The making of a Meiji mountaineer (5)

Concluded: a translation of Kogure Ritarō's A talk about mountaineering

In this way, the people of a congregation would go on long pilgrimages to their special mountain for a week or more, or even several weeks. Thus, most of the notable mountains had already been climbed, except for those in a small part of what’s now known as the Japan Alps. But if there had been any indomitable monks like those pioneer mountain mystics of old, who tirelessly opened up new mountains and proselytised their faith, I can scarcely imagine that they would have left any mountain untracked. So this is a piece of good luck for us.

Climbing a snow valley at Harinoki, woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi (1926)

The important thing to note is that most of these mountaineers were commoners. While the city-dwelling aristocracy and the literati were celebrating Mt Fuji simply as something to look at, the commoners were climbing mountains all over the place. Of course, the power of faith is part of the explanation, but one can’t help feeling that the vigour of this mass mountaineering movement and that commoners were organising group ascents from quite early times can be put down mainly to the fact that Japan’s mountains are easy to climb in the summer.

These mass ascents meant that there would be thousands or even tens of thousands of climbers, but except on their chosen route, the mountain wasn’t devastated. For example, when we had to relieve ourselves, we dug a hole, did our business on a sheet of paper, and tidied up afterwards; we were always extremely reluctant to desecrate the mountain. Standing on the top of Shirouma, I couldn’t help feeling sad at the way that beautiful sward was being trampled from end to end. As we keep climbing the mountains that our forebears opened for us, in new ways, and pass them on to the next generation, surely we should want to avoid passing them on in a shop-soiled state.

As my mountain-climbing evolved from such circumstances, it’s only natural that I can’t entirely escape my origins. So I wear Japanese garb over my straw sandals and leggings, don a rush mat against the rain, keep an oiled paper cape ready, hang my baggage from panniers, and wear a hat of cypress bark instead of a straw one. I’ve been told by Mr Fujiki that this makes me look like an itinerant swordsman of old, and indeed there could be some similarities, as this was the traditional garb for travelling. Of course, as a pilgrim, I didn’t carry a short sword or a fighting staff, but fortunately I was able to keep climbing mountains in this way up to the end of the Meiji years, without any accidents, and it was only when I first met the new city-dwelling type of climber, never having heard of such a thing, that I realised to my amazement just how many people like climbing mountains. And among those people are the founders and inaugural members of the Japanese Alpine Club.

Sunrise on Mt Fuji (Goraiko): woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

The downside of traditional mountaineering dress is when a storm hits. As you can’t put up an umbrella, all you can do is wrap it tightly in the straw mat and tough things out. I once got caught in this way while climbing Kaikoma from the Todai valley, and I still remember how we struggled to avoid succumbing to the cold. In those days, we’d stay the night at the summit, so as to enjoy the view of sunrise at leisure on the next day, as we felt safe sleeping on an open summit, even if it was colder, rather than camping in a gloomy wood. As for food, I sometimes walked carrying enough large balls of baked rice for three days, but I doubt if such tribulations can be imagined by anybody who hasn’t experienced them.

Well, I’ve rambled on for long enough with my talk, but if you’ve learned something from it about the way mountain-climbing was in those days, then I will consider myself more than amply rewarded.

References

This is a beta translation of a chapter (登山談義) from Mountain Memories (山の憶い出), as republished by Heibonsha in 1999 and edited by Ohmori Hisao. Kogure Ritarō (1873-1944) grew up in a mountain village where people still made regular pilgrimages to Mt Fuji and Ontake. He made his way via the new Meiji educational system to Tokyo, where he joined the Japanese Alpine Club a few years after it was founded, and later became its president. For more about the celebrated mountain meeting at Kirigamine in August 1935, see the introduction to One Hundred Mountains of Japan.

