of meizan. Like Japan, only bigger, it is a country of mountains; some two thirds of its surface is corrugated. So the study of its meizan would probably take a lifetime. On second thoughts, it’s probably as well that the introduction to One Hundred Mountains of Japan limits itself to the home country. If we’d attempted to trace the origins of famous mountains back to classical China, I suspect the book would never have been published.

Fortunately for any meizanologist who wants to pursue that line of research, there exists a Gazetteer of China’s Famous Mountains (中国名山志), published by the China National Microfilming Center for Library Resources. This provides a comprehensive overview of research on the history of China’s meizan. In case you're thinking about climbing all of them, though, please note that this resource runs to sixteen printed volumes.

References

Mei Xueqin and Jon Mathieu, “Mountains beyond Mountains: Cross-Cultural Reflections on China”, in Crossing Mountains: The Challenges of Doing Environmental History, edited by Marcus Hall and Patrick Kupper, April 2014.

Photo of Mt Wudang, courtesy of Wikipedia.

The nature of Nihon Hyakumeizan

What One Hundred Mountains inherited from the Wanderers of the Mist 

Ever since One Hundred Mountains of Japan was reviewed in Canada (see previous post), a ghastly suspicion has been gnawing. That, maybe, Nihon Hyakumeizan isn't a genuine mountain book at all.

Preposterous, I hear you say - how can a book with a hundred summits in its title not be a mountain book? But bear with me a moment. Real mountain books are by guys - usually guys, I'm afraid - who wear stinky fibre-pile jackets while seeing how dead they can get. (Make that tweed jackets for climbers of an earlier generation.) Their books rarely sell, unless they luridly recreate spectacular accidents.

Nature writing, by contrast, draws a wider, if less aggressively fit, clientele - folk who like wandering lonely as a cloud over hill and dale, or at least reading about it from the depths of an armchair. Often appearing at times when ecosystems threaten to crumble, classics in this line can sell quite prolifically - just as the original Nihon Hyakumeizan did from 1964 onwards.

So could it be that Japan's most famous mountain book owes its broad popularity to a whiff of nature writing?

Japan's first modern essay in that genre came out in 1898. To console himself after the breakdown of his first marriage, the writer Kunikida Doppo had retired from stressful Tokyo to the rural village of Shibuya - yes, that Shibuya; his lodgings were near today's NHK Centre - where he spent a few months wandering the woods and fields of Musashino. Today, a century after this sylvan Arcadia went under successive waves of concrete and tarmac, people know the region as Saitama.

Entitled Ima no Musashino, Doppo's account of these wanderings is less a short story than a loose ragbag of historical references, diary jottings and personal reminiscences. There's a sense that this isn't the traditional kind of terrain for Japanese writers - in the first few pages, we learn that oak woods cover the rolling plain, not the pine forests favoured by the classical authors.

In fact, Doppo admits, "It is only recently that I have come to understand the beauty of deciduous woods, something I first learned in reading this following passage from a short story." And then he quotes a page-long passage about an autumnal birch wood from Futabatei Shimei's translation of a short story by Ivan Turgenev, adding, as if to belabour the point, that "It was the power of his description which first led me to an appreciation of the beauty of deciduous woods."

Musashino in 1815, from a print by Suzuki Nanrei

Tastes in landscape were certainly changing at that time. Just four years before Musashino appeared, Shiga Shigetaka published Nihon Fūkeiron, his best-selling "theory about Japanese scenery". In an age when Western influences threatened to overwhelm Japan, Shiga's aim was to show that the national character was rooted in the country's unique geography. Yet, to pursue this most Japanese of agendas, he had to ransack a whole shelf-load of foreign books, most of them British.

As we have seen, Shiga's book inspired a young banker to climb Yari-ga-take, write Japan's first work of mountaineering literature, found the Japanese Alpine Club (this was in 1905), and rebrand Honshū's highest mountains as the Japan Alps. This in turn touched off a wave of mountain writing that culminated, six decades later, in Fukada Kyūya's Nihon Hyakumeizan. It is hardly a coincidence that Shiga's Nihon Fūkeiron gets a mention on the very first page of Nihon Hyakumeizan - without Shiga's ground-breaking work, Fukada's book could not have existed.

References to this Meiji-era re-casting of the Japanese landscape run right through Nihon Hyakumeizan. Chapter 61, for instance, opens like this:

According to Dr Shinmura Izuru, the word kōgen, meaning "upland", did not appear in Japanese literature until the Meiji period. True, there were places called Takahara, written with the same characters, but kōgen is now used in the sense of plateau or tableland, perhaps as a translation of those foreign terms. Whatever the word may mean, uplands aroused little interest up to the Meiji period...

These words introduce the charms of Utsukushi-ga-hara, a plateau that rises to just over 2,000 metres above Matsumoto. There's no need to sweat when bagging this summit today: according to Br'er Wes's Hiking in Japan site, you gain only 129 metres vertically while walking from your air-conditioned bus to the highest point. Real mountaineers - the sort who attire themselves in stinky fibre-pile - may well ask, incredulously, what this soft-touch summit is doing in a book that also includes such tiltyards of alpinism as Tsurugi-dake.

