Snow records, past and present

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

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

Snowy Ibuki-san: woodprint by Hashiguchi Goyoh

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

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

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

References

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

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

Chris White, i-cjw blog, Mountain redeemed

A meizanologist's diary (11)

October 20: watching NHK’s weather feature over breakfast, we’re finally able to put some numbers on our observations. We’ve noticed how warm it is this October - how could we not? In our student days, October mornings used to be crisp, cold affairs out here in the Fukui countryside.

Autumn as it should be (Kurobe valley)

In those days, the leaves would already be red and gold up on Hakusan, frost pillars would be pushing out of the ground, and, if you didn’t look lively, you might be mugged by a sudden snowstorm. All that is unimaginable this year. There isn’t even a dusting of snow on Hakusan, the trees are still more or less green and the bears are still wide awake. As for snowstorms, you’re much more likely to be bitten by a viper.

Now NHK explains why. “Autumn has been shortened,” the announcer says. The average temperature in recent Octobers has been 1.9°C higher than the average temperature for the month during the 1980s. (I’m not sure whether he’s talking just about Fukui, or for the whole country.) Of course, recent Decembers have been warmer too, but by a lesser margin – only 0.9°C warmer than in the 1980s. The figures don’t look that alarming, until you consider that the world today is only a few degrees warmer, on average, than during the Ice Ages.

Exploring the moulin in the Kuranosuke coire

On another morning, NHK reports on a deep hole or “moulin” that has appeared in the Kuranosuke snowfield high up on Tateyama’s eastern flank. This is the first one that has appeared in these parts for eleven years.

The Kuranosuke snowfield
(photo: Tateyama Caldera Sabo
Museum)

The savants of the Tateyama Caldera Sabo Museum are shown boldly roping down into the shaft, taking measurements as they go. On the way down, they encounter a layer of shattered boulders, evidence of some ancient rockfall centuries ago.

“Moulin” usually refers to the deep blue pits that drain surface streams down into the icy depths of alpine glaciers. Several thousand years ago, there would have been a real glacier in the Kuranosuke corrie.

But a survey in the 1980s did discover hard-packed ice layers at the bottom of its permanent snowfield that were 1,700 years old. Let’s hope the moulin closes up again before that ancient ice is all washed away.

Meizan from Hell

On volcanoes and the wave clouds of Venus

Project Hyakumeizan was charmed to see that the savants from the European Space Agency have discovered “gravity waves” above the mountains of Venus. Gravity waves are what we ordinary folk call “wave clouds”. Island peaks such as Mt Fuji are virtuosos at producing them.

Maat Mons, the highest volcano on Venus
Image, courtesy David P Anderson, Southern Methodist University 

Alas, the wave clouds of Venus couldn’t be seen directly. Instead, they were detected as a bunching-up of the atmosphere’s water vapour over the Aphrodite Terra, a four and a half kilometre-high band of high mountains around the planet’s midriff.

Lording it over the Aphrodite mountains, although standing somewhat aloof from them, is the highest volcano on Venus, which rises some eight kilometres above the surrounding desert – if that is the right word for an infernal plain where the heat would melt lead and the sulphuric smog presses down heavily enough to crush the average submarine.

Although humans are unlikely to visit this summit soon, they have already named it Ma’at Mons, after an Egyptian goddess of the underworld. And when meizanologists get round to selecting the One Hundred Mountains of the Solar System, this “Venus-Fuji” will surely make the front rank of candidates.

Wave clouds over the one and only original Mt Fuji

Those gravity waves, though. How will we ever know if they stack up, aesthetically, against the original Mt Fuji’s masterly cadenzas of cloud? Pending the time when ESA can scrape together the funds for another Venus spacecraft – regrettably, they let their last one burn up in the planet’s upper atmosphere – perhaps they could rustle up a computer simulation.

Meizan of science

Ten years ago today, the manned weather station on Mt Fuji closed, ending 72 years of continuous human habitation on Japan's highest summit. Here is a timeline on how Mt Fuji has served as a platform for science and weather observations, with links to related posts

1828: Ninomiya Keisaku, physician, Dutch scholar, medical botanist and student of the German doctor, Philipp Franz von Siebold, climbs to the summit and estimates its height by measuring the air pressure, yielding an altitude of 3,794.5 metres - less than 20 metres adrift from the height as triangulated by modern surveyors.

1880 August: Thomas Mendenhall weighs the earth by conducting gravity experiments on the summit, assisted by Tanakadate Aikichi and others. So accurate is the pendulum clock he devises for this purpose that a similar one is later used to measure the speed of light.

1889: Nakamura Kiyo'o and Kondō Hisajirō make a 38-day series of weather observations respectively from a stone hut on Kusushi-dake, one of the eight peaklets around the crater of Mt Fuji, and from beside Lake Yamanaka.

1895: officials from the Central Meteorological Office take readings on the summit during the summer. They too use a hut on Kusushi-dake. In the following winter, independent meteorologist Nonaka Itaru attempts to overwinter in a self-built summit hut under Ken-ga-mine, the highest summit, supported by his wife Chiyoko. They endure the cold for 82 days, almost succumbing to beri-beri, a deficiency disease, before being rescued in December.

1927: meteorologist Satō Junichi builds a summit hut for weather observations, supported by a grant from Suzuki Seiji, president of the Tokyo School of Motoring.

1930 January-February: now in his fifties, Satō Junichi overwinters in his summit hut, supported by porter Kaji Fusakichi, proving that round-the-year weather observations are possible. Kaji will go on to climb Mt Fuji a record 1,672 times during his lengthy career.