The making of a Meiji mountaineer (4)

Continued: a translation of Kogure Ritarō's A talk about mountaineering

When they went unescorted by a sendatsu, one might think it would be quite problematic for these unversed pilgrims to make their way safely on unfamiliar mountains without maps, but the fact is that the way was well thought-out, the route was always the same, as were the stops for food and lodging, so that they would eventually reach their preacher as long as they followed this routine. Then too, there were at least three signs on each of the guesthouses that clustered around every post station, marking them as the lodgings for various congregations such as the New (一新講), the Original (故信講), the Reverent (崇敬講), the Divine Wind (神風講) and the Kantō Schools (関東講).

Avenue of cryptomeria trees: woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

As most of these names were used to show that the congregation so identified stayed here, the effect was somewhat provincial. For example, I seem to remember that the Divine Wind congregation came from the shrine of Ise, while the Reverents (Sūkei) were probably worshippers of Kompira. As for the New Congregation (whose name was also written as 一新講社), this was a widespread association of inn-keepers that was probably formed around 1881 or 1882, although I haven’t investigated the matter thoroughly. Anyway, there was at least one guesthouse with its sign at every post station.

A guide booklet, as issued by the New Congregation to its pilgrims

When staying at a guesthouse of the New Congregation, the landlord of the first lodgings would give a first-time traveller a booklet of about ten sheets of paper, of 3-5 size (about 9cm x 15cm). The cover was printed with the character for open (開) in white within a red circle, and the characters for the New Congregation (一新講社) below that. The landlord would write his name and stamp his seal in the book and give the traveller a letter of introduction to the next lodgings. Unlike one’s baggage, one would always keep the letter of introduction on one’s person, so that there would be no fear of dropping it or handing it to the wrong person on the way. The letter of introduction would say:-

此御客様御案内申上候に付御入宿相成候はゞ御大切に御取扱之段御願申上候以上

I’d like to introduce this guest to you; please look after them well during their stay.

or

此御客様御さし宿仕候間御着の砌には万事不都合無之様御取扱のほどねがひ候也

This guest stayed with us; when they arrive, please ensure they are well looked after and take good care of them.

Or, sometimes we were given a printed letter from the lodging house we were due to stay in next, and in that case there would be the following additional remarks:

私方より宿引差出不申若外宿引のもの旅人体になり私方を悪しく言ひ外宿をしんせつらしく御すゝめ申か又人力ひきも右様に申候共決て御取上なく御投宿冀望候也

We don’t send out touts. If touts from other lodgings pretend to be travellers and try to do you a favour by speaking ill of us and recommending another lodging house, or if rickshaw men say such things, please don’t listen to them and stay with us.

In this way, one could find the way to one’s destination quite easily, especially when travelling alone, and the letters were extremely valuable as a way of making a booking, as the custom was in the old days. Apart from showing the way between post stations, they had very useful maps to mark the sights and ancient monuments along the way.

Pages of a pilgrim's booklet, showing route and sketch maps

Of course, the paper and print quality of these booklets was poor, and the script would sometimes fade, leading to misunderstandings. In the booklet for the Nakasendo route to Kyoto that I got at the Tsutaya in Kiso-Fukushima, it said you could climb Kisokomagatake either from Agematsu or Nezame, and so I changed my plan to climb from Agematsu and saw the splendid sights of Nezame-no-toko before tackling Kisokomagatake on the following day. According to the map, there was a pond on the summit known as Tama-ike, but when I topped out I found only a hut and no pond. Then, when I found Nō-ga-ike, another pond, I thought this must certainly be Tama-ike and wrote it up as such in my account of the journey for my school magazine. Later, I was sorry to see that this passage was quoted, without much alteration, by Professor Yamasaki Naomasa in the Kisokomagake section of his Geography of Greater Japan.

However, after talking about this at the mountain meeting, when I got back to Tokyo, I found another booklet, which happened to have been issue in October, in which I saw that Tama-dake and Nowaka-ike were written side by side. As the characters other than “tama” and “ike” had been effaced in the notebook I originally looked at, it turned out that I’d carelessly confused this Tama-ike with Nō-ga-ike, so that I’m forced to redouble my apologies. However, in fact, it may be that the pond really was called “Nowaka-ike” because the katakanaワdoes not look as if the small stroke on top of that character (which would make it an ウ) had faded. Thus Nowaka-ike must be the correct name, which was later corrupted into Nō-ga-ike. The notebook also writes what seems to be the Kanekake Rock as Kanesashi Rock. So, if the current name is correct, then the notebook is mistaken. Even with the odd mistake like the one noted above, however, the notebooks were much more useful for people who rarely made journeys than today’s 1:200,000-scale maps.