As if anticipating that very question, Fukada starts his next essay with these words:

Strange to say, but I believe that there are mountains for climbing and mountains for recreation. In the former category, the peaks are attained only by sweaty, lung-bursting efforts that merit a yell of exultation when you get there. You can stroll up the latter type with a song on your lips. As mountains, they do require one to go uphill but they don't force you to make single-mindedly for the summit. When the going is pleasant, they tempt you to wander off onto side-tracks or to lie down and watch the clouds go by.

Kiri-ga-mine: from a drawing by Takahashi Tatsuro

This is by way of promoting Kiri-ga-mine (1,925m), another undramatic altiplano in central Honshū and the very epitome of a recreational mountain. "From the foot of Kuruma-yama," Fukada recalls, "several trails or vestiges of trails wandered out into the broad grasslands that rolled away seemingly without limit. Only the hut-warden could thread this maze of pathways without error, although getting lost was no hardship. Every time we climbed Kuruma-yama, indeed, it was by a different path."

That passage, in particular, might pay homage to Doppo, who eulogises the wandering paths of Musashino which

...twist and turn through the woods, across the fields and there are so many forks that it is easy to go round in circles. The paths vanish constantly into woods, emerge into fields and vanish again, so that you can never keep track of anyone as he walks along. But for all that, the paths of Musashino are much more rewarding than any others, and people should not distress themselves at getting lost, for wherever you go, there is something worthwhile to see, hear and feel.

The parallels are suggestive - the twisting paths, the eclectic range of sources including foreign writers, the references to a novel style of landscape. In the end, though, there can be no proof that Fukada alludes to Doppo - for the later author makes no direct mention of the earlier one, at least within Nihon Hyakumeizan. At the same time, it's hardly conceivable that Fukada didn't know of Doppo's essay. After all, his own home in suburban Setagaya sat, and still sits, at the heart of the vanished idyll that Doppo had called Musashino.

What may be said for certain is that both authors liked to wander through pastoral scenery. There was even a newly minted word for this activity, as Fukada explains in his Utsukushi-ga-hara chapter:

With the advent of mountaineering in Japan, uplands started to gain a following. In fact, they acquired the same sort of status as mountains in people's minds. Silver birches, once thought a nondescript kind of tree, now took their place in every romantic landscape. Patches of waste ground set aside for grazing became "pastures", another new word. Beyond them rose distant mountains as if glimpsed in a pastoral idyll by Segantini, the Swiss landscape painter. Suddenly, wandering through the uplands or kōgen-shōyō became a recognized part of mountaineering.

Kōgen-shōyō had solid economic reasons going for it too. Although the nascent Japanese Alpine Club was remarkably inclusive - it welcomed both scientists and schoolboys, bank clerks and writers (indeed, its founder Kojima Usui was both), artists and attorneys- the subscription would have been a show-stopper for many potential recruits. Kunikida Doppo certainly couldn't have forked out the required one-yen fee, although he did publish a joint collection of poems with a future member - this was Tayama Katai, who joined the club during its early years.

So the need soon arose for a lighter, cheaper style of mountain excursion. That need was met when middle-school teacher Matsui Mikio (1895-1933) and his friends founded the Kiri-no-tabi-kai in 1919. These "wanderers of the mist" preferred one or two-day hikes to the Japanese Alpine Club's multiday expeditions, complete with guides, porters and expensive tinned food. And they favoured the lower ranges of Chichibu and Tanzawa, close to Tokyo, over the distant Japan Alps.

Ozaki Kihachi

Soon they had a manifesto of their own, to set against the voluminous literary outpourings of the Alpine Club. This was Kawada Miki's best-selling guide to one- and two-day walking tours in the Kanto region, Ichinichi, futsuka yama no tabi.

The translator and poet Ozaki Kihachi discovered the mountains after buying a copy: "I treated this book like a Bible of mountaineering," Ozaki recalled, "and it was always in my pack when I went walking." On meeting the author, he signed up with the Kiri-no-tabi-kai too. The club was good for his literary output: three years after joining it, Ozaki published Journeys and sojourns (Tabi to taizai), Japan's first slim volume of mountain poetry.

One might have expected the  toffs of the Japanese Alpine Club to have walked separately from the less well-off Kiri-no-tabi folk. But this expectation would be quite wrong. In fact, Takeda Hisayoshi and Kogure Ritarō, two stalwarts of the Sangaku-kai, were quick to join the Kiri-no-tabi-kai - whether they were invited, or if they asked to be let in, is not known to this blogger. And, at a later stage in his life, Ozaki Kihachi became a senior member of the Japanese Alpine Club. So the alpinists appreciated the attractions of the wanderers, and vice versa.

The hut on Kiri-ga-mine

"Once before the war I spent an entire summer on Kiri-ga-mine and learned to appreciate this recreational mountain to the full," recalls Fukada Kyūya in the relevant chapter. "From my room on the upper floor of a hut ... I could see Norikura, Ontake, and Kiso-Kaikoma right in front of me. Next door was the literary critic Kobayashi Hideo. Whenever the weather was fine, we would drag out the hut owner, Nagao Hiroya, on walks all round the plateau."