Inaugurating the Mt Fuji observatory on August 1, 1932

1932: the government budget provides for one year of observations at the summit observatory as part of Japan's contribution to the Second International Polar Year. At the end of the one-year period, meteorologist Fujimura Ikuo and his team refuse to come down from the summit hut, so that observations can continue.

1934: the future of the summit observatory is secured by a grant from a foundation recently established by the Mitsui zaibatsu after a right-wing extremist had assassinated its director-general Takuma Dan.

1936: now officially styled the Mt Fuji Summit Observatory of the Central Meteorological Office, the observatory is moved from Yasu-no-kawara, a flattish area on the crater's south-eastern rim, to a new building on the mountain's highest point, Ken-ga-mine. In the same year, physicists from Nishina Yoshio's research group at Riken visit Mt Fuji to study cosmic rays.

1944: a squad of soldiers run a high-tension cable all the way from Gotemba to the summit to power a wireless relay station. The summit weather station also gets a direct electricity supply for the first time.

1945, July 30: the summit station is attacked by two enemy fighters. Some of the staff are injured by flying debris. This is the most damaging of three strafing attacks on the summit installations during the last two years of the war.

1964: the weather radar station is completed on Ken-ga-mine after a dramatic helicopter lift to bring in the surmounting radome. In the following year, the post office issues a 10-yen commemorative stamp and the radar tracks its first typhoon.

1985: the radar is upgraded with digital signal processing and colour output display.

1999 November: the radar is shut down and the famous radome is later taken down to a museum at the mountain's foot. From now on, typhoons will be tracked by satellites and two newer radar stations, one at Makinohara in Shizuoka and the other on Kurumayama in Nagano.

2004, October 1: the manned weather station closes too, ending 72 years of continuous human habitation on the summit of Mt Fuji. Automated instruments will continue to relay meteorological observations from the summit to a base station.

References

This timeline is adapted from the one on the website of the Society for the Valid Utilization of Mt.Fuji Weather Station, an NPO that seeks to preserve the buildings of the summit station for continued scientific activities. Additional information is from (ed) Dokiya Yukiko, Kawaru Fuji-san Sokkojo, 2004.

Summit duty

A memoir of life on Mt Fuji by Hirai Yasuyo, former head of the summit meteorological observatory

I had a 40-year career with the Meteorological Agency, much of that time in work related to the Mt Fuji summit observatory. After retiring to my native Izu, I like to look out for Mt Fuji whenever I’m somewhere you should be able to see it from. These days, it’s often hazy whatever the time of year and I don’t see the mountain as often as I used to. When I do see its distant shape under a clear sky, it’s like meeting an old friend, and I remember all the things that happened up there and all the people I used to know.

Call of duty: de-icing the instrument tower

I came to the summit observatory quite by chance. A magazine that I used to look at in my school’s reading room sometimes serialized novels by Nitta Jirō, and that was how I first heard about the observatory and got the idea that I’d like to work there.

In 1954, I was hired to make weather observations at the Meteorological Observatory on Izu Ōshima island. In those days, that meant taking temperature and pressure readings at set times in a set order, and also making visual observations of weather phenomena. I remember sweating quite a bit over those on-sight assessments of clouds and sky conditions.

Porters above Hoei-zan

As the observations had to be made rain or shine, I sometimes sheltered under an umbrella as I made my measurements out there by the instrument box. Until, one day, I heard one of my seniors comment to a team leader as follows: “The young guy seems to be out there at the instrument box with an umbrella. But we used to just stand out there in the wind and rain making our observations, didn’t we.” After that, I decided that I would go out into the wind and rain like that, so that I could feel the weather unsheltered.

Around that time, I applied for re-assignment to the Mt Fuji observatory, and all of a sudden I was able to realize my dream of working at the summit station. And so, on April 5, 1956, I stepped off the train at Gotemba and was overwhelmed by the snow-covered bulk of the mountain.

On the way to the summit

Next day, before dawn, we left the refuge hut at Tarobō for what was to be my first-ever Mt Fuji climb. We had to break trail through the snow on the slopes of Hōei-zan before taking a break for breakfast at the refuge hut above the Seventh Station. From the Eighth Station onwards, on a stretch they called “Tarumi”, we were climbing on a steep sheet of blue ice. By the Ninth Station, I was so close to collapse that I was barely making sense any more. In fact, I tripped and fell over, but somebody who came to meet us quickly stopped my feet sliding with his axe, so that nothing worse happened.

The sun was low by the time we reached the summit station. Ash-grey clouds floated past under the darkening sky and a weird “bōōō” sound emanated from the depths of the vast crater. Laying eyes on this scene for the first time in my life, I could hardly believe that it belonged to this planet.

My apprenticeship in the ways of the observatory started on the morning after a blizzard. The first job was to bash the accumulated hoarfrost from the instrument tower. “This is how we do it,” grunted a colleague, as he grabbed a wooden mallet and started pounding at the steel framework, sending the ice shards flying with the vibrations. This is just the hoarfrost you always get when clouds come drifting across a summit and their supercooled droplets freeze onto any object they meet, creating an ice build-up. Up here, though, just about everything that projected above the ground would ice up – the frost was everywhere. Every time a low pressure came along the Pacific coast in winter or spring, that instrument tower would rime up overnight to a depth of several tens of centimetres.

