Sakura diary (5)

19 April: Narita again: after circling back over the airport, the Airbus heads due north, tracking up the spine of Tohoku.

Looking through gaps in the cloud, passengers in the right-hand seat rows can play Meizan sudoku.

Over Hokkaido, the track turns slightly left, so that we coast into Siberia far to the north of Vladivostok. At first the big Siberian rivers roll brown with meltwater; after lunch, washed down with a glass of economy-class pinot noir, they’re frozen into silent braids.

We continue on this hyperborean heading, overflying nameless mountains, until Siberia’s northern coast heaves into view under the starboard wing, somewhere north-west of Norilsk.

The Barents Sea winks blue at this season; the water is open as far north as the eye can see. In just one place, though, ice-floes have crowded up on a lee shore.

Perhaps it's the pinot noir. Looking down on the brash ice, I so far forget myself as to think of ... white petals floating in an old castle moat. How mortifying: even at this distance, the cherry flowers have cast their spell. As they always will.

Sakura diary (4)

17 April, Eiheiji: early on a Monday, the town is almost deserted. Under the temple’s colonnade of old cedar trees, it’s as tranquil as it was in my student days. Those concrete dormitory buildings are larger than I remember them, though.

Some of their occupants are already out and about. Above the temple, we pass a working party of novice monks who are weeding and cleaning the watercourse. Eiheiji’s founder would have approved; streams and rivers were important to him:-

Water extends into flames; it extends into thought, reasoning and discrimination; it extends into awareness and the Buddha nature. Descending to earth, it becomes rivers and streams. We should realize that, when water descends to earth, it becomes rivers and streams, and that the essence of rivers and streams becomes sages.

Aiming to trace this stream to its source, we follow in the footsteps of the sage who wrote those words. The way is soon interrupted by a sizeable concrete dam. At this point, we can either take a long way round by road – more than a kilometre, says the sign – or duck under a yellow-and-black rope and take a flight of steps straight up the side of the obstacle. The choice is easy.

Ignoring a warning sign about avalanches – snow? what snow? – we duck under the rope. A few minutes later, the error of our way is borne in on us. A TV-sized rock has smashed down onto a stair landing, all but demolishing the steel railings. Smaller stones lie all about in puddles of meltwater. “Let’s get out of here,” I say to the Sensei, needlessly; she’s already pounding the stairs as fast as she can.

Back in safety we take breath. Inevitably, the road that leads round the reservoir is planted with cherry trees. For a change, their blossoms are tinged a bright cerise. We find them rather louche. At the head of the lake, we rejoin the watercourse, which promises to take us into the heart of the mountain.

To this day, scholars can’t say for certain why Zen master Dōgen gave up a comfy billet in the capital city and moved to the wilds of Echizen. This was in 1243. It may be that he’d exhausted the patience of his peers at the Enryakuji – after all, he was busy subverting their doctrine – or simply that a follower had offered him a tract of land. Or perhaps he just wanted to be in the heart of the mountains:-

These mountains and waters of the present are the expression of the old buddhas. Each, abiding in its own dharma state, fulfils exhaustive virtues … Since the virtues of the mountain are high and broad, the spiritual power to ride the clouds is always mastered from the mountains, and the marvellous ability to follow the wind is inevitably liberated from the mountains.

These words open Dōgen’s Mountains and water sutra (Sansui-kyō), one of the essays that make up his Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma, a summation of the theology that he developed after his study tour of Cha’an monasteries in China. Intriguingly, the Sansui-kyō was written just a few years before his move to Echizen.

Today, the marvellous ability to follow the wind is denied us. In fact, both we and the wind lack puff. An unseasonable warmth bears down – yesterday the mercury nudged 30°C in Tokyo – and, while we toil higher, the sunlight thins and fades. As so often in this north country, the weather has started to turn.

“To be in the mountains is ‘a flower opening within the world’," says Master Dōgen. “Those outside the mountains do not sense this, do not know it. Those without eyes to see the mountains, do not sense, do not know, do not see, do not hear the reason for this.”

The flowers opening beside the track give us reason to pause – perhaps more than strictly necessary. Aster-like ichirinsō, white as the sakura, alternate with patches of purple kikuzaki ichirinsō. The path never veers far from the stream, which runs in a direttissima line straight up the mountain. It follows that the going is steep.

In the old days, before people went hiking, the only way up a mountain would have been to follow a sawa or watercourse. So the abruptness of this path might suggest that it originated in early times, lending credence to the tradition that Dōgen came this way.