Fukada doesn't mention it in Nihon Hyakumeizan, but for the space of a week during that summer of 1935, the Kiri-ga-mine hut hosted a gathering of some twenty or so representatives of Japanese mountain and cultural circles, including members of both the Japanese Alpine Club and the Kiri-no-tabi-kai. Takeda Hisayoshi was there, as were Kogure Ritarō, Yanagita Kunio, the father of Japanese ethnography, and Ozaki Kihachi. It is no coincidence that Nihon Hyakumeizan is enriched by the writings and doings of each of these luminaries.

The year after the celebrated summit meeting, the hut on Kiri-ga-mine burned down. In a few years, the Kiri-no-tabi-kai was gone too: like many another mountaineering club, it was dissolved during the second world war. Yet its inclusive spirit may live on in Nihon Hyakumeizan and its catholic selection of mountains.

The big peaks of Japan are prominent in Fukada's list - how could they not be? - but the lower hills, the ones that harassed city-dwellers can escape to at weekends, also get their due. One of these is Daibosatsu-dake (Nihon Hyakumeizan, Chapter 70), strictly speaking more of a pass than a peak, and a favourite haunt of the Kiri-no-tabi-kai's founder.

If it's true that the Wanderers of the Mist influenced Fukada's choice of mountains, that might help to explain the dual character of Nihon Hyakumeizan - a mountain book that also appeals to people who prefer just to stroll through the uplands, wander onto side-tracks, or watch the clouds go by.

References

Musashino in River Mist, and Other Stories by Kunikida Doppo, translated by David G Chibbett, Kodansha International (those were the days)

Nihon Hyakumeizan, translated as One Hundred Mountains of Japan, University of Hawaii Press

Photos of Ozaki Kihachi and the hut on Kiri-ga-mine courtesy of 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).

Musings inspired by Mountain 99

The first English-language review for Nihon Hyakumeizan raises an interesting question

Unaccountably, the New York Times books editor hasn't been in touch. So the scoop of being first to review One Hundred Mountains of Japan in English has fallen to the Alpine Club of Canada's Sean McIntyre. In the April newsletter of the club's Vancouver Section, he describes how he climbed Kaimon-dake, the miniature but perfectly formed stratovolcano that Fukada Kyūya wrote up as the 99th of his "famous mountains".

Photo of Kaimon-dake from the original Nihon Hyakumeizan

Mr McIntyre is clearly familiar with Japan. "Japan is a land of lists," he writes. "There's the top spots to watch the sun rise and top city skyline night views. Every spring, people search out the country's top places to watch cherry blossoms. There are magazines and television programs dedicated to the must-see attractions and experiences; folks pursue them with a missionary's zeal in what often becomes a lifelong quest."

A lifelong quest - well, any Hyakumeizan-bagger will recognize themselves in that phrase, even if some manage to knock off their peaks in a far shorter time. What McIntyre says next, though, grabbed even more of my attention: "One Hundred Mountains of Japan was published when the Japanese wilderness had largely been tamed; Tokyo was hosting the Olympics and the nation had just launched its first high-speed train. As the country sped forward, Fukada's work offered a significant insight into the nation's soul."

That's a most telling point about the book's timing - Nihon Hyakumeizan came out in 1964, which was indeed the year in which Japan got its mojo back. But, as with most economic progress, there was a dark side. In Tokyo, traffic policemen had to carry small oxygen cylinders during their shifts, in Yokkaichi, people gasped for breath in the sulphur-laden air, and in Kyūshū the name of a small harbor town was about gain unwanted international notoriety.

Looming environmental disasters have little in the way of upside. One small consolation may be that, like the pieces of grit that prompt pearls to form, they sometimes catalyse great works of nature writing. It was no accident that the Lake Poets published their manifesto in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, that Thoreau's Walden started selling as America set up its own smokestack mills, or that Kunikida Doppo eulogized the fields and woods of Musashino just as Tokyo's conurbation was poised to roll over them.

So there is a proud tradition of nature writing in the face of environmental doom. But does Nihon Hyakumeizan rightly belong in it? That line of enquiry will have to be pursued in a future blog post. Meanwhile, many thanks to Mr McIntyre - or may I call you Sean? - for raising this fascinating question.

Story of a review

It seems scarcely possible that the same person who commissioned the original Nihon Hyakumeizan in the late 1950s could, more than half a century later, be the first to review One Hundred Mountains of Japan, the book’s English version. Yet exactly this has just happened.

The generous and perceptive review of the translated Nihon Hyakumeizan that you read in the previous post is by Ohmori Hisao (above), one of the Japanese Alpine Club’s senior statesmen. The original Japanese version of the review appeared in a recent JAC newsletter.

An authority on the European Alps, Ohmori-sensei has a long list of mountain and travel books to his name. He also introduced the latest edition of Fuji Annai and Fuyō Nikki, the journals by Nonaka Itaru and Chiyoko of their 82-day sojourn atop Mt Fuji in the winter of 1895.

In the late 1950s, Ohmori-sensei was working for a small publisher in Tokyo, Hōbundō, having recently studied French at university. It was probably thanks to this background that he got to know Fukada Kyūya, the future Hyakumeizan author, who was then translating a French mountaineering work for Hōbundō.

Here Ohmori-sensei himself takes up 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.