This “de-icing” was the toughest work all through the snow season. When the ice shards blew back in your face, the pain was like needles thrusting into you. At first I relished the work as something you’d only get to experience on summit duty, but later as the gales pierced me to the core and the effort made me fight for breath, the job started to grind me down. Up there, on that tower, hacking at the ice in the pitch dark, I’d start thinking “Why does it have to be me? Does anybody care that I’m way out here battling the ice on top of Fuji?” It was at those times that the sheer isolation of Japan’s highest summit would get to me.

The radar dome in winter

In those days, Fujimura Ikuo, the observatory head, would sometimes come up and tell us that weather phenomena were never the same twice – if you don’t record them at the time, they’re lost forever, he’d say, to impress on us the seriousness of our responsibility and mission as meteorological observers. He’d also say, when the team was trying to bash every last scrap of ice from the instrument tower, that we should only clean things up as far as was needed for good measurements. In fact, we should go as easy as possible. “If you drive yourselves too far, you’ll not last long on summit duty,” he told us. After that, I decided to give the job about 80%, so that I could always keep something in reserve. And I think that this was one reason why I was able to continue serving so long on the summit.

My summit duty years started in 1956, when I applied for the transfer from Izu Ōshima. Then, after stints in Tokyo, I was up there again from 1960 to 1964 and from 1971 to 1983. Adding in the years that I spent at the Mt Fuji base offices, I spent more than 30 years in work that involved the summit station. As these years spanned Japan’s economic high-growth period, I witnessed a great deal of change in both society and life at the summit station during this time. In 1964, radar and automated weather measurement systems were installed, which meant that the work changed from taking readings manually to maintaining and monitoring the measuring equipment. As for our living environment, this changed dramatically in 1973 when the new building was completed and the electricity supply upgraded. Instead of the old building, where the only place you didn’t feel cold was next to the charcoal stove, we had a fully airconditioned new building, where you could sleep in a warm room. Compared with the old building, where you had to creep into bed under a frosted-up futon, this was undreamt-of luxury.

Automation comes to Mt Fuji

Other innovations included better mountaineering kit and safety measures, and we introduced a SnowTrac for the first part of the uphill haul. And our logistics were revolutionized when we started using the bulldozers to freight up supplies in summer, leading to a dramatic improvement in both the quality and quantity of our food. In winter, though, the weather could still cause delays in the food supply, and I have fond memories of a three-day stretch where we had nothing to eat with our rice except salt-dried squid and soy sauce.

Dining area in the summit weather station

As for mountaintop itself – the wind, the cold and the thin air – nothing could change that. Climbing up and down the mountain in winter during the shift changes was pretty much as tough as it was in the early years of the summit station. And, even though the instruments had been modernized, things went on icing up just as before, so that the only way observations could be kept up was for the summit team to go out in the same old way to bash at the ice encrustations on the instrument tower and the radome.

Shift change

Yet I did see changes during those thirty years, even if only gradual ones – little rockslides around the summit, new fissures opening up in the crater and the Great Gully of Ōsawa, and so on. And there was the way that the knotweed (オンタデ、Aconogonon weyrichii) and other alpine plants kept creeping up the mountainside, bit by bit, towards the summit.

Some things changed more rapidly. One was the spread of the town lights below. Up until the late 1950s, except for the Tokyo-Yokohama area, you could distinguish the lights of one town from those of another all along the coast at night. In the 1960s, however, the lights started to spread into the dark patches between towns, and from the 1970s the whole Kantō plain as far as Enshū became just a single mass of luminosity, a sea of lights.

Porters

Another of those changes was air pollution. When I first climbed the mountain in 1956, there was a splendidly clear view all round. Under that azure sky, you could gaze down at the whole Kantō spreading out below, at the Chubu mountain ranges, and the islands of Izu floating on the ocean. In those days, we had to make a visual assessment of the visibility below us, how high the haze came up and how thick it was. You could clearly see the upper limit of the haze as a sharp dividing line against the sky, and we used to record its height against the backdrop of the Akaishi mountains. In the 1960s, the height and density of the haze might have fluctuated a bit, depending on conditions, but it rarely swamped the 3,000-metre ridgeline of the Akaishi mountains.

In 1971, when I came back for summit duty after a seven-year gap, I was in for a shock – there were now many more days when the haze buried the mountains and you couldn’t see the ground below, even when the sky was cloudless. Air pollution had become a serious problem in Tokyo from the early 1960s; now you’d often see a thick haze layer in all directions.

Haze layers develop when you have the right meteorological conditions, such as several days under a ridge of high pressure, but it’s not the weather that has changed around Mt Fuji. Rather, the spreading haze is coming from the proliferation in pollution sources and the growing volume of polluted air.

In former days, you could always expect to see Fuji from Izu, but I feel that in recent years that’s no longer true. And, as I’ve spent most of my life involved with Mt Fuji, I can’t help feeling that we’re losing something of great value.

Seeing Mt Fuji obscured by haze isn’t just about losing a view – it’s a sign that air pollution and environmental destruction are getting worse. My hope is that, by continuing our scientific observations, we can shed light on the state and causes of that environmental degradation, so that we can finally do something about it.

References

Translated from "Harukana Fuji-san wo nozomeba" in (ed) Dokiya Yukiko, Kawaru Fuji-san Sokkojo, 2004. Images are also from this book except for header image, which is from Fuji-san: oinaru shizen no kensho, Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1992.