Style of the well-dressed pilgrim
(Image courtesy of Kotobank)

Congregations like these were organised everywhere, not just in our village and, when on pilgrimage, the groups were led by experienced leaders. Interestingly, these leaders, the so-called sendatsu, often came from the lowest orders of society, and by some rigorous but unwritten agreement, as soon as a group came together, whether its members were rich or poor, and regardless of social status, every body was on an equal footing and the sendatsu’s word was law, so that to oppose it was unthinkable. Speaking of these arrangements, there could be no question of washing these precious garments, as the pilgrims’ white robes had received the inky stamp of each sacred mountain visited, so that one couldn’t help reeling back in disgust if one ever got into a carriage with them. Even in this age of the train, there must be quite a few people who have felt a bit faint if they’ve had the misfortune to be seated with such people.

The members of the congregation, except for the sendatsu, were allowed to wear their ordinary clothes while travelling to the mountain but, as soon as they reached it, they had to change into what we called gyō’i (行衣) or pilgrim’s garb. Even today you can see such scenes. Although this may be less true of congregations from the countryside, groups from the city tend to be fairly riotous and their sendatsu have lost the authority they used to have. So even if they don’t stink out their fellow passengers, they get on their nerves with their drinking and carousing. This is inevitable, as serious pilgrimages fade away, to be replaced with trips that have the atmosphere of a light-hearted mountain excursion. This is not to say that there wasn’t a pleasure-seeking element even in those mountain pilgrimages of old, once the pilgrims were away from the mountain, but the religious element has now greatly faded, leaving the pleasure-seeking to dominate.

Continued

The making of a Meiji mountaineer (3)

Continued: a translation of Kogure Ritarō's A talk about mountaineering

Later, in my high school days, I dragged quite a few friends with me to the mountains, doing my best to sell them on my own enthusiasms. As we were in Sendai, we went out one Saturday to Izumi-dake, a mountain nearly twelve hundred metres high about five leagues northwest of the city that is so ideal for weekend expeditions. We camped out for the night, then climbed to the summit on Sunday and looked out at all the mountains bordering Ōu province, before descending. In April, one could slide down a fairly long snowfield, but even though everyone agreed that this was fun at the time, only two or three of my companions decided they liked mountains and went on climbing them afterwards.

Pilgrims on Mt Fuji (Umagaeshi): woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

One of these, for some unknown reason, became a devotee of waterfalls, and so, one summer, he went out in search of waterfalls that I’d never heard of, such as Shōmyō, Hirayu and Hakusui, and as he walked along the Itoigawa highroad towards Matsumoto, he saw the high mountains of the Tateyama and Ushiro-Tateyama range and, discovering that quite a few of these mountains keep their snow into summer, he learned the peculiar names of some of them, such as North and South Goryū. When we met up back at the dormitory, and he asked if I know these mountains, I was embarrassed. So I asked if he’d actually climbed them, and when he admitted he hadn’t, I told him he had nothing to boast about then and felt somewhat relieved. As Shiga Shigetaka's Theory of the Japanese landscape hadn’t yet come out, there was no way of discussing the matter further.

The mountains in question may have been South Goryū or Kashimayari-ga-take. Later, I realised that I should have dug into the matter more thoroughly. But I had no way of knowing, as I had no detailed knowledge of the place. This man later caught a lung infection and died on the island of Hachijōjima just last year. After this episode, my first mountain friend was Tanabe Jūji, who was originally a devotee of the sea but, as everybody knows, has since achieved great things in the mountaineering world.

