A meizanologist's diary (4)

October 11: to Kanazawa, first to take a turn around Kenrokuen. The famous garden is approached through the grounds of the old castle.

This was where Fukada Kyūya did his military training in the pre-war years, when the castle housed an army base. In off-duty hours, it’s recorded that the future Hyakumeizan author would climb a tower and console himself by gazing through the wooden gratings at distant Hakusan, his native mountain.

Kenrokuen was supposed to combine the six aspects of a perfect garden: spaciousness and seclusion, artifice and antiquity, water-courses and panoramas – I take this from the excellent website of the prefectural authorities.

Yet one wonders how much of the original vision has survived fire, repurposing as a public park, the depredations of war – the pines were tapped for fuel – and repeated restorations. Never mind, the sacred mountain of Horai is still there. Indeed, by some accounts, there may even be two of them, one floating in the Hisago-ike pond, and another in the Kasumi-ga-ike.

Then to the prefectural history museum, which occupies a fine brick building that once served as an arsenal. The meizanologist’s eye was caught by a wall tableau showing a dense network of temples across Hokuriku that were dedicated to mountain religions. Not all of them belonged to the Hakusan faith.

On the way back to the station, there was just time to drop in on the Ishikawa Institute of Modern Literature, which inhabits part of the former Ishikawa No.4 Higher Normal School buildings. An exhibition on mountain writers runs until November 27, to mark the new “Mountain Day” national holiday (August 11) and front-run next year’s 1,300th anniversary of Hakusan’s first ascent by Monk Taichō. (We will hear more about him soon.)

Pride of place was accorded to Fukada Kyūya, as a native of Ishikawa – he was born in Daishōji, halfway between Fukui and Kanazawa, and lived in the latter city for a few years after the war, until his wife got fed up with the snowy winters. Poignantly, one photo showed the Hyakumeizan author on his last mountain (below).

On display were some of the manuscripts for Nihon Hyakumeizan: the blocky yet serviceable script recalled Fukada’s remark that his best-known book was written with a pair of mountain boots. Below the manuscripts could be seen a copy of Yama to Kōgen, the mountain magazine where the essays that were to form Nihon Hyakumeizan first appeared.

It was good to see the English version accorded the honour of a display cabinet too:

Also on show were books by Inoue Yasushi (“Hyōheki/Die Eiswand”), Izumi Kyōka (“Kōya Hijiri”), Nitta Jirō (“Hakkōda-san/Death March on Mt Hakkoda”) and Tani Kōshū, a manga and science fiction writer.

The photos of Inoue Yasushi visiting the Japan Alps (above) and practising with an ice-axe (below) help to explain why his famous mountain novel has the ring of authenticity.

Alas for English speakers, the only translation of Hyōheki is in German. Now there’s a challenge for somebody….

A meizanologist's diary (3)

October 10: the bear scuttles deferentially across our downward path and disappears into the bushes. Nothing to worry about, says the Sensei, who was the only one to see it. It was just an ichinensei – a yearling cub. Quite cute, indeed.

Genanpo (“Gingko Peak”) is where you’d expect to meet bears. So retiring is the mountain that, while driving in this morning, we aren’t sure even where to find it. But Amber sorts us with her GPS-enabled phone, and we discover the trailhead after one false start. Judging by its overgrown state, this is not a popular way up. If mountain mystics pioneered this path, as some say, it must have been a while back.

It’s said that books like Nihon Hyakumeizan have encouraged a star system among Japanese peaks. Anointed eminences, such as Hakusan just over the prefectural border from here, erode away under the boots of Meizan-seeking multitudes. Whereas summits without name or fame, like this one, have so few visitors that the wilderness has overwhelmed them.

That’s how it seems when we are sidetracked into a dead-end by a wild hassle of boar trails. For the third time in an hour, we become uncertain of our position. We consult a pair of elderly men who’ve come up to gather mushrooms. Fortunately, one of them helped to restore the path about ten years ago. Yes, it’s overgrown in places, he says, though you should be able to find it if you keep going straight upwards.