People of the Lotus reprised

NHK revives an epic story of mid-winter survival atop Mt Fuji

“Meiji 28 (1895): Nonaka Chiyoko (Matsushita Nao) is praying for the safe return of her husband, Itaru (Satō Ryuta), who is attempting the first-ever mid-winter climb to the summit of Mt Fuji. If he succeeds, he’s determined to build a hut on the mountaintop and shut himself up there all through the next winter taking high-altitude weather observations. But Chiyoko is afraid that, if he goes up there alone, he’ll never come back…”

If this plot-line sounds familiar, that may be because you read it here first, on this very blog. This time, though, the true story of how Chiyoko saved her husband from sacrificing himself to science is being retold by NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster. Entitled Fuyō no Hito, the new six-part “Saturday drama” started on July 26.

This is not the first time that NHK has revived the Nonaka story. In April 1982, a two-part drama was aired with the aptly named Fuji Mariko playing Chiyoko. An English-language guide to Japanese TV notes that the NHK Children’s Division adapted the story “presumably as a means of introducing young viewers to the science of weather”.

Actually, that last remark may need to be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s true that, ever since Itaru and Chiyoko were rescued from their mountaintop ordeal in late December, their story has periodically played to packed houses. In fact, a stage drama about them was put on at the Tokyo Ichimuraza theatre as soon as February 1896. But it probably didn’t dwell much on the science of the weather.

Just before that play opened, Chiyoko finished publishing her own account of the adventure in the Hōchi Shinbun. Again, meteorological details are scant in Fuyō Nikki (Journal of the Lotus), which, as the title suggests, is written in the style of a traditional travel diary. The lotus, by the way, is a nod to the traditional perception of Mt Fuji’s crater as a sacred mandala in the form of a gigantic lotus blossom.

In the autumn of the same year, the poet and author Ochiai Naobumi published a book-length account of the Nonaka story, Takane no yuki (High mountain snows), drawing heavily on Chiyoko’s diary. Then, a few years later, Itaru came out with his own guide to Mt Fuji (Fuji Annai). As you would expect, this account does make ample reference to the science of weather but, by that time, most people had lost interest.

After that, Mr and Mrs Nonaka were largely forgotten until 1948, when Hashimoto Eikichi published a novelistic rendition of their adventure. According to Andrew Bernstein, whose account I rely on here, the timing was not fortuitous: the novel was clearly meant to inspire people during the hard post-war years "by celebrating a Japanese man and woman who had endured the unendurable”.

Be that as it may, the meteorologist and novelist Nitta Jirō thought that Hashimoto had underplayed Chiyoko’s role in the couple’s survival. And so, in 1971, he published his own novel, Fuyō no Hito (People of the Lotus), in which the story is told mainly from Chiyoko’s viewpoint.

It is Nitta’s version that has won out, providing both NHK dramas with their storylines and title. You can watch the second episode of the current NHK Fuyō no Hito this Saturday, August 2. (Sorry for failing to publish this post in time for you to catch the first.)

Judging from the trailer, the series will make the most of a human drama set amid a landscape of almost inhuman severity. But brace yourself for a disappointment if you expect to be introduced to the science of weather.

References

Andrew Bernstein, Weathering Fuji: Marriage, Meteorology, and the Meiji Bodyscape, in Japan at nature's edge : the environmental context of a global power, edited by Ian Jared Miller; Julia Adeney Thomas; Brett L Walker.

The Dorama Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese TV Drama Since 1953, Jonathan Clements, ‎Motoko Tamamuro

Mt Fuji at war

How Japan's mountain-top meteorologists rode out the dark years of early Shōwa

War comes to Mt Fuji 

War came to Mt Fuji on July 30, 1945. For months, the meteorologists at the summit station had watched streams of enemy aircraft drone overhead. And so they saw nothing unusual about the six-ship formation that roared past just after 8am. Until two planes peeled off from the main swarm and came howling in towards them. Seconds later, the spent cartridges came spilling from the fighters’ wings and the air was filled with noise, shattering glass and flying splinters…

In retrospect, one might say that the road to war started in the previous decade, on another fine summer's day. It was on August 1, 1932 that Japan’s Central Meteorological Office commissioned its first officially funded observatory on Mt Fuji. Gathered round the small summit hut almost four kilometres above sea-level – yes, that’s Satō Junichi in the photo below, standing in the hut's doorway – the weathermen must have felt themselves as far above the era’s murky politics and foreign policy as “clouds from mud”.

Inaugurating the Mt Fuji observatory on August 1, 1932

Yet the events then unfolding in China would one day embroil these men too. Ten months earlier, the Japanese army had invaded Manchuria. In an act of insubordination that was swiftly termed “gekokujō” (下克上), the local army officers made their move without getting authorization from either the government or, indeed, their own general staff.

Whether or not the military had inspired them, the meteorologists were soon moved to stage an act of gekokujō for themselves. This was because the government had seen fit to approve just one year of continuous weather observations atop Mt Fuji, as part of Japan’s contribution to the Second International Polar Year in 1932-33.

As a single year’s weather readings would be scientifically of little worth, the government’s stinginess made no sense to the weathermen. So, in mid-December 1933, when the last approved summit crew were ordered to bring down the portable gear when they finished their month-long shift, they fell to plotting. How would it be, they mused, if they just sat out the winter in the summit hut, continuing their work in a kind of high-altitude sit-in strike.

No excuses were necessary

The team leader – not to say ring leader – in this enterprise was Fujimura Ikuo, who later went on to head up the observatory in a meteorological career spanning three decades. At first, he and his crew cast about for some plausible-sounding pretexts for disobeying their orders – for instance, the slopes would be too icy to let them bring down delicate instruments, and so they’d have to stay on at the summit to look after the kit.