At the end of the day, the reason that the friends who originally came with me to the mountains didn’t end up as mountain aficionados is that they found the effort of climbing too much of a grind. If you can’t appreciate mountains while accepting the grind of climbing, then it’s only natural that you’ll fall by the wayside. Although we ourselves are apt to say that a climb was more strenuous than amusing, mountaineering gives us so many interesting experiences that we’d never dream of giving it up. But thirty-five or six years ago, people didn’t think like that. Now that mountaineering has parted from religion, and has become a mere hobby, people have lost their motivation to improve their skills, no matter what their potential, in line with the trend of the times. I can’t help being amazed how far “fashion”, if I may be permitted to use the word, holds sway over people.

Speaking of fashion, I can’t deny that the “fashion” (if that is the right word) for mountain pilgrimages in my village helped to attract me towards mountaineering. Every year in August, in the slack season, congregations of twenty or thirty people would set off from Mt Fuji or Ontake or Hakkai-san, while smaller groups of three, four or five people, or just individuals, would seek out more distant places, such as the Three Sacred Mountains of Dewa, Ōmine in Yamato province, or Osore-zan in the Nambu region.

Misty morning at Nikko: woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

Closer to home were Mitsumine, Kōshin and Nantai. Of course, this was mountaineering for a religious end, so people’s knowledge of these mountains was rather sketchy, and they were only vaguely aware of whether a mountain was high or low, or how many passages were rigged with chains and so on. For instance, if you asked people who’d climbed Ontake if there were any high mountains nearby, you’d likely hear that there weren’t, except that Mt Fuji looked fairly high. So I was gobsmacked when I later climbed Ontake for myself and saw Kisokoma-ga-take, Norikura and other high peaks staring me in the face.

Even so, when the congregations came back, handed their thank-you gifts and souvenirs round the village, and spent half a leisurely day telling their travellers’ tales, there is no doubt that these mountain mysteries, wrapped round in strange legends, held my attention and made my eyes bulge with amazement, stoking both my fascination with mountains and my desire to climb them, whether I was aware of it or not. I can see myself sitting there, a shaven-headed lad, snotty nosed, mouth agape, listening for all I was worth to the loud voice of the man telling the tale, right by me, in a tea-house, served with pickled plums, or candied red-pickled ginger, or stuff like that.

(Continued)

The making of a Meiji mountaineer (2)

Continued: a translation of Kogure Ritarō's A talk about mountaineering

In those days, farming villages weren’t distressed as they are today; they were very peaceful places, bustling with people, women too, and in our hill country – although what we spoke of as “mountains” included flat ground with forests and dry fields – we used to go out collecting bracken in spring and mushrooms in autumn. I enjoyed these forays too, although rather more the mountain-climbing than the bracken-harvesting or mushroom-picking. It was probably then that I caught the mountaineering bug.

Village near Mt Fuji: woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

The lure of high places is also felt in our childhood tree-climbing; perhaps everyone has felt this. In a small way, it’s how an adventurous, aspiring spirit expresses itself. In his Theory of the Japanese landscape, by way of introducing the charms of mountaineering, Shiga Shigetaka writes how he once climbed up to a high tower and describes how he felt looking down at the people going back and forth below. Although, if it’s a sense of superiority you’re looking for, I’d say that climbing a tree always beats going up to a second-floor window, as I’m sure you’d agree, and this is probably because the second floor is not enough to satisfy an adventurous, aspiring spirit.

We used to vie with each other in climbing trees on the way home from school. Once I clambered about a hundred feet up a sawtooth oak, and, when I looked down, I saw how small my friends had shrunk to tiny heads with their arms poking out from them, as if their heads were walking by themselves. Then I felt dizzy, and I was too afraid to climb down, so that I had to be rescued by a grown-up. In mountaineering terms, you could say I’d got myself into a pickle.

But I am straying from the subject; the first mountain I ever climbed was Akagi. When I was six, my grandmother took me along to Yu-no-sawa, where she was going to take the waters but, as I don’t remember much except being frightened by stories of tengu, being surprised at the lake on the mountain, and ice being carried away from an icehouse, I doubt if this contributed much to my later love of mountains.

