Sudden dearth

Are Japan mountain blogs falling by the wayside, and does it matter?

“Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it's enemy action’.” So says Goldfinger in the eponymous novel by Ian Fleming.

The same could be said of the mountain blogging scene....

It’s been like that with Japan mountain blogs in English. First, Tom Bouquet’s Volcanoes in Japan fell dormant. Then Hanameizan and i-cjw went more or less quiet. Mountain blogs were not the only ones to fade: Through the Sapphire Sky, an inspired writer on cross-cultural topics, took all her posts down, wiping out a trove of insights into gardens, the Epic of Gilgamesh and disaster-film monsters. Harumi, we miss you.

Blogs bloom and wither all the time. That’s happenstance for you. It matters only when more wither than bloom. Then bloggers get less chance to interact. It's the interaction that's crucial. On this blog, for instance, Mountain revolutionaries would never have been posted if Bre’er Ted in Kyoto hadn't prompted me. Thanks, Ted. Without conversations like that, a blog ends up like the sound of one hand clapping.

The malaise may go beyond Japan. Over on Hiking in Finland, Hendrik Morkel has recently complained that compiling his deservedly popular Week in Review feature isn’t rewarding enough. I share your pain, Bre’er Hendrik, whether the rewards are actual revenue or just reader traffic. Though, like other fans, I hope you’ll keep that excellent review going somehow.

At this point, like Auric Goldfinger, one starts suspecting that more than coincidence is at play. Is enemy action to blame? Try a Google search on “death of blogging”, and you’ll see what I mean. Twitter and its ilk have taken over, leaving blogs stranded like beached whales. Blogs don’t deliver the traffic that Facebook does, says Mother Jones.

Or, to quote the New Republic, we’re in a post-print world, where social media move at the speed of images, not the slowness of words. This paragraph from Jeet Heer's thoughtful article particularly resonates:

The Japanese have a word for blogs that have fallen into neglect or are altogether abandoned: ishikoro, or pebbles. We live in a world of pebbles now. They litter the internet, each one a marker of writing dreams and energies that have dissipated or moved elsewhere … But the feeling of community and camaraderie in pioneering a new medium—the fellowship of the hyperlink—is no longer palpable.

Not everybody sips the defeatist Kool-Aid. We're fortunate that, among Japan-based outdoor bloggers, Bre’er Ted keeps roaming the old highways, Bre'er Tony can't stop climbing Japan, and, on Ridgeline Images, Bre’er David is working an increasingly rich vein of haikyo visits that mash up hikes with history. As for Br’er Wes, rumour has it that he’s parlayed his authoritative Hiking in Japan posts into a book contract.

That’s right, a book. You know, these read-only media are going to be the next big thing. If you’re still out there, readers, remember you read it here first.

Climb Japan!

Book review: how the 10 Classic Alpine Climbs of Japan were scaled and selected

For five sweaty hours, unforewarned that a bridge and much of the path had long ago collapsed, we struggled along a gorge called the Tenjō (Heavens Above!). And this was just the approach to our climb. Alas, Kindles didn’t exist in those days. If they had, we could have downloaded Tony Grant’s 10 Classic Alpine Climbs of Japan and saved ourselves a world of hurt.

Recently released as an e-book, Tony’s book points you up some memorable routes. Just as importantly, it tells you how to get to and from the climbs safely. If you want to scale Yari’s Kitakama Ridge, for example, you’d be well advised to avoid Tenjō-zawa and, instead, to make a slightly less gnarly approach from the east. Naruhodo; had we but known…

Experience is needed to write a guidebook like this. Tony arrived in Tokyo with more than a decade of mountaineering behind him. Starting with a Plas-y-Brenin rock-climbing course in Wales, he gained multi-pitch experience in Poland’s Tatra mountains during a posting with the British Council, a cultural agency. While with the Warsaw University Alpine Club, he took a winter mountaineering course with a Himalayan veteran, who habitually free-soloed icy gullies alongside his roped-up students.

Tony Grant

By way of short postings to Bangladesh and Azerbaijan, Tony arrived in Tokyo nine years ago. He now supervises the development of English-teaching apps for the British Council. Despite the Council’s best efforts, though, the English language has yet to seep far into the Japanese climbing scene. So, when Tony arrived, he found next to no resources for foreign climbers either in print or on the web.