In the event, they made no such excuses. On arriving at the summit, they simply told the outgoing shift that they would stay until summer and keep up the observations. With that, Fujimura handed over a missive to the Meteorological Office’s directors and, together with his rebel crew, shut himself up for the winter. Fortunately, his resolve wasn’t put to the test. On New Year’s Eve, a telegram arrived from Fujimura’s superiors: “Observations temporarily extended; you are instructed to descend when relief crew arrives.”

The following September, the funding crisis was eased when a foundation set up by the Mitsui zaibatsu stumped up seven thousand yen. A year later, in October 1935, the government switched the summit station’s funding to the regular budget, so that it could continue operating indefinitely. To mark this promotion, the adjective “Provisional” was removed from the observatory’s designation.

Mitsui comes up
with the cash

The government also granted funds to build a new and improved hut close to Ken-ga-mine, Mt Fuji’s highest point – the buffeting airflow at the old site had interfered with pressure readings. There was even talk of a cable car to waft the relief crews effortlessly to the summit, although these plans came to nothing. But the new hut was duly opened in 1937 and one more building in 1940.

By 1944, Japan’s early successes in the war had become a liability. Lines of supply were overstretched. In fact, even keeping in touch with far-flung units of the Imperial forces had become problematic. Thus, the summit of Mt Fuji was the natural place for the military to look when seeking a better way to communicate with the radio relay station on Hachijō-jima, an island about 300 kilometres south of Tokyo. Better still, there was no need to build a new shed for the radio gear – they could house it in the meteorologists’ old hut at Yasu-no-kawara.

Furnishing a power supply was the biggest challenge. The plan was to sling a high-tension cable on poles between the city of Gotemba and the mountain’s 1,600-metre contour. After that, the cable would run underground all the way to the summit. The work of laying the cable was assigned to a squad of five hundred soldiers, who used ‘human wave’ tactics to complete the job in a blistering two weeks.

The new power supply brought more than one benefit – it put an end to the worst job at the summit station; cranking up the generator in winter. When the frigid temperatures had congealed the lubricating oil to candy-like stiffness, the duty man might be spitting blood by the time he got the motor started. Or, if the generator refused to start, the batteries would run flat, forcing the weathermen to cook by the light of candles. Once at least, the candles ran out too and rush-lights were rigged to burn the cooking oil, all this in temperatures of minus 30°C.

Soon the summit crews had more to worry about than scanty provisions and the icicles that formed in their sleeping quarters. Yajima Hiroshi had only just joined them on the mountain when he was called up for military service. On December 3, 1944, in a ferocious blizzard – the wind was gusting at a hundred kilometres an hour – Yajima set off with two colleagues to fight his way down to Gotemba. After that, he shipped out to Io-jima and was never seen again.

On March 13, 1945, one of the weathermen climbed the observation tower above the hut and, looking westwards in the direction of Nagoya, saw a reddish glow in the sky, beyond the shoulder of Akaishi-dake. Soon the spectacle would be repeated, and in almost all quadrants of the compass. Feelings of despair overcame the summit crews as, night after night, they watched these false dawns.

On July 18, five men from the army’s own meteorological service came up to the summit to launch weather balloons. Their brief was to check if the incendiary balloons then being launched by the military were flying high enough to ride the jet stream all the way to America. In fact, the balloons were already doing enough damage for the US authorities to impose a news blackout. One device even cut the power supply to the Hanford plutonium plant in Washington State.

Hacking ice from the instrument tower

By chance, it was at the end of the same month that the two enemy fighters made their strafing attack on the summit observatory. By a miracle, nobody was killed although some of the weathermen suffered bruises and scratches from ricocheting debris. And, although the 50-calibre bullets riddled the observation towers and smashed an instrument box, most of the precious equipment was unscathed.

In the end, Mt Fuji itself was a far more dangerous adversary than anything the Americans could launch at the meteorologists. The first casualty came in a snowstorm in April 1944, when 19 year-old Imamura Ichirō lost the way during a routine ascent as a member of the monthly relief crew. He stumbled blindly down the mountain before succumbing to exposure near the fourth-station level. The rescuers found him propped against a rock, as if he’d sat down to rest and never woken up.

The next mishap occurred in December 1946, when Koide Mutsurō slipped and fell from the ninth station. He was just 28. It is surely no coincidence that, of the four fatalities during the summit station’s six decades of operation, these two accidents closely bracketed the war’s end. As if climbing the mountain in winter was not already dangerous enough, the deck would have been stacked higher still against the weathermen by short rations, the blunted ice-axes and crampons, the lack of proper winter mountaineering kit.

Were these sacrifices worth it? This blogger cannot say what the Mt Fuji station might have added to the sum of meteorological knowledge. But by proving that men could survive and work in the extreme conditions of the summit, the summit crew did pave the way for a yet more ambitious project than year-round weather observations – the mountaintop radar that went into service in 1965 with the aim of saving thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands, of Japanese lives. This, though, is another story.

References

Fuji-san: oinaru shizen no kensho, Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1992; also for images of summit hut, ice clearance and radar station.

Timeline for Mt Fuji's modern history, from the project to re-utilise the summit station.

Summit of achievement

How Satō Junichi revived the dream of an all-year weather station on Mt Fuji

When, much against his will, Nonaka Itaru was rescued from his self-imposed ordeal atop Mt Fuji in December 1895, he did what any self-respecting Chikuzen samurai would do and composed a defiant tanka:

As the catalpa bow
Springs back, so will I;
Do not believe
That for long I go

Alas, the would-be meteorologist never did get together the money to build a better summit hut. Worse still, there were many who wrote off his efforts to take mid-winter weather observations: "Nothing of serious value resulted from his enterprise," sniffed Frederick Starr, an anthropologist and Mt Fuji devotee, writing in 1924.