Then, at the age of thirteen, I climbed Mt Fuji. Today, when a nine-year old girl has climbed the mountain and a youngster of eleven can brag about having scaled Ko-Yari, this may not sound particularly novel, but in those days it was almost beyond imagining. There were adherents to both the Fuji faith and the Ontake faith in my village and, as our family belonged to an Ontake congregation, I normally wouldn’t have been allowed to climb the other sect’s Mt Fuji before I’d had the chance to climb Ontake for the first time. But it turned out that another boy of my age was going up Mt Fuji, and I was so envious and made such a fuss that the sendatsu, the Mt Fuji guide, made an exception for me as I was just a child and let me tag along.

Pilgrims on Mt Fuji: woodprint by Yoshida Hiroshi

The Fuji congregation in my village had the strange custom of ritually drinking water along the way. Whereas the Ontake congregations made ablutions in water, the Fuji ones drank it. As to how this custom arose, all the old folks have passed away, and now we have no way of knowing. We drank one cup of water on the first day, two on the second day, and so on until we got up to five cups on the day we started on the mountain from Fuji-Yoshida. Since we drank the water after breakfast, just before starting out every day, this was quite an effort. We’d try to eat breakfast as early as possible so that we could take our time getting ready. The guide had a wooden bowl with a lanyard hanging from his belt. The aluminium canteens that we use today may owe something to this practice. Anyway, the bowl held about eight measures of water, so about five bowlfuls meant four gō (almost a litre), and we’d drink that off in one swig, and we used to practise this water-drinking before setting out.

As on Ontake pilgrimages, one wasn’t allowed to circumambulate Mt Fuji’s crater on one’s first visit, but I managed to persuade the guide to let me do so, as I was only a child and so it wouldn’t count as a transgression. What I remember fairly well from this trip is the crowds in the mountain huts pressing in on me, eating mochi as the other food was so dreadful, and drinking delicious sweet sake. My memories of the mountain itself have faded to a blur. But the fine mid-August weather held, so that the views were good and you could take in the surrounding mountains with one sweep of the eye. Among them, I remember recognising Akagi when it was pointed out to me, and being delighted when I saw the sea for the first time ever. Also I remember being shocked when I realised that the simple skyline that I saw from my village was, in reality, a much more complicated affair.

What I took away from my Mt Fuji trip was quite simple; that mountain-climbing was very much for me. That is to say, I thought that climbing to high places was for me; it was only much later that I learned to appreciate the true joys of mountaineering. I might grumble that, if only I’d found a proper mentor and undergone the right training, I would have made something of myself as a mountaineer. Anyway, I did discover, by luck more than judgment, that mountaineering was the best way of satisfying that youthful spirit of curiosity and adventure, and that was a feat in itself.

(Continued)

A meizanologist's diary (12)

October 20: with only the afternoon to spare, we need a low mountain. Monju-san, a few kilometres south of Fukui, fits the bill. It has just one metre of altitude for each day in the year. Height, though, is not the same as stature, as Fukada Kyūya points out in the afterword to his most famous book. For this is a mountain that no meizanologist should miss.

Monju was “opened” by Monk Taichō himself, in the first year of Yōrō (717). Presumably, he was warming up for his pioneering excursion to Hakusan in the same year – the climb that Fukada somewhat adventurously identifies as Japan’s first high-mountain ascent. Actually, it is surprising that Taichō didn’t climb Monju sooner, since he was born in Asōzu, the village at its foot, more than three decades earlier.

Be that as it may, Monju’s Meizan status cannot be disputed. Like any self-respecting sacred mountain, it has three peaks, identified on the hiking map as Little Monju, Big Monju and the Inner Sanctuary (Oku-no-in). But the first and last ones are known additionally as Murodō and Ōnanji, names that also adorn the equivalent places on Hakusan and Tateyama. This suggests that people once saw Monju in the same terms as those two other sacred peaks.