About where the stream dwindles to the merest trickle, we pass under the boughs of a mixed oak and beechwood. The path comes out into a wooded dell, where stone buddhas, each in a rough shelter of piled stones, distil green thoughts in a green shade.

This, explains the Sensei, is the site of Daibutsu-ji, the temple that gives the mountain its name. Dōgen founded it the year after he arrived in Echizen, using it as a place to continue the meditation he’d placed at the heart of his doctrine. After a year or two up here, he relented on his followers – who might, like us, have found the climb a hard morning’s work – and moved down the valley to Eiheiji.

With the ridgeline now in sight, we zig-zag up a slope that is a-quiver with iwa-uchiwa (“rock fans”, translates the Sensei, although probably she does not mean in the Rod Stewart sense). When we top out on the bare grassy summit, a party of fit pensioners is already sitting in a circle, finishing their lunch. My, they were fast. Or were we slow?

We find a fallen log to sit on and broach the Sensei’s industrial-strength onigiri.

While eating, we admire the ghostly profile of Hakusan to the east. Close by, white magnolia flowers flutter against a backdrop of bare trees. Lunch is short: the cold wind is bringing an ominous band of dark cloud towards us.

The other party start out along the ridge, instead of descending the way they came, tempting me to follow. After all, tradition says that Dōgen came from that direction when he discovered the site for the Daibutsuji temple. The Sensei has other ideas: “You can go, but I’m going straight down,” she says, with a nod at the glowering clouds.

As I know better than to challenge the experience of a local guide, the ridge traverse is kicked into touch. The wind drops as soon as we dip below the ridge, confirming Dōgen’s good judgment in siting his temple, but the skies continue to darken.

Still, there’s time to head a short distance up a side-valley to visit a waterfall. The Sensei recalls coming here one autumn, before the dam was built. In those days, you had to climb round the waterfall to reach the beech woods of the upper valley, flaring red and gold. Since then, steel ladders have been installed next to the waterfall. We wonder who put them there - was it a hiking club, for the convenience of sawa climbers, or were the dam authorities responsible?

Although we say that mountains belong to the country, says Dōgen, actually they belong to those that love them. When mountains love their master, the wise and the virtuous inevitably enter the mountains. And when sages and wise men live in the mountains, because the mountains belong to them, trees and rocks flourish and abound, and the birds and the beasts take on a supernatural excellence. This is because the sages and wise men have covered them with virtue. We should realise that the mountains actually take delight in wise men and sages. (Translation by Carl Bielefeldt)

Really, the waterfall would look better without those steel ladders. By the lake, the yamabuki glow yellow in the gathering gloom.

We feel the first drops of rain as we come in under the great trees of Eiheiji. The monks are still at work in the river, except for an overseer who is recording their efforts with a large camera. It’s good to see that Eiheiji shoots Nikon. The temple also seems to be exploring co-branding opportunities with a local firm of bulldozer-makers:

A full downpour starts just as we reach the Sensei’s van. That night, a tempest of wind and rain buffets the house. In the morning, the cherry trees will be stripped bare; the white petals gone even from the gutters, all washed away overnight.

Sakura diary (3)

15 April: at Imajo, the sakura glow brighter under a leaden overcast. The townlet lies south of Fukui, yet its cherry trees have yet to start shedding their petals. That may be due to a slightly cooler climate, thanks to the wooded hills that backstop the town’s southern boundary. These we’ve come to inspect.

We start our climb of Fujikura up a flight of stone steps that leads past vegetable gardens to a shrine.

A sign warns us about bears, but the wire fence at the wood’s edge suggests that wild boars are the real menace around here, especially if you grow vegetables. This slope will soon shimmer blue with dog violets (katakuri), says the Sensei, but we seem to be a few weeks early. Ah well, you can’t have your sakura and see your katakuri too.

The grey skies spit with rain as we zig-zag higher. The Sensei wears a cagoule, and I wield an umbrella, which is bad for my balance. “Shall we give up?” she asks, sensing my lack of enthusiasm for this slippery path. “Give up what?” I reply, “We haven’t got anywhere yet.” Fujikura does not promise to be one of our more inspirational outings.

At half height on the ridge, we pass a course of stonework and the bramble-filled shadow of a ditch. Apparently, there was a castle here during the warring country period, although too little remains to prompt Bashō-style ruminations on forgotten warriors’ deeds. Besides, I remind myself, we don’t do mujō.