Mr & Mrs Nonaka
(from a movie version of their story)

But this may be unfair. Nonaka and his wife Chiyoko, who loyally supported him during their 82-day sojourn, had proved that human beings could survive, if only just, on Mt Fuji in mid-winter.

And Nonaka’s goal – to take a year-round series of high-level atmospheric pressure readings – was one that would have been endorsed by any contemporary with an interest in the accuracy of weather forecasting. Indeed, one such contemporary was no less than a prince of the realm.

By profession, Yamashina-no-miya Kikumarō (1873–1908) was a navy man. He attended the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy and received a commission as a sub-lieutenant in 1894. At about the same time, he was sent to attend the staff college of the German navy, where he no doubt got to grips with the latest meteorological thinking. Back in Japan, he decided to make his own contribution to the science and, in 1901, put up the funds to build a weather station on Mt Tsukuba.

Prince Yamashina at the
battle of Tsushima

As all Hyakumeizan fans will know, at a mere 877 metres, Tsukuba is the lowliest of Japan’s One Hundred Mountains, and building an observatory on its summit was intended only as an interim step. For Prince Yamashina’s ultimate purpose was the same as Nonaka Itaru’s – to site the world’s highest year-round weather station atop Mt Fuji. But the Nonakas’ experience may have served as a caution not to be too ambitious at the outset.

A young meteorologist by the name of Satō Junichi (1872-1970) was appointed to oversee the Tsukuba observatory. Like the Nonakas, Satō was born in northern Kyūshū – the obstinacy sometimes attributed to natives of this region may be a not irrelevant character trait when it comes to siting weather stations atop high mountains. In 1893, he’d gone up to Tokyo to study at a scientific institute (東京物理学校).

In January 1907, twelve years after the Nonaka adventure, Satō scaled Mt Fuji to see for himself if it would be possible to survive up there in mid-winter. The weather was fine and the successful climb filled him with confidence. Then came an unexpected blow: in May the following year, the sudden death of Prince Yamashina deprived the Mt Fuji project of its main patron and sponsor. Satō was forced to look for alternative employment.

Satoh Junichi

In 1920, he shipped out to Japan’s recently acquired territory of Karafuto for a four-year stint as the head of the meteorological observatory. In his novel about Satō’s life, Nitta Jirō speculates that the meteorologist was attracted by the island’s extreme climate – in mid-winter, trees are said to explode with the cold. Indeed, the parallels between Sakhalin and the summit of Mt Fuji in winter cannot have escaped the would-be high-altitude researcher.

Two years after Satō’s return to Honshū, in 1926, a private benefactor (鈴木靖二) offered to fund the construction of a Mt Fuji observatory and Satō was appointed to lead the project. The following year, a small hut, large enough for Satō and a few government meteorologists, was completed at Yasu-no-kawara, a flattish area on the south-eastern rim of Mt Fuji’s crater. For the time being, though, observations would only be taken during the summer.

That would not satisfy Satō for long. And time was pressing – he was now 56 years old. In December 1927, he set off from Gotenba, accompanied by a few young meteorologists, to attempt another winter ascent of Mt Fuji. But the upper slopes were frozen so hard that their crampons wouldn’t bite, and they were forced to turn back. A similar attempt in December two years later also failed. Now time was running out.

On January 3, 1930, Satō set out again, this time accompanied only by the porter, Kaji Fusakichi (1900-1967), who would one day be famous for climbing Mt Fuji a record 1,672 times during his lengthy career. This ascent has taken on the stature of a minor epic within the annals of Mt Fuji.

Somewhere above the seventh station, in a storm of wind, Satō lost his footing and took a long, battering fall down the icy slope, knocking himself out on the way. But Kaji revived him, and the pair reached the summit hut as night was falling.

Once there, they settled in for a long stay. Too long, perhaps. Deprived of fresh food, Satō started to suffer from beriberi, a deficiency disease that probably increased his vulnerability to frostbite. Yet when Kaji urged him to retreat, he retorted that he didn’t want to become “a second Nonaka Itaru”. And so they held out until February 7 before descending. By that time, some of his fingers had been blackened by the frost back to the second joint.

Commissioning the summit observatory atop Mt Fuji
on August, 1, 1932

In the end, Satō did not risk his digits in vain. His exploit - and, no doubt, his gaman - had impressed the public and, even more importantly, the meteorological establishment. In the following summer, the summit hut was rebuilt, expanded and, on August 1, 1932, formally put into commission as the Provisional Mt Fuji Summit Observatory of the Central Meteorological Office.

On that August day, after the ceremonies and the group photograph, Satō prepared to descend the mountain. He was 61 years old; from then on, the station would be run by alternating monthly teams of young Met Office staff, year in, year out. He would no longer be needed.

Before he left, though, there was one more note to write up in the hut logbook: “Anemometer contacts are worn; need to be replaced.” And with that injunction, the old meteorologist set off down the burning slopes of the Gotenba trail for the last time.