Some centuries after Taichō, Monk Saigyō, the all-terrain poet of the Heian era, distinguished the mountain in a deft tanka:

越に来て富士とやいはん角原の文殊が岳の雪のあけぼの

                     In Koshi, over yonder
                     Is it Fuji there, I wonder?
                     So bright the daybreak glows
                     On Tsunohara-Monju’s snows
                   

Indeed, you can still climb Monju via a “Tsunohara course”. And it may be that the mountain really does look like Mt Fuji from that western aspect. Though, when we step out of the Sensei’s van at the foot of the normal route, it is a straggling ridge that rises above us rather than a shapely cone.

In the carpark, we brush up on Monju’s history from a signboard. On its battered paintwork, a tiny frog is contemplating a vertical direttissima. A few minutes into the woods, we encounter a sign warning that bears might leap out at us. The Sensei is unfazed, but I deploy her bear-bell all the same. It’s always best to err on the safe side when dealing with these ursine types.

In fact, the trail presents a greater hazard – it is broad but slippery, the mud polished to a mirror glaze by the passage of a millennium’s worth of feet. About half-way up our hill, the Sensei tires of it and launches into the woods on our right. Trust me, she says, there really is a path. So, chiming rhythmically, we start our own direttissima across the mountain’s north face. A strip of red tape marks the way for those who would brave this route in mid-winter.

In front of us, the leaf litter rustles as something leaps for cover. Fortunately, it is an order of magnitude or two smaller than a bear. Instead, we find a fat brown frog palpitating by the side of the track– pregnant with eggs, says the Sensei, who knows about country things. Perhaps it is taking the warm weather for the start of spring.

We come up on the ridge close to a pavilion that houses a Kannon, or so at least a gaudy banner suggests. Nearby is a tree wearing a sacred rope, suggesting that nobody ever tried very hard to disentwine Buddhism and Shintoism here, as they did on Ochi-san. Even today, the Sensei tells me, it is a temple at the foot of the mountain that looks after the shrines up here.

High on the ridge, we pass a lightning-scarred tree. Monju, one of the four great Bodhisattva (Bosatsu), is sometimes portrayed with a thunderbolt (vajra) in his hand. He seems to toss them down with considerable liberality on his namesake mountain.

A few minutes later, on the summit itself, we see a tree-stump that a lightning strike has completely burned out. Probably one should avoid Monju during thunderstorms.

Below the Oku-no-in, the path leads into a rift between the two halves of a gigantic boulder. You should only pass through if you have a clear conscience. No impure thoughts now, says the Sensei. Or the rocks will clap together and swallow you up.

I hesitate for a moment. I mean, suppose there were an earthquake. Then, surviving the passage unscathed, we circle back through the woods towards the middle peak.

Guarded by a row of jizō statues, the summit shrine is silvery with age. Its timbers must have looked fresher when Fukada Kyūya, then in his fourth year at Fukui Middle School, came up here with three companions on November 27, 1919. Another noticeboard gives us these details.

As fellow students had helped to clear the path a year or two before, Fukada and his friends might have felt a proprietary interest in Monju-san. At any rate, all four felt entitled to inscribe their names on the shrine.

Where the future Hyakumeizan author left his mark
(Photo: Fukui Shimbun)

Ninety-nine years later, I look here and there for the graffiti, without success – sorry, says the Sensei, they carved their names inside the shrine, and you can only see them when the doors are opened for the annual festival.

The view makes up for any disappointment. For its height, Monju must afford one of the best all-round vistas in the prefecture. Through gaps in the trees, we look westwards to Ochi-san and the coastal hills. In the opposite direction, Hakusan and all those other famous mountains of Hokuriku loom through the haze. Mountains, as any meizanologist will testify, are places that let you see further.

Tomorrow, we would have to head back to the Big Slope. There were friends to meet and a flight to catch. We’d take the view from Monju with us, though.

A meizanologist's diary (7)

October 14: A shrill “Kyaaah!” from up ahead tells me that the Sensei has met a snake. Bears, by contrast, leave her unfazed. By the time I get there, the hapless viper has wriggled off into some hole. It’s unseasonably warm; in our student days, no self-respecting snake would have sunned itself on a mountain path in mid-October.