The Nihon Hyakumeizan series as it first appeared
in "Yama to Kogen" magazine

The rest is history. What later became the definitive One Hundred Mountains of Japan started life in the March 1959 edition of Yama to Kōgen. Chōkai and Nantai were the first essays to appear. Readers subsequently voted this the best feature in the magazine, which published two of Fukada’s mountains every month until April 1963. The articles were collected and published by Shinchōsha in July 1964 in an edition that you can still buy today.

It’s good to know that the work’s original commissioning editor is also still going strong. Domo o-sewa ni narimashita, Ohmori-sensei!

Review: One Hundred Mountains of Japan

The Hyakumeizan translation is reviewed in the Japanese Alpine Club newsletter:

This full translation of Fukada Kyūya's Nihon Hyakumeizan has been eagerly awaited.

The book has an introduction that summarises the development of mountaineering in Japan. As I've seen in France and Switzerland, people there are well aware of the activities of Japanese climbers in the Alps and the Himalaya, but they know almost nothing about Japan's mountains and mountaineering world. The only Japanese peak they know is Mt Fuji.

The introduction starts out by describing the arc of Fukada's life in mountains and literature from its start in Daishōji to its end on Kaya-ga-dake. Then it surveys Japan's traditions and literature of travel from the age of the Manyōshū to the Edo period, through the beginnings of modern mountaineering in the Meiji period, and the growth period after the second world war.

Tani Bunchō, Suzuki Bokushi, and Tachibana Nankei are introduced, as are the doings of Ernest Satow, William Gowland, and Walter Weston. Then come the 1902 ascent of Yari-ga-take by Kojima Usui and Okano Kinjirō, and their subsequent meeting with Walter Weston, as well as the catalytic influence of Shiga Shigetaka and his Theory of the Japanese Landscape. Unlike European alpinism, Japanese mountaineering was inspired by literature, not science, and this had a formative effect on Nihon Hyakumeizan, it is argued. Certain personalities such as Takeda Hisayoshi, a founder member of the Japanese Alpine Club, and Kogure Ritarō are introduced in separate sections.

The introduction is pleasant to read, and there is a good eye for detail in the narrative, which takes in diverse aspects such as the motivation for Kojima's epoch-making Yari climb - neither religion nor surveying, but quite simply "because it's there"; Kogure's ruminations on the most distant mountain that can be seen from Tokyo; and the famous meeting of alpinists on Kiri-ga-mine in the summer of 1935, in which both Fukada and the critic Kobayashi Hideo took part.

However, the word "meizan" in the book's title is left untranslated, although a note before the introduction explains why this was done. This reminds me of a conversation with the late Miyashita Keizō, a member of the Japanese Alpine Club and professor emeritus of German literature at Keio University - one of his works is referenced in this book. You can translate the Japanese words "meibutsu" or "meisan" with the English word "specialty", and likewise "meisaku" goes neatly into "masterpiece". But how do you translate "meizan"? As far as I can recall the professor's reply, there is no equivalent word in German. That seems to be the case in all European languages: there is no concept for "meizan" and hence no word for it. And, as you can't really call all of Fukada's one hundred "meizan" either 'famous' or 'notable', the translator has chosen to imply rather than translate that "mei-" element, or else he simply spells out the Japanese words "Nihon Hyakumeizan" in roman letters.

There is also a glossary of people, which looks to have been quite a labour. The one hundred or so entries seem to encompass pretty much everybody who appears in the book. Ranging from En-no-ozunu to Higuchi Ichiyō and Matsuura Takeshirō, the names are referenced to the chapters they appear in. Laudably, the names are given in the usual Japanese order - family name first - which is how they appear in the text too. The only exception is on the title page, where we read of "Kyūya Fukada"- why do this when the Japanese order is used in the main text? There are also some regrettable slips in some of the readings of mountain and personal names, as well as in the references. That said, I would like to see this introduction and the glossary of people mentioned in the text translated for Japanese editions of the book.

For this book is, all in all, a very good way of introducing a global audience to the unique work of literature that is Nihon Hyakumeizan, born as it is in our mountains - as well as to the mountain culture, history and traditions that the book embodies.

In fact, I wonder how many Japanese there are who have this sort of knowledge in their heads. My hope is that this translation will help to increase the number of mountain-lovers worldwide who have come to know and appreciate the Japanese mountains.

The translator is an Englishman who has climbed about one third of the Hyakumeizan, and there is photo in the book showing an ascent of Tsurugi-dake in the snow season. According to the evening edition of the Asahi Shimbun on January 7, he worked on the translation together with his wife, Harumi Yamada.

Peter Skov, the Canadian photographer who contributed the cover photo, was featured in Gakujin magazine in November 2009 and September 2011. The cover design for the paperback edition is fresh and original. There is also a hardback edition.

Ohmori Hisao, Japanese Alpine Club

By fair means

Climbing the One Hundred Mountains of Japan without fossil fuels

After Tim Macartney-Snape's sea-to-summit, on-foot-all-the-way ascent of Mt Everest in 1990 and Göran Kropp's solo, unsupported, ascent of the same in May 1996 - without bottled oxygen and after cycling to Nepal all the way from Sweden ­- it was inevitable that somebody would apply the same thoroughgoing ethic to Japan's One Hundred Mountains.