References

Frederick Starr, Fujiyama: the Sacred Mountain of Japan, 1924

Chiyoko’s Fuji: Selected excerpts from the English translation of Fuyō-Nikki, 1896, translation by Harumi Yamada, 2013

Fuji-san: oinaru shizen no kensho, Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1992

Obituary for Satō Junichi from Japan Meteorological Society Journal

Cirques of controversy

How pioneer Japanese alpinists weighed into the great debate over Japan’s vanished glaciers

"Viewed from afar, the gentle lines of its skyline suggest a serene and settled character. The splendid accents of the ridgeline save the mountain, despite its huge mass, from any hint of ponderousness. These accents are the three cirques that carve deeply into the upper slopes, adding to their form a note of tension … The snow lingers longer in these amphitheaters, outlining them crisply." (Nihon Hyakumeizan, Senjō-dake)

Senjō-dake (photo courtesy of Yama to Keikoku)

When writing up Senjō-dake, a mountain in Japan’s Akaishi range, Fukada Kyūya (1903–1971) pays tribute to the mountain’s elegant cirques. But no guess is hazarded as to how these “splendid accents” could have formed. Fukada may have had reason to avoid this question. For cirques like these lay at the focus of a long-running controversy that lasted well into the writer’s own lifetime. And, like Fukada himself, several of the protagonists were members of the Japanese Alpine Club.

It was Yamasaki Naomasa who started this one. As we have seen in a previous post, it was in the summer of 1902 that the young geographer discovered evidence for an ancient glacier beside Shirouma’s Great Snow Valley. And, on returning to Tokyo, he wasted no time in announcing his findings.

Evidence for ancient glaciers? The striated "Red Rock" on Shirouma

Asking rhetorically, “Did Japan really lack glaciers?” (氷河果たして本邦に存在せざりしか), Yamasaki’s public lecture sent a frisson through academic circles. A summary that appeared in a newspaper article was translated into English – by a Bank of Japan official, no less – and picked up in the February 1903 edition of Science, then as now the most prestigious of scholarly journals.

Alas, few accepted his arguments. Where in Japan, they asked, do you see obvious moraines and deep “drifts” of pulverised rubble –the debris that clearly marks the paths of ancient glaciers all over the Alps or the Himalaya? Undismayed, Yamasaki continued to press his case. In a second public lecture, delivered in September 1904, he suggested that ancient glaciers might have honed the razor-sharp ridges of Yari-ga-take and other high mountains.

Side moraines on the Morteratsch glacier, Switzerland

Still, his peers were underwhelmed. In 1911, the palaeontologist Yokoyama Matajirō published a paper on fossils from the Bōsō Peninsula that purportedly showed that Japan had enjoyed a tropical climate during the Ice Ages. Two years later, this conclusion was overruled by another geologist, Yabe Hisakatsu, who found that the fossils dated from after the Ice Age. But, still, nobody could find the missing moraines and drifts.

Sangaku: the first edition

Given the orographic nature of the subject matter, it was all but inevitable that the debate would spill over into “Sangaku” (‘Mountains’), the journal of the newly formed Japanese Alpine Club – which Yamasaki had joined within a year of its inauguration. Indeed, Yamasaki had contributed an article on the snows of the high mountains (高根の雪) to the very first volume of “Sangaku”, published in 1906.

But Yamasaki was not party – at least, directly – to the controversy launched in the same pages a few years later. In the November 1911 edition, two articles were published, one putting the case for ancient glaciers and the other opposing it. The first, (日本アルプスと既往の氷河) argued that former glaciers had carved out the shapely cirques found on many high ridges throughout the Japanese Alps. A map was included of these suspected glacial landforms, the first ever attempted.

The author was Tsujimura Tarō, then a 21 year-old university student. Tsujimura’s enthusiasm for mountains was such that he too had joined the Japanese Alpine Club just after its inauguration, making him its youngest member. If his “Sangaku” article read like an uncritical redaction of Yamasaki’s views, this should not be surprising: on entering Tōkyō University, Tsujimura had immediately started attending the professor’s lectures.

In 1911, the editor of “Sangaku” was Kojima Usui, the banker and part-time writer who, six years before, had brought together the founding members of the Japanese Alpine Club. Kojima had taken a close interest in Yamasaki’s theories since 1902 and made a point of attending his public lectures. Yet he never allowed his personal friendship with the geographer to sway his independent judgment on the glacier question.

As editor, it is likely that Kojima had the chance to see Tsujimura’s contribution before setting down his own views. His own piece, which was placed after Tsujimura’s, dealt ostensibly with the permanent snowfields of the Japan Alps, with reference to the Hodaka massif, the 3,000-metre peaks that anchor the southern end of the Northern Alps range (日本アルプスと万年雪関係附穂高山論). Effectively, though, Kojima delivered a 29-page rebuttal of Tsujimura’s 19-page article.

The Hodaka massif from Tokugo Pass

Japan’s cirques were formed differently to those of Europe, Kojima noted; their headwalls were less steep, implying that permanent snowfields, not glaciers, had carved them. In this, he followed John Tyndall (1820–1893), the British physicist and pioneer alpinist, who had proposed that snowfields could slip downhill like glaciers, imitating some of their erosive powers.

As for the moraines and the striated rock that Yamasaki had found on Shirouma in 1902, Kojima hadn’t seen them for himself and so he wasn’t able to judge their worth as evidence for ancient glaciers. And he concludes by suggesting that his fellow Japanese alpinists should take up the search for moraines and other glacial landforms.

Yamasaki Naomasa

 In the re-worked version of the article that appears in his collected works, Kojima added a further argument. Japan’s volcanic craters, he observed, only retain their pristine shape if the parent volcano is still active; the moment a volcano falls silent, erosion starts to destroy its features. By the same token, Japan’s cirques are too crisply defined to have been created by glaciers that vanished 20,000 years ago; instead, they must be the product of some continuing agency – namely, the perpetual snowfields that scour them.