It isn’t only the trail that has fallen into disuse. On a previous trip, the Sensei noticed a patch of “oren” (Coptis japonica Makino?), one of fifty herbs with a prominent role in Chinese medicine. It was probably planted here by somebody from a nearby village. Now, only scattered plants remain in this clearing. The Sensei digs one up to show us the orange nodules among its roots. Apparently they have a bitter taste, which may explain why oren was used as a vermifuge.

We climb up through the plantations of cryptomeria. This is the “satoyama”, or the part of the mountain that is used by villagers. Or rather used to be used. The trees look neglected, their bark shredded by nibbling deer or clawed by bears. Weird fungi colonise rotting logs.

Despite the mountain's name, not a single gingko tree is to be seen. Apparently, the silver (金) in the mountain's name refers to a mine that was once worked here. Stands of beech mark the boundary with the “okuyama”, the wild ‘mountain beyond’. In one place, where branches block the path, Amber takes to a rocky streambed to find a way round. Up on a treeless ridge, clouds come drifting in as we navigate waist-high seas of panda grass.

The Sensei, a veteran of bushwhacking in Oku-Etsu, the part of Echizen province best translated as ‘the back of beyond’, insists on going ahead – it would be easy to lose sight of the path here and drown in seas of sasa.

A jizo figure, hiding in the depths of a yew bush, announces the summit slope – at 1,440 metres or so, the mountain isn’t high enough for creeping pine. We munch our onigiri beside the summit shrine. There are four or five other people there, but their shirts aren’t ripped and their hair isn’t full of twigs and leaves. They must have come up by an easier way.

It’s on the way down that the Sensei sees the bear cub, patrolling between the ‘wild mountain’ and the ‘village mountain’. We take a leaf out of Tanaka Yōki’s book – in his lecture yesterday, he described how, questing the mountains of Hokkaidō, he chanted “o-jama shimasu” (je m'excuse de vous déranger) to give the bears warning. We chorus in alto, soprano and baritone as we yomp down through the gloomy satoyama.

Back in the van, I encounter another of the mountain’s denizens. Something is clambering up my shirt, fortunately on the outside. I open the window and toss out a brown and sturdy-looking tick. Bears and ticks – you shouldn’t take them home with you. They don't make good pets.

A meizanologist's diary (2)

October 9: to Daishōji, the birthplace of the Hyakumeizan author, to hear a slide presentation by Tanaka Yōki. The self-styled adventure racer is the first and only person to have completed a round of Fukada Kyuya’s one hundred mountains of Japan “by fair means” only – that is, entirely on foot, except for the sea crossings, for which he used a sea kayak.

More recently, he’s completed the second 100 mountains of Japan – that is the Hyakumeizan 200, less the ones he climbed before – again on foot and by kayak. The strait between Wakkanai on the Hokkaido mainland and Rishiri island alone took ten hours. Altogether, Tanaka covered more than 7,800 kilometres and climbed 110,000 metres, solely on human power.

There’s a brief outline of his original journey on this blog, and more detail on the second 100-mountain “Great Traverse 2” on an NHK website (in Japanese). By way of conclusion, Tanaka said he wanted to live an “arigato to ieru jinsei” – a life to be grateful for. Or should that be a life filled with gratitude? Either way, it sounds like a good way to live.

A meizanologist's diary (1)

October 8: Starting the annual trip to Japan - a meizanologist has to go where the Meizan are - I'm on the Tokyo-Haneda to Osaka-Itami flight and seated on the right-hand side of the plane.

Yet there’s no sign of Japan’s most famous mountain. Has it collapsed under the weight of visitors? After all, their number is said to have tripled since UNESCO designated Mt Fuji as a World Cultural Heritage site.

But then I notice the white hummock in the undercast – that must be where the volcano is lurking. What really captures the attention, though, is the huge stack of lenticular clouds riding on the mountain’s lee side. A colossal pile of crockery juggled on the winds by an invisible prestigitator.