That somebody turned out to be Tanaka Yōki, a thirty-year old self-styled "adventure racer", who climbed the One Hundred Mountains of Japan last year using only "human power". Starting out on 1 April on the southernmost of the peaks, Miyanoura-dake on Yakushima, he completed his 100th mountain on Rishiri-dake, at the northern tip of Hokkaidō, 208 days later, on 26 October.

"Human power" means what it says. Tanaka not only walked between mountains, trashing fifteen pairs of running shoes en route, but paddled a sea kayak over the sea crossings between Yakushima, Kyūshū, Shikoku, Honshū and Hokkaidō. "Using just my own motive power meant that I felt the full force of the changing seasons and Japan's beautiful nature," he said, adding that he was relieved when the journey was over.

Tanaka was born in Saitama, but his father moved the family to Furano in Hokkaidō when he was still a toddler - it seems that his father was captivated by the portrayal of the northern island in the TV soap drama, "Kita no kuni kara". He competed in cross-country skiing at a national level while still a student and later branched out into adventure racing, twice taking part in the Patagonia Expedition Race.

His human-powered "Great Traverse" was filmed by NHK for a television series. It also coincided with the 50th anniversary of the first publication of the original Nihon Hyakumeizan, although that might have been accidental.

References

Photos are from NHK's Great Traverse website

Category killer

Nobody can say what kind of book Nihon Hyakumeizan is, but please don't let that stop you from enjoying the translation

Ah, the oxygen of publicity. Thanks to an article in the Asahi Shimbun, pre-orders on Amazon's Japanese site have temporarily lofted One Hundred Mountains of Japan into best-seller territory. For two weeks or so, the book duked it out among the top 100 foreign titles. It even nipped briefly (so to speak) at the heels of Fifty Shades of Grey.

A funny thing happened during this heady period. For a while, the book held the top slots for any Amazon Japan-listed foreign book in three widely differing categories - travel, ecology and science. "Travel" seems logical enough - I mean, you do have to cover quite a swathe of territory if you plan to climb all of Fukada Kyūya's favourite mountains.

But science and ecology? In all fairness, prospective readers with a technical bent should be warned of possible disappointment. Given that mountains are piles of rock and dirt, it's amazing how little space Fukada gives to geological ruminations. You will usually look in vain if you want to find out what a mountain is made of. Although, as noted before on this blog, the Hyakumeizan author did know his flowers.

This embarrassment of categories calls to mind a conversation that Project Hyakumeizan once had with the commissioning editor of an eminent publishing house. This took place soon after the translation was completed, a few years back. Unfortunately, said the editor, he couldn't take on the book - it wouldn't sell because it didn't fit into any recognizable genre.

Actually, he had a point. One Hundred Mountains is devilishly hard to categorise. Not unlike the geological mélange of Kita-dake, that mountain for philosophers, it blends together bits of this and bobs of that - a soupçon of travelogue here, fragments of literature and history there, all mixed up, but with masterly assurance, into a zany matrix of zuihitsu-style essay writing.

This categorical confusion is nothing new, by the way. When the original Nihon Hyakumeizan first came out, in 1964, it promptly won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature - in the category for biography and criticism. Biography? Criticism? Fukada's former climbing companion, Kobayashi Hideo, who was on the panel of judges, explained his advocacy as follows:

This is one of the most original works of criticism that I've seen in recent years. The objects of critical thought are, in this case, mountains. The author has chosen to write about mountains as if they were people. To do so, he has engaged with them face-to-face, so to speak, in all the remotest corners of our land.

Regrettably, Amazon doesn't rank the Hyakumeizan translation in either biography or criticism. But, as of Monday this week, the internet giant is performing a much more vital service - it is starting to ship the book, at least from its Amazon.com mother ship. Shipments from Amazon Japan will also start soon, I'm assured. So you can now buy one copy of the English-language Hyakumeizan, a mountain book, and get several extra literary genres packaged with it, at no additional charge.

Just don't expect me to tell you which they are, though.

New Year resolution

Resolve may fade with time, but the blog goes on ...

At about half-height, my glasses began to steam up, adding to the pressure. Nobody tells you about this hazard in the ice-climbing manuals, I whinged to myself, and started to drive the axes too deeply into the glutinous blue wall, as if compensating for the fading visibility. Now every move sapped twice as much energy. Below, my belayer endured the shower of ice divots in silence, but I got the unspoken message: “Stop faffing, and get a move on.”

Just before the rope ran out, a darker blur loomed through the condensation. I lurched towards it, torn between haste and caution on the lumpy ice bulges. After wrapping a couple of grateful slings around a mountain birch, I wiped the mist off my glasses and looked upwards – the next pitch would take us up a spiral staircase of crystal into the heart of mountain. But this vision had to remain unrealised – my lead of Komatsuzawa F1 had burned up so much time that there could be no question of going further. After Yamada-san had come up, we rapelled to safety. Well, sort of. There was still the frozen river to descend.

In those days, we resolved to start the year as we meant to go on. So we'd pointed our weatherbeaten Subaru into the frozen Japan Southern Alps – the more rugged Northern ranges would be too much for our modest talents – hiked half the night up a snowy track to a bivvy hut, and then lit out before the year's first dawn for our chosen waterfall. Thanks to the recent eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines, and its climate-cooling effects, ice was everywhere in the Japanese mountains. And somebody had to climb it.