OK, at 613 metres, this isn’t a very high mountain. We’ve chosen it so that we can get away with a late start. A more meizanological reason for climbing Ochi-san is that it was the first mountain to be “opened” by Taichō, the monk who later pioneered Hakusan (2,702 metres) in the first year of Yōrō (717).

The start of our own climb is marked by a modest signboard, showing Ochi-san as it was in the heyday of mountain pilgrimages. We zig-zag up through a dense plantation of sugi (cryptomeria). Unlike the one on Genanpō, this grove is well-tended. We exchange good mornings with a quartet of foresters, who are preparing to shin up the trees with spiked boots and climbing gear in order to trim off the lower branches.

Sultans of silviculture

Above the sugi, we start meeting with the labels – each new variety of tree is labelled with its Japanese names and in English too. Unwisely, I start photographing every one, slowing me up so much that I’m far behind the Sensei when she sees the viper. Thus I miss my chance to meet Gloydius blomhoffii.

In the shadow zone

The labels underline Japan’s astonishing biodiversity. I remember a conversation with Ben Jones, the curator of Oxford University’s Harcourt Arboretum. Unlike other temperate regions, he explained, the Japanese islands were never scraped clean by the ice ages. This let a whole herbarium of plants survive that were razed out in more northerly climes. A year or two ago, Ben was in the Chichibu mountains collecting seeds from one of these old survivors for Kew Gardens. (And, for true plant otaku, here is a day-to-day account of that trip.)

Under the greenwood tree

The path leads onto a straggling ridge. I’m surprised to meet the first beech trees at just over 300 metres – that seems low for this part of Honshū, but perhaps their lower limit has been “downshifted” by the hard Hokuriku winters. Signs marking the “stations” (gome), just as on Mt Fuji, remind us that we’re on a sacred mountain.

Effacement

Just above the fifth station, we take our first break at a pavilion that enshrines jizō statues. Some are missing their heads. The Sensei says they lost them during the Meiji government’s campaign to separate Buddhism and Shinto in the 1870s. I look at a date scratched on one of the headless figures – perhaps the third year of Tempō (1832). The post-Meiji ones seem to be intact.

Spring time

After dropping down to a spring that issues from a rockface, we start on a steeper section of ridge. The sunlight filters through a mixed canopy of beech, maple and hornbeam. We pass a Japanese stewartia (natsu-tsubaki) romantically entwined with a Korean whitebeam (azuki-nashi).

A little later, a cherry tree afflicted with witches’ broom disease (tengusūbyō) hints at nature’s darker side.

Now slippery with moss, the path tops a rise and drops into a level glen of fir trees (momi). A torii heralds the main sanctuary.

From the engawa of a building that combines the shrine itself and a mountain hut, an elderly man seems to be waiting for us. “Did anything leap out at you on the way?” he asks – could he have heard the Sensei’s “Kyaah”, I wonder. Then he invites us in for tea.

We make our way past a shed full of jizō figures (these seemed to have kept their heads) to a flight of stone steps leading to the summit sanctuary. As Ochi-san is an eminence in Fukui’s coastal range of hills, the view is all-encompassing.

Westwards, a band of fog elides the boundary between sea and sky while, inland, a single sweep round the skyline takes in all of Hokuriku’s famous mountains, from Hino to Arashima, Kyō-ga-take and Fujisha.

Beyond them lies the district’s highest Meizan, still without a shred of snow. “It was from here that Taichō first saw Hakusan,” the Sensei says. This seems right. Any meizanophile would see the distant mountains beckoning to them.

We present ourselves again at the door of the priest's house. When we have settled ourselves around the irori, a traditional sunken fire-pit, Otani-san serves out bowls of miso soup, while we share the celebratory red rice presented to us by the Senpai’s wife yesterday evening. They go well together. Dessert is a blackened banana each.

Between April and November, Otani-san lives up here for ten days at a time, going down intermittently to stock up on food. Fortunately – he is over eighty – you can drive all the way up the mountain. The eldest sons of his family have been priests for thirty-one generations; his daughter, a primary school teacher, will carry on the tradition. Before taking over from his own father, he worked for JR and the city administration.