Is there no end to this Meizan’s virtuosity? The plane steers well clear, though - and with good reason. This is a mountain that demands the utmost respect, from climbers and pilots alike.

Meizan spring & autumn (5)

Failing to see Mt Fuji from Hakusan's separate mountain

Was it really necessary to get up two hours before daylight? I may have been rash enough to put the question to the Sensei over our pre-dawn cup of coffee. “You’ll see,” was all she said.

Soon after daybreak, we were walking up through a shadowy forest. The sun had yet to climb over Chiburi-one, the ridge we were heading for. Now I was beginning to understand the early start – geographically speaking, Bessan may be only an appendage to the Hakusan massif. Yet, as the name suggests, it is a “separate mountain”, and to climb it, you need to raise yourself through much the same interval – sixteen hundred vertical metres – as for Hakusan.

In the half-light, the huge trunks rose around us like columns in a Romanesque cathedral. The Sensei pointed out a particularly magnificent tree. It’s a konka, she said. Eh, I asked, what kanji do you spell that with? She gave me a funny look. Ah, naruhodo, a conker.

We stopped to fill our water bottles at a spring from central casting – a little rill of snow-chilled water, clear as crystal glass, burbling out from under a mossy arch of boulders. No wonder the trees like it here. As we climbed on in the growing light, the giant horse-chestnuts, oaks and katsura gradually gave way to beech trees.

On the ridge proper, we passed through a stand of maple, their leaves backlit a dramatic yellow against the liquid-blue autumn sky. Now we were in the realm of the kōyō, the autumn colours for which Japan’s mountain forests are justly famed.

But – or was this just a nostalgia attack? – perhaps those autumnal ochres and maroons and crimsons weren’t flaring quite as they used to. Stripping off another layer of fibre-pile, I wondered if it was just too warm to start the leaves turning properly.

We sat in a beech grove, sipping the cool water, munching sweet natto, and looking out at the white fringing to Hakusan’s summit crest yonder – yesterday’s clouds must have sprinkled down a little snow, the year’s first.

A clatter of rotor blades cut into our musings – a dun-coloured helicopter, a military spotter, choppered its way up the valley, then circled back. This hatsu-yuki no longer belonged to us.

Refreshed, we climbed into the realm of the dake-kamba, the rosy-barked high mountain birch. An exposed path led across a flank of the ridge. Fortunately, the black earth of the path was dry. Then suddenly we left the trees and moved up onto a grassy hogsback.

There’s sometimes a large snake here, sunning itself, said the Sensei, whose encounters with the local wildlife include quite a few bear and viper sightings. Privately, I hoped it was too late in the year for such denizens, but you never know your luck in these warming times.

Lunch was taken on a comfortable rock slab beside the refuge hut, some two-thirds of the way up the ridge. Beside the hollow-log water-trough, a sign invited us to clean our boots with the washing-up brushes provided. The idea, it explained, was to stop alien seeds from the lowlands migrating into the alpine zone. Truly, times have changed around here.

Again our musings were interrupted – this time, the whup-whup of rotor blades came from a big Bell helicopter, complete with chin-turret for its gyro-stabilised cameras. Apparently, a visit from NHK. And already the craft was sashaying to and fro across the summit ridge opposite, reeling in footage of the year’s first snow for the evening news show.

When the whine of the twin turbines had died away, we pried ourselves off our sun-warmed slab and turned to the last part of our climb. End-on, the top of Chiburi-one looked almost alpine. Soon our boots crunched through the first shards of ice while, all around, the creeping pine boughs that fringed the path rustled and whispered as they shed last night’s frozen snow.

On the col, a cold wind blew. Taking shelter in a hollow, the Sensei delegated the summit push to me. Ten minutes along the level ridge I came up to a small shrine, fringed with icicles – it’s said that Taichō Daishi, the monk who “opened” Hakusan in that first year of Yōrō (717) also pioneered the Chiburi ridge route to this subsidiary peak.