Unfazed, Tony did what many gaijin climbers do. He got in touch with one of the Tokyo-based international hiking clubs, and started cragging with two of its leading rock-climbers. He also hooked up with well-known mountain bloggers, Chris White and Hanameizan. Not all these early forays were successful: “In my first few years in Japan,” he recalls, “we’d often be scrabbling around at sunrise for the start of the climb and finding ourselves up the wrong gully.”

One breakthrough came when Tony met a Japanese musician and alpinist on a hike. A few days, later, the British Council’s receptionist called Tony to say a gentleman had left a carrier bag for him – which proved to be full of old guidebooks. These were eye-openers to what Japan has to offer in the way of alpine climbing. At the same time, there were some gotchas – the books were in Japanese, route descriptions were outdated, or said little about those all-important approaches and descents.

Shirouma Main Ridge - a classic 

Such lacunae led, at least once, to harrowing episodes. Topping out of Tanigawa’s classic Nanryō route, Tony and his companion decided to climb onwards to the ridge above. They thought it would take an hour, at most. Vertiginous rakes of slippery grass, head-high weeds, slimy fixed lines that might or might not hold, and rock steps forced them to triple that estimate and more. “Never again,” says Tony.

To save others from repeating such epics, Tony distilled his experiences into a blog, Climb Japan. And the blog, in turn, has flowed into his e-book. (There's now a print version too.) As you'd expect from the blog, the route descriptions are well illustrated, complete with strategic arrows overlaid on images to point out key turnings and directions. Excuses to find yourself fossicking in the wrong gully at sunrise just got fewer.

Astride Kita-dake Buttress (photo courtesy Chris White)

How did Tony pick out the ten routes from the much greater number he’s climbed? “Apart from the three routes on Tanigawa, a lower mountain,” he explains, “they’re huge natural lines that run right up to the top of peaks that rise past or close to 3,000 metres. They’re all lines that any mountaineer would want to climb.”

Also, he adds, all ten are on mountains that belong to Japan’s famous One Hundred Mountains. If you need to know what the Hyakumeizan are, Tony has added a brief explanation within the “Japan Extra” sections of his book. These are ten essays that accompany the guidebook chapters, each focusing on a special aspect of the Japanese mountains. The monkeys, snow ptarmigan and kamoshika get mentions, as do practical matters such as mountain huts and hot springs to soak in after your climb.

Guidebook author in his natural habitat.

If Tony ever expands his book, there are quite a few more classics he’d like to include – among them, the Genjirō, Komado and Yatsu-mine ridges on Tsurugi, and the Hida Ridge on Hodaka’s Gendarme, another of those compelling lines to the sky. And then there is the unique Japanese river-climbing sport of sawa-nobori – one famous river gorge, that of Oren-dani on Kaikoma, does make an appearance in Tony’s book, albeit as an ice-climb. But the next project, he hints, might be a guide to climbing on Yatsu-ga-take, a rugged extinct volcano near Tokyo best known for its winter routes.

Ice is nice too.

Nobody would dispute that routes such as Kitadake Buttress or Tsurugi’s Chinne – both feature in Tony’s book – are magic lines. Even their names– Chinne as in Gross Zinne, Buttress as in Lochnagar – invite comparison with European classics. But such comparisons might be misleading, Tony suggests. For, if you choose to climb the Japanese classics, don't expect to waft by cable-car onto retro-bolted tracts of sun-warmed granite.

“Chamonix this isn’t,” says Tony. “The rock is often poor quality, and it tends not to take trad gear, leaving you dependent on crummy pitons. But once you’ve got a handle on it, it develops a character of its own – horrendous in situ pro, tatty slings, grassy slabs, and huge runouts are among the recurring motifs. Anyone coming from abroad will be guaranteed an intense cultural experience.”

Now, thanks to Tony’s efforts, the Japanese alpine climbing experience can be downloaded by a new generation of foreign climbers.

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

"Tei: A memoir of the end of war and beginning of peace"

Book review: how Tei Fujiwara brought her children to safety from Manchuria

This blog usually concerns itself with the mountains of Japan. But I hope reader(s) will excuse me if I introduce a book that has nothing much to do with mountains, unless they are those that lie athwart Korea, square across the path of desperate refugees fleeing from northern China in the second world war's aftermath.