Fast forward a decade or two, and I have to confess my appetite has waned for pressing my nose up against a congealed cascade. The objective hazards of New Year excursions remain, though. We saw in the Year of the Sheep at a Swiss mountain hut. Our ski-tour on January 1st started tentatively – the avalanche forecast stood at Level 3 or “considerable”. And the forecast was not kidding. Less than twenty minutes after leaving the hut, we triggered a first “whoomf” sound, a sure sign of weak, avalanche-prone layers in the snowpack.

As in Komatsuzawa, we would have to forgo our summit. Pausing below an old moraine to strip the skins off our skis, we looked wistfully up at the Jammspitz and recalled the sage advice of Don Whillans: “The mountain will always be there tomorrow; make sure you are too.” A few hours later, we boarded the little red train back to the big city. From that you may surmise – and I won’t deny it – that my appetite for winter driving has waned too.

Back in town, an e-mail was waiting of the kind that warms the heart of any translator. “Can I get a copy of your book through a European distributor or should I just order it from the University of Hawaii press (in January/February)?” Well, Denis, Amazon appears to be telling prospective buyers of One Hundred Mountains of Japan that they’ll ship in mid-January, and I have no better information than that. As for distributors outside the United States, the book won’t reach them for another month or so. So Amazon or the University of Hawaii Press are probably your best bets for now.

Now the Hyakumeizan translation is out – or almost so – the question arises of what next. After all, Project Hyakumeizan is out of a job, so to speak. But one thing leads to another. The Sensei has just helped me to put the finishing touches to a translation of an essay about Japan’s mountain scenery by Kojima Usui (1873–1948), the banker, writer and founder of the Japanese Alpine Club. I look forward to sharing the disquisition on this blog soon.

Further ahead, there is a full translation to finalise of Nonaka Chiyoko’s diary of a Meiji-era mid-winter sojourn on Mt Fuji. Her adventure was recently the subject of an NHK mini-series. The translation might be published as an e-book. Unless anybody out there would like to consider bringing it out in conventional ink-on-dead trees format? If so, please get in touch. Now that would be another really welcome e-mail…

Meanwhile, Project Hyakumeizan wishes all readers a great start to the year. Be safe, don’t push your luck in avalanche conditions, and may your ski-goggles or spectacles never steam over.

An apology

One Hundred Mountains: coming soon, but not quite as soon as expected

Sumimasen: I have to apologise. In an earlier update, you were promised the English translation of Nihon Hyakumeizan by Christmas. Well, it now appears that you will have it in good time for Christmas 2015. The printing presses are running as I write, which will let us claim - just about - that One Hundred Mountains of Japan came out in time to mark the half-century of the original book's appearance. Alas, copies will reach the shops, online and otherwise, only in the New Year. Zuibun o-matase shimashita.

It occurs to me that several readers of this blog have actually climbed all of Fukada Kyūya's hundred mountains - with all the costs, travelling and placating of office bosses that this entails - in far less time than it took to translate the book's 460-odd pages, let alone get it published. For the record, Project Hyakumeizan started the translation in 2003 and finished it three years later. Yet, as you see, more than twice that much time again was needed to actually get the book out of the door.

Just for fun, I was tempted to see how this tardy-gaited performance stacks up against the Paris-Dakar rally of Japanese-to-English translation - the challenge of turning Genji Monogatari into English. Actually, it might have been better not to venture on that comparison. For it doesn't show Project Hyakumeizan in a good light. Summoning the shade of the immortal Arthur Waley (1889-1966) to the witness stand, we find that he took a mere twelve years for his "transcreation", as he called it, starting in 1921 and completing the last of six volumes in 1933.

Picking up the baton two generations later, Edward Seidensticker (1921-2007) pared that time down to a round decade, bringing out his modernized Shining Prince in 1976. Another few years were knocked off this record by Royall Tyler (born 1936) with his acclaimed 2001 version of Genji, started in 1993. Of course, the Tale of Genji has been translated into many more languages than English. It seems that Setouchi Jakucho, a Kyoto-based nun, took just four years to finish her recension of Lady Murasaki's tale into modern Japanese. And she started at the age of seventy.

Confronted with such examples of translation dash and derring-do, I can only bow at the acutest of angles - please feel free to imagine me tilting ritually forward at the podium like some disgraced company executive - and offer you my most abject moshiwake gozaimasen. So please bear with me until January, and in the meantime have yourself a memorable (but, perforce, One Hundred Mountains-free) Christmas and New Year ...

Autumn meizan (4)

Travelogue continued: getting to know Hakusan again after a long gap

The life-size tyrannosaurus did discombobulate me - not that I took it for real, of course, though it seemed to lunge at us out of the twilight. As the Sensei had already explained – she was driving – the hulking beast was made of nothing more terrifying than papier-mâché. And it stands guard over a new dinosaur museum. But that was exactly what worried me: the creature was new.

As a rule, mountaineers aren’t fond of change – we like our mountains the way they always have been. This morning, though, innovations leapt out at every bend in the road. That’s only to be expected when you revisit a favourite mountain for the first time in decades. When we reached the end of the forest road, the Sensei parked her van in a multi-level car park; in the old days, this was just a patch of gravel.