Beyond a summit marker inscribed with our height – 2,399 metres – the rocky spine of Honshū floated above a blue gulf of low-level haze. My gaze tracked rightwards from the hacksaw serrations of the Northern Alps – yes, there was the pimple of Yari and the statelier domes of the Hodaka massif – across a gap to Ontake, isolated and aloof – and then further still, southwards, to the indistinct ripples of the Chuo Alps.

Those ripples … I wish I’d looked harder in that direction. According to Michio Masunaga in his magisterial book on the mountains of Echizen, an Edo-era scholar named Kuroda Tomoari (1792-1859), who climbed Bessan in search of medicinal herbs, reported that he saw Mt Fuji from here.

Is this really possible? By consensus, Japan’s highest mountain can’t be seen from the top of Hakusan, fully 300 metres higher than Bessan, because the line of sight is blocked by Ontake. As for Bessan, Masunaga-san says that Mt Fuji would simply be hidden by the earth’s curvature; he himself, in a lifetime of mountaineering, has never seen the mountain from Bessan.

Hoping to settle the question, I later looked at my copy of the Handbook for Climbing Mt Fuji. Unfortunately, this invaluable reference just muddies matters further - it has a map that suggests that Mt Fuji can indeed be seen from the prefectures of both Fukui and Ishikawa, in which the Hakusan/Bessan massif stands. But, if so, where are those lofty viewpoints?

There was no time to pursue such enquiries now. The Sensei would be freezing in her bower of creeping pine, and we’d better be heading down – the sun was already westering tendentiously towards the Japan Sea.

Sixteen hundred downward metres are hard on the knees. Ours were laughing, as the Japanese say. Yet we managed to keep the sun in the sky until the lowermost woods. Then he dipped below the ridge and we were left darkling. Stars were pricking through the forest canopy by the time we reached the Sensei’s van. There was no need to ask again why we'd got up so early.

Meizan spring & autumn (4)

Kyōgatake: a volcano that has taken the vow of silence

If you want to get to know a mountain, it’s best to visit in the company of its local guardians. So I leapt at the chance to inspect Kyōgatake with members of the Fukui Mountaineering Club, including its venerable president, Michio Masunaga. Appropriately, the summit we meant to climb is the highest that lies wholly within the borders of the club's home prefecture.

Skippping the first few hundred of Kyōgatake's 1,625 metres, we parked the cars half-way up Hozuki-one (“Moon-keeping ridge”). Clouds loured over the plain below, just as you'd expect from Hokuriku weather in October. A rainbow flickered out over nearby hills and rain started to spot.

We set off past a sign warning us about the vipers. Although snakes aren’t the most likely source of toxin in this season: “Don’t touch that, or you’ll come out in a rash,” said the Sensei, pointing to a shrub with crimson leaves. It seems that urushi, the plant that provides the resin for lacquer ware, has much the same effect on human skin as poison ivy. I took a photo for future reference.

Only one, mind, as Masunaga-san was setting a brisk pace up front, belying his 82 years. Indeed, this being a Monday, almost everybody in the group was of pensionable age, except for the Sensei and myself. Yet we didn’t manage to catch up with the advanced guard until they stopped for a breather. We nibbled hill food under two intertwined trees that go by the name of “Adam and Eve”.

This nod in the direction of religious syncretism could mislead. As the Hyakumeizan author points out, the mountain names around here are firmly in the traditional camp. “In front of Hakusan,” Fukada Kyūya writes in his essay on Arashima-dake, “are arrayed the lesser peaks of Hō-onji, Kyō-ga-take, Aka-usagi-yama, and Gankyōji, the playground of the Fukui Mountaineering Club. The Buddhist names of many of these mountains are said to trace out the route that Monk Taichō took when he made the first ascent of Hakusan.”

Kyōgatake means ‘Sutra Peak’, suggesting that a religious scroll might have been buried there. Lending credence to that theory, a sutra case was discovered near the summit in 1997, stamped with a seal that indicated that it had been brought here from Kai Province some time after the second year of Dai’ei (1522). A racier account of the name’s origin has the monks of Heisenji bringing their precious scrolls up here to burn when their monastery was sacked.