One of those refugees was Fujiwara Teiko. Married to a meteorologist, Tei was one of the two million or so Japanese who lived in Manchuria and other parts of China during the 1940s. When the war ended, the Japanese military left the civilians to fend for themselves. More than 11,000 settlers died in the post-war turmoil, about a third by their own hand.

Those who wanted to live fled southwards, in the so-called hikiage. This book - originally entitled Nagareboshi wa ikite iru, quoting a song that gave the author hope - is the account of how Mrs Fujiwara brought her two sons and baby daughter to safety in a year-long odyssey down the Korean peninsula.

After her husband was taken to a Soviet labour camp, Mrs Fujiwara found herself alone, destitute and hungry. Before the journey south could continue, she had to survive - and keep her children alive - through a harsh winter in what is now North Korea, living on a cup of rice per day. Soon even that ration was cut.

Desperate privations throw the characters of her fellow refugees into stark relief. Some fellow Japanese cheat her. An unknown Korean gives her food, at the risk of his own reputation or even life. There are Soviet soldiers who give her cloth from their stores so that she can make rag dolls and sell them on the street.

This is a book that raises questions. As in, how would I behave if torn out of a comfortable middle-class existence and subjected to the pressures and deprivations of a refugee camp? And how do you summon up that last ounce of strength to cross the mountains that bar the way to safety? This is how Tei answers that question:

The road into the mountains wound its way into a valley between other mountains and turned into a narrow, shriveled trail. Eventually, even the trail disappeared. We followed the shadows, which swirled like a beautiful obi, on and on to the horizon. 

 The red mud on the trail refused to let go of our feet once we stepped in it. Sometimes we stuck in the muck up to our knees... If I had had to drag my boys, as I had done through the night, I couldn't have gone a step further. We would have sunk into the earth and died. Everyone went ahead of me and disappeared into the rain while I fell behind and was left alone on the trail. Somehow, I kept moving, driven only by the knowledge that my two boys were moving up ahead. 

 The rocks closed in from both sides. If I could get through this place, I sensed that there would be something up ahead. But what I found up ahead was a woman who had lost her mind...

Eventually, Mrs Fujiwara made it to the port of Busan, in the south of Korea, and was repatriated to Japan in September 1946. Three months later, her husband came back to Japan after being released from a labour camp in northern Manchuria. He had fared relatively well there, thanks to his skills as an electrical engineer, which proved useful to his captors.

In 1949, Tei Fujiwara wrote up her experiences, partly as a "last testament" to her children in case she succumbed to the after-effects of her ordeal. In the event, she not only pulled through - and is still alive today - but her book became a best-seller. It has recently been ably and fluently rendered into English by Nana Mizushima, who says in her translator's introduction:-

I try to write in a natural style which is enjoyable to read. I believe the translation should be invisible, just as the camera is invisible in a good movie. 

Let me just say here that she has succeeded magnificently. I read the book on a long and delayed journey across Europe and hardly noticed the time passing.

There is a final twist to this tale. Tei's husband resumed his career as a professional weatherman and rose to head up the Meteorological Agency's equipment division. In this role, he played a key part in commissioning the radar station on top of Mt Fuji. But he soon noticed that his modest official salary was eclipsed by the money rolling in from his wife's book. His competitive spirit piqued, he decided to try writing for himself.

Today, the works of Nitta Jirō - as Fujiwara Hiroto styled himself for literary purposes - are better known than his wife's. He was certainly more prolific, putting out four full-length historical novels about Mt Fuji alone. And his recreation of the Death March on Mt Hakkōda was made into a memorable film. But he never wrote at any length about his own experience of the hikiage. The memories were probably too painful.

References

Tei: A Memoir of the End of War and Beginning of Peace, by Tei Fujiwara, translated by Nana V. Mizushima

Account of how Tei's book inspired Nitta Jirō's career is from Fuji-san: oinaru shizen no kensho, Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1992.

Death March on Mount Hakkōda

Timeless lessons on mountain leadership from a master of documentary fiction

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

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

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

Men of the 31st Regiment
on winter manoeuvres

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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