The duties of a priest are various. Once, he had to take down a small shrine that stood in the way of a housing development and haul it all the way up here. Today is quiet but tomorrow a hundred schoolchildren will visit the mountaintop. If they want to read up about the shrine’s foundation, Otani-san has a short print-out ready for them.

Ascents of Ochi-san book-end the story of Monk Taichō’s life. A plausible date for his birth is the month of June in Hakuhō 11 (682), in the village of Asōzu, now part of Fukui City. Curiously, one of the Sensei's relatives was born there too.

The dates are deduced from a biography, the Taichō wajō denki that was published some centuries later. As a child, Taichō is said to have fashioned Buddhist images out of mud and, at the age of fourteen, he climbed Ochi-san for the first time, where he venerated the Eleven-Headed Kannon.

In 716, when Taichō was thirty-four, the goddess of Hakusan appeared to him in a dream, and the following year he climbed the mountain. According to Nihon Hyakumeizan, this was the first ascent of a high mountain in Japan for religious ends. On the summit, the goddess appeared to him again, this time in the guise of the Eleven-Headed Kannon.

In 722, he journeyed to Nara, the capital, and cured the Empress Genshō of an illness. In 736, he visited the capital again, and received from Monk Genbō a copy of an Eleven-Headed Kannon sutra. The following year, the ninth of Tempyō, he performed a rite of repentance to ward off an outbreak of smallpox that threatened the capital. For this he was raised to the high monastic rank of “wajō”.

Returning to his home province, he climbed Ochi-san again in the second year of Tempyō-Hōji (758) and retired to a cave to meditate. He died in 767 at the age of eighty-six.

It's time to go. We bow to the priest at his door, receive his blessing, and start down. One tends to forget that, even if autumn days are now unseasonably warm, that doesn’t make them any longer than they used to be. Shadows are lengthening by the time we reach the Sensei’s van.

A meizanologist's diary (6)

October 13: to dinner in Kobe with the Senpai. The Senpai and I go back some decades. In our student days in Kyoto, we climbed Hakusan together. Just below Murodo, sandwiched between layers of rainy season clouds, we met the monks of Eiheiji, the Zen temple founded by Dōgen, filing down the narrow path in their black robes and straw sandals. Although I hadn’t yet learned the word for “reihō” (sacred peak), this scene got the concept across handsomely.

Much later, the Senpai made a vital contribution to Project Hyakumeizan by providing, in best just-in-time fashion, a copy of Heibonsha's Hito wa naze yama ni noboru no ka (Why do people climb mountains), a kind of who’s who in Japan's mountaineering history. At that time, I’d just started writing the introduction to the Nihon Hyakumeizan translation and was struggling to find out more about all the early mountaineers it mentions. The Senpai’s book set me on the way to finding the answers.

We stagger off home burdened with a large bag of delicacies furnished by the Senpai’s wife. Tucked into it are some mountain brochures that the Senpai thinks we might find interesting. Brochures for mountains? At first, I admit, I’m put off by the idea of marketing famous mountains like soap-powder. But a closer look helps to change my mind.

The brochure for climbing Mt Fuji is well-produced. It has a set of detailed maps, complete with realistic course times, for climbing the mountain from the Fuji-Yoshida (eastern) side. There’s good advice on planning your approach and what to bring – although do people really now wear helmets against stonefall on the Yoshida trail? Perhaps times have changed. At any rates, these hints should help to cut the accident rate.

What really gets my attention, though, is that the brochure gives you all the information you need to climb Mt Fuji from the mountain's foot – even though the authors recognize that most will take the bus to the Subaru Line station at 2,500 metres before starting to walk.

You start out from the big torii in the centre of Fuji-Yoshida and walk (or take a taxi) up the road to Naka-no-Chaya, the middle tea-house. A neat new pavilion has replaced the ruined teahouse (below) that you used to see here twenty years ago. And then up through the forest to Umagaeshi, the place where the horses used to stop ...

Climbing Mt Fuji this way takes more time - just over five extra hours, according to the map - but you'll walk in the path of pilgrims approaching their "reihō".

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.