At first sight, Kojima’s scepticism seems difficult to explain. After all, the banker was just then tirelessly promoting “The Japanese Alps” as a term for the high mountains of central Honshū. In fact, he’d chosen the title “Nippon Arupusu” to adorn his collected mountain writings, of which the first volume came out in 1910. Not all his peers welcomed this neologism. Yet evidence for ancient glaciers could only have strengthened the case for awarding the alpine brevet to the Hida, Kiso and Akaishi ranges.

Could it be that Kojima picked up his glacial scepticism from Walter Weston (1860–1940), the English missionary and mountaineer? The question is raised by Ono Yugo, Japan’s pre-eminent glacier expert of modern times, whose paper on the 1911 Sangaku debate is the main source for this post. Kojima certainly did take over the concept of the Japan Alps from Weston, who had embedded them in the title of his own memoirs – Mountaineering and Exploring in the Japanese Alps, published in 1896.

It was Weston too who, on his second visit to Japan, had originally suggested the idea of an “Alpine Club” to Kojima. The proposal was floated during a conversation over a pot of tea at Weston’s flat in Yokohama in early 1903 and the club itself was formed two years later, in October 1905. For this contribution, the newly formed “Sangaku-kai” or Japanese Alpine Club promptly elected the Englishman as its first honorary vice-chairman.

Walter Weston 

When it came to ancient glaciers, Weston was firmly in the camp of the sceptics. As recorded in his second book about Japan, The Playground of the Far East, he had personally seen no relic landforms during his mountain travels in Japan. All in all, the evidence for ancient glaciers was “slight and inconclusive”, he wrote, and, therefore, “it seems reasonable to conclude that the claims that have been advanced on behalf of glacial action in the Japanese Alps are not as yet sufficiently substantiated to merit acceptance.”

Although Weston published these words in 1918, long after his return to England, he most probably formed his opinions long before. During his second stay in Japan, he had taken an interest in the glacier debate and, just before leaving the country in May 1905, he had received an English version of Yamasaki’s original 1902 paper. According to Kojima, who commissioned the translation, Weston was unimpressed by the evidence presented there.

Whether or not Kojima was influenced by Weston, he certainly stayed true to his friend’s position. While never finally excluding the possibility that glaciers had once existed in Japan, he kept firmly to a neutral stance on whether the evidence adduced by the glacier enthusiasts actually supported that conclusion. And, as Ono Yugo points out, some of Kojima’s reservations about that evidence were well founded. For example, the moraine-like rubble heaps found within the basins of some Japanese cirques are not actually moraines – rather, they are “ramparts” formed from stones bouncing and rolling down from the snowfields above.

Alfred Hettner

But the case for ancient glaciers did not rest only on cirques. Soon after the “Sangaku” debate, geologists started to find signs that glaciers had once reached much lower altitudes. In 1913, Alfred Hettner, a visiting German geographer, found a scratched-up boulder in the Inekoki gorge of the Azusa River, above the village of Shimajima. Glacier supporters interpreted it as evidence for an ancient moraine; naysayers said that water erosion could equally well account for the stone’s markings.

In 1931, Ogawa Takuji, a geologist at Kyōto University, published a paper arguing that ancient low-altitude glaciers had created the moraine-like debris found at around the 1,000-metre mark on Yatsu-ga-take, an extinct volcano, and at other sites in Nagano Prefecture. This time, the case was strong enough to prompt a renewed search for glacial relics throughout the Japan Alps and in Hokkaidō.

Ogawa Takuji

One such foray was made by none other than Tsujimura Tarō, who had recently succeeded his mentor Yamasaki as professor of geography at Tōkyō University. For the locus of his search, he chose Senjō-dake in what were now known – irrevocably, thanks to Kojima – as the Southern Japan Alps.

Climbing into one of Senjō’s elegant cirques in the summer of 1932, Tsujimura found the evidence he’d been looking for: so-called “gekritztes Geschiebe” (scratched-up debris) in the terminology borrowed from German geologists. The parallel grooves on their smooth granite surfaces clearly showed that these boulders had been ground under a body of moving ice.

Five years before the Senjō discovery, Kojima Usui had returned to Japan after a twelve-year stint as manager of the Yokohama Specie Bank’s branches in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The chance to see live glaciers in America’s coastal ranges had not changed his mind on the question of ancient ice-streams in Japan. That didn’t stop him from continuing to write voluminously about the artistry of snow and ice in the mountains.

Just a few months before Kojima’s death in 1949, he returned to the glacier question in an essay on “The Hettner Stone revisited”. His last words on the matter hint at a softening in his stance: “If these cirques and roches moutonnée were to affirm the former presence of great glaciers in the Hida, Kiso and Akaishi ranges, then there would be nothing for it but to bow down our heads at the infinitely creative ways of Nature, this strange and mysterious shaper.”

References

Main source is Ono Yugo (2010): Kojima Usui and Tsujimura Taro — Arguments in “Journal of the Japanese Alpine Club (Sangaku)”over glacial landforms in the Japanese Alps. Journal of the Japanese Alpine Club（ Sangaku），105，138-154.（in Japanese）小野有五（2010）: 小島烏水と辻村太郎—日本アルプスの氷河地形をめぐる『山岳』での論争—．山岳，105，138-154．

For the importance of Ogawa Takuji’s 1931 paper, see R H Grapes, History of Geomorphology and Quaternary Geology, page 185.

For account of research on Senjō-dake, see Tsujimura Tarō's 1961 paper in Chigaku Zasshi (辻村太郎、本州山地の氷河堆積物)