Shrouded in mist, our mountain looked suitably mysterious. Hakusan is one of Japan’s three most sacred summits, along with Mt Fuji and Tateyama. It was the home mountain of the author who wrote up the Nihon Hyakumeizan, and the first high one that he climbed. "I could write for ever about Hakusan," Fukada Kyūya wrote, "so much has the mountain given me."

Unfortunately, the instant success of Fukada's book greatly increased the popularity of the mountains he described. That is all the more ironic in the light of the acerbic comments about new roads, ski resorts and summit installations that he sprinkles through his mountain essays. For Fukada was an arch-conservative. In the afterword to Nihon Hyakumeizan, he has this to say about “famous mountains” that let themselves be Disneyfied:

A peak that people admire from morning to night, that they crown with a shrine, necessarily qualifies as an "eminent mountain". A true spirit of reverence inheres in such places. Unfortunately, the crowds mobilized by mass tourism have debased some of these mountains, hallowed by tradition though they once were, and driven the mountain gods from their haunts. Such mountains are no longer eligible as Meizan.

Could Hakusan too be in danger of losing its Meizan brevet? As we shrugged on our packs in front of a grandiose visitor pavilion, I was starting to worry. The spirit of reverence seemed to be much in abeyance around here. True, the climbing path leads out under a concrete torii, but this structure serves mainly to funnel visitors over giant doormats. These are supposed to wipe the seeds of alien weeds from hikers’ boots, said the Sensei. A little later, she pointed out such an intruder, sprouting by the path.

Cloud kept our valley in shadow, though fitful shafts of light played on distant hills. Soon we stopped to take off our jackets: in the old days, frost pillars would push out of the ground in this season, and snow would already have dusted the summits. Today was more late summer than early winter. No wonder those alien plants are moving uphill.

Coming up to a pair of mountain birches that mark the start of Hakusan’s sub-alpine zone, the Sensei patted the silvery bark and announced them as old friends. A while later we reached the midway hut at Jin-no-suke. Or rather we reached the large blockhouse that replaced the small wooden hut which used to merge unobtrusively into the hill. We took our half-way break on the new concrete terrace, where once there was a forest glade.

Above the hut, we came to an outcrop of conglomerate rock, rounded pebbles frozen into a concrete-like matrix. Not the kind of rock you’d expect half way up a not-yet-extinct volcano; you could almost see the gravels rolling along the bed of some ancient river, washed down from a vanished mountain range.

It turns out that we were looking at the Tetori Group, the very formation that, lower down the mountain, yielded up the dinosaur bones for the new museum. The Sensei, who indulges my interest in rocks as a harmless eccentricity, walked on ahead while I took a photo. Some novelties do have to be accommodated, even if they go back more than a hundred million years.

Climbing back into the realm of lava, we passed a giant boulder that must have surfed downhill in one of Hakusan’s eruptions. Now the view opened up across a plain of rustling panda grass. This was Midagahara, the Buddhist name signalling a kind of gateway to the upper world. Years ago, we’d met the monks of Eiheiji here, black-robed and straw-sandalled, each carrying down a creel full of empty drink cans. No sign of them today.

At around 2,200 metres, panda grass gave way to an avenue of creeping pines. The gnarled branches looked to be in good health, green and glossy, with no trace of the strange blight that was reported last year.

We came up to Murodo. For a century or more a large hut has dominated this belvedere below Hakusan’s summit cone. Now a cluster of buildings sprawls across the plateau, big enough for 700 guests at once. This late in the season, all were shuttered. A few hikers were brewing up on gas stoves on the concrete ledges under the eaves. Most wore down jackets against the autumnal chill.

We'd left Murodo below when the clouds were rifted away, like a prestidigitator's tablecloth, to reveal a wild hassle of sunlit hilltops tumbling away in the distance. From out to sea, the clear autumn light cascaded over our mountaintop. Was it in search of visions like this that old Monk Taichō pioneered the way up here in the first year of Yōrō, almost a millennium and a third ago?

At the summit, the wind from the sea blustered against a stone revetment. Behind it sheltered the “okumiya”, the innermost sanctuary of the Hakusan shrine. Brightly dressed folk paid their respects in front of the weathered timbers. Others, at the trig point a few yards away, took selfies. We stepped up to the highest point and looked down at the little crater lake, faithfully reflecting the sky as it always has done.

The Sensei led the way – this is her native mountain too – to a sheltered spot below some boulders, and unpacked three of her industrial-strength onigiri. Our lunchspot faced inland, towards the Japan Alps. Ranges of lower hills rolled away at our feet, as if paying homage to our peak. Hakusan is a high mountain.

Some might cavil at that assertion. After all, Hakusan tops out more than a kilometre below Mt Everest's base camp. Or, to put it another way, you'd have to jack Hakusan up by the best part of two kilometres before it could face off against the Matterhorn. Yet Hakusan never fails to impress me as a mountain of stature.

Tucking into one of those industrial-strength onigiri, I wondered how this could be so. Something to do with the expansive views of an “island peak”, perhaps. Or the way that the summit cone stands aloof from the sublunary world of trees and grass. Or the frost-sculpted landscape of the craters below – the stepped slopes and snow hollows must be some of the southernmost periglacial features on this side of Honshū.