Crossing from Fujikura to Nabekura, the twin summit, we enter a beechwood. At 500 metres or so, this seems remarkably low for trees that favour a cool climate. A snowpatch that we crunch through as we start descending the northern slope helps to explain the presence of a particularly magnificent beech grove, the leafless trees sheltering the path like a pillared hall.

Lower down, we come across a climatic signal of another kind. The tree trunks in a plantation of cryptomeria are bound up in plastic twine – to protect them against deer, explains the Sensei. In days gone by, the snow would have been too deep for these animals to make a living up here.

As the rain has stopped, a late lunch is taken on the steps of a deserted temple. Tucking into the Sensei’s industrial-strength onigiri, we’re too hungry to be distracted by the flowering tree over by the belfry. The operative haiku is this one:-

花よりもよしや吉野の葛団子 (17th century; anonymous)
 Hana mo yoshi ya, Yoshino no kuzudango

Lo, they beat the blossoms; Yoshino’s kudzu dumplings.

(Translation: Robin D. Gill)

Sakura diary (2)

14 April, Fukui: It’s easy to get swept away by the blossoms, though. Walking past the remains of Fukui Castle – the donjon burned to the ground centuries ago – we see swirls of petals floating on the moat’s dark waters. They bring to mind a song about snow-flakes vanishing into a winter sea. Perhaps best not go there. Or is it ice floes endlessly adrift in the Denmark Strait?

さまざまのこと思い出す桜かな
Samazama no koto o omoidasu, sakura ka na

Many, many things they call to mind, those cherry blossoms (Basho)

Sakura diary (1)

13 April, Narita: as soon as the tyres squawk onto the runway, I realise this trip is ill-timed. Over there, a whole row of them enfold the airport’s fuel tanks in their luminous billows. Later, as the Shinkansen hurtles westwards, they flicker past the windows like a faulty neon tube. On arrival in Fukui, they throng the streets and riverbanks, or light up the tawny hillsides with intermittent puffs of pallor. In the manner of a frontal assault – people do call it the sakura zensen – the cherry blossom rolls northwards. Resistance is futile.

14 April, Fukui: if we can’t avoid them, we may as well view them. I accompany the Sensei up Asuwa-yama, the hill on the edge of town. Under the flowering trees, pensioners take selfies with their smart phones. This is a weekday, so crowds are moderate. Tomorrow, on Saturday, the police will be out trying to unscramble the gridlocked roads. Such congestion is traditional:-

花見駕籠がくて衝突桜狩
Hanami-kago gakute shōtotsu sakuragari

The sedan chairs jostle as they vie to view the blossom (Yūsei, 1680)

I’ve nothing against cherry blossoms, of course – without them, after all, there’d be no cherry trees. It’s just their in-your-face evanescence that’s objectionable.

Now, here we go again – the breeze swirls the petals round us like a snow squall. So stagey. It's as if somebody's trying to re-enact those famous opening lines in Tale of the Heike: “The proud endure not; they are a mere dream on a spring evening and, no less, the mighty must fall, as blossom drives before the wind ….”

Actually, the aim of our walk has nothing to do with the mighty. We're on our way to a teacher's house. The name of William Eliott Griffis (1843-1928), a Meiji-era yatoi, will live forever in connection with Fukui. In 1871, not long after graduating from Rutgers University, the young American came to the feudal school as a science teacher on a salary of $2,400. The Fukui authorities even built him a Western-style house.

Embarrassingly, though, Griffis's actual stay was almost as transient as the sakura zensen's. The year after his arrival, he decamped to a more prestigious job in Tokyo. Although this irked his hosts, Fukui seems to have forgiven him, and the house was recently reconstructed. At the Sensei’s suggestion, we drop in to inspect it.

Surfing the exhibits, a minor meizanological discovery is made – Griffis may have been the first foreigner to climb Hakusan, the 2,702-metre dormant volcano that looms to the city’s east. At least, that was his ambition, as he phrases it in a letter to his sister Maggie dated August 20, 1871. The full story is found in his collected letters.

Outside the house, the museum curators have erected a hardboard cut-out of Griffis, complete with a puritanical hat, leaving a hole where his head should be for visitors to poke their faces through. A cheeky young soul does just that as we walk past. Yes, after more than a century, I think Fukui and Griffis have at last reached a satisfactory accommodation.

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.