The Sensei interrupted my thoughts. “Just below us is the cave where Monk Taichō meditated,” she said. “With my mountaineering club, we visited it once – it took a while to find, searching around on those steep slopes.”

Naruhodo, I realised, however often you visit a “famous mountain”, there’ll always be something new to discover. It’s almost like a continuing conversation, one with a person of depth and character. I looked over at the Sensei at this, wondering if I should run the idea by her, but she was busy with her own onigiri. As for Hakusan, you know, one could do a lot worse for a Meizan-in-law…

The Big White Peak

A forgotten photo collection reveals the Hyakumeizan author climbing in the Himalaya

Second-hand bookshops can be serendipitous. I recently emerged from one near Basel Station clutching, for a paltry five Swiss francs, a collection of faded colour photos of the Himalaya. The photographer's name - Kazami Takehide - had caught my eye. Needless to say, there was a connection with the author of Japan's most famous mountain book.

It happened like this. In the mid-1950s, Fukada Kyūya was a jobbing writer for mountaineering magazines. Perhaps inspired by the French ascent of Annapurna in 1950, he was increasingly interested in Himalayan topics. This led to a series of articles in the mountaineering journal Gakujin from June 1953, just after the first Japanese attempt on Manaslu, the world's eighth highest mountain.

Unfortunately, the income from these articles was substantially consumed by Fukada's almost compulsive purchases of books about the Himalaya, many imported expensively from abroad. To rid the house of tottering piles of alpine literature, his wife later took advantage of her husband's absence on a mountaineering trip to build a book-shed in the garden.

In 1956, the Japanese collected their own 8,000-metre trophy. The veteran climber Maki "Yukō" Aritsune led the Japanese Alpine Club's third expedition to Manaslu, enabling Imanishi Toshio and Sherpa Gyalzen Norbu to reach the summit on May 9. Their success helped to stoke a mountaineering and skiing boom in Japan.

It also fired Fukada's own Himalayan ambitions. A Japanese Alpine Club member himself, he was now well enough known in mountaineering circles to find generous corporate support for a private expedition, although it was organized several years before ordinary Japanese citizens could easily travel abroad.

With three companions, Fukada took ship for Calcutta in the spring of 1958, arriving in Kathmandu some forty-five days after leaving Kobe. With Fukada at the head of fifty porters, an experience that made him feel like Napoleon, the expedition then marched to its base camp in the Jugal Himal.

Their intended mountain, today known as Loengpo Gang (7,083m), had been named Big White Peak three years earlier by a party of Scottish lady alpinists who climbed one of its neighbours. It was a wildly ambitious objective. Three high camps would be necessary to reach the summit, the Japanese party judged.

The comforts of Camp Three were scant. By the time it was established at 5,000 meters, the party's lack of high-altitude climbing experience was starting to tell. Age too may have had something to do with it; as Fukada had put it to a journalist just before leaving Japan, he was "only" 54 years old. Just to clamber in and out of the high-altitude tent's round hatch during a blizzard was a torment that had to be repeated several times a night.

The expedition photographer did manage to reach the east ridge by taking turns to break trail with a Sherpa companion. There the brown plains of Tibet were glimpsed through the clouds. Honour satisfied, Fukada decided to abandon the peak, impressing one colleague with his Buddhist spirit of self-abnegation. The party then moved on to the Langtang Himalaya and, after two months under canvas, back to Kathmandu.

The high-climbing expedition photographer was none other than Kazami Takehide. In the blurb to the English-language edition of his photobook The Himalayas, he is introduced as follows:-

"The author . was born in 1914. In 1943 he joined the Japanese Navy, where he did a three-year tour of duty, after which he managed a Ginza camera shop and and then the Sanei photo library, both in Tokyo. He has made several journeys in India and Southeast Asia. His most absorbing interest has always been high-mountain photography, and he is author of several books on the subject."

In his preface to The Himalayas, Kazami is curiously reticent about his participation in Fukada's expedition. All he vouchsafes about that experience is this: "In 1958 I spent a couple of months in Nepal, where I fell in love - with Nepal." To be sure, most of the photos in the book were taken on a later trip, in 1964, which he undertook specifically to take photos of the land and people.

Yet a few images from the Fukada expedition do creep into The Himalayas. On page 112, for example, there is an image of a Camp 3 in the Jugal Himal (see picture left). The mountain is not identified but the height given - 23,240 feet - makes it clear that the peak in the background is Big White Peak or Loengpo Gang. One glance at those Big Bad Ridges shows why Team Fukada would never get anywhere near the top.

Looking again at the photo, my attention was drawn to the figure standing in the foreground. As there were only four Japanese mountaineers on this trip (or was it three?), this is likely to be Fukada himself. The comb-over hairstyle is also a giveaway. But there is no way of knowing for certain.

As an expedition, the attempt on Big White Peak was somewhat of a fiasco. That's not to say that the effort was wasted. Sometimes it takes an overseas trip to make you appreciate your native land. The Himalayan trip may have done that for Fukada. On returning to Tokyo, he revived a project that he had been mulling for years - to portray one hundred of Japan's most eminent mountains. And the rest, as they say, is history.

References

Tazawa, Takuya, Hyakumeizan no Hito, TBS Britannica, 2003.

Photos from Kazami, Takehide, The Himalayas, Kodansha International, 1967.