We recommenced our walk in a file no less disciplined than the far-famed “Kolonne” of the Swiss Alpine Club – the Sensei and I tried not to straggle this time. Just after we emerged from the trees on a grassy ridge, Masunaga-san stopped again. But this time it was for edification, not refreshment.

Here was the perfect place – our leader extended a ski-pole in a proprietorial manner – to observe where Kyōgatake’s ancient crater had collapsed, sending debris cascading down into the plain. That was in Jōmon times, about five to seven thousand years ago, about a million years after Kyōgatake's eruptive heyday.

I was impressed. Hearing that Kyōgatake had once been a volcano was like discovering that some placid senior citizen, a pillar of the local community, was notorious in his youth for a blazing temper and riotous excess.

Actually, you could extend that remark to the whole landscape we were looking at – yonder was Arashima-dake, apparently a model of orographic sobriety. But if you’d been standing here 20 million years ago, say the savants, you would have seen eruption after eruption. Later, the volcanic edifice crumbled away, but the day was saved for future Hyakumeizan enthusiasts when a bleb of igneous rock welled up to form today’s peaceable summit. So today you start climbing the mountain on volcanic debris and end up on top of a granitic dome.

A little later, plumes of steam and smoke would have billowed from a seawards direction as red-hot lava surged out into shallow coastal waters. Then these effusions hardened and crystallised into elegant hexagonal pillars of basalt. Today, you can watch crack-climbing fans clambering up them at Tojinbō, Echizen’s answer to the Giant’s Causeway.

Masunaga-san had timed his briefing well. A little further on, we clambered up a wooden ladder past a wall of gritty grey and unmistakably volcanic rock – like frozen porridge – showing through the russet and yellow foliage.

Another steep slope led up to an intermediate top known as Shakushi-dake, which may have been the original name for the whole mountain. From here we could look down into the hollow left by the crater collapse – so much like a Lost World under these overcast skies that all it needed to complete the scene was a brace of pterandons flapping their way up out of the mist-raking treetops on leathery wings.

On the far side of Shakushi is another col. It was here that “a long time ago” Masunaga-san had bivvied in a snowhole during a winter climb of Kyōgatake. They’d started from the ski-ground at Rokuroshi and took the whole day to get this far, using a rope to traverse the narrow parts of the ridge.

Reading this account in Masunaga-san's book on 150 mountains of Fukui, I was reminded that these mountains have a bipolar character, balancing a benign face during the warm seasons with arctic asperity in mid-winter.

As he and his companions climbed the mid-winter mountain, he only sound was the crunch of their traditional snowshoes (kanjiki) biting into the drifts. The snow-laden trees merged into the mists, blurring the world into a milky whiteness: “It felt as if, little by little, we were being absorbed into the landscape.”

Another steep slope took us to the true summit. Once again, the Sensei and I found ourselves scrambling to keep up as, gripping handfuls of sasa or a grimy rope, we A-zeroed ourselves up the muddy runnel of a path.

Inland, the clouds had completely blotted out the most eminent Meizan of the whole Hokuriku region. Yet we didn't miss the view much. Geologically speaking, Hakusan is a mere upstart when compared with the ancient heritage of our own peak. Sometimes, maturity has its charms too.

Meizan spring & autumn (3)

Fujisha-ga-dake: following in the footsteps of Fukada Kyūya

Maitta, na. The poem wasn’t there – there was still a wooden post in the ground, but both plaque and poem were gone. Oh no, said the Sensei. I can’t say I was bothered, though. It was too splendid a day to worry about one tanka or haiku more or less.

Sometimes I suspect that Hokuriku folk are playing the Seattle game – they talk up their fogs, mists, rains and snows to put off potential migrants from the overcrowded cities on the Pacific coast – who might otherwise surge over the mountains, in zombie-like hordes, and turn these rural provinces of Ura-Nihon into another concrete wasteland...

But, if that really is their game, they’ll need to keep quiet about days like this one. The morning shrugged off its last mists as the Sensei drove her van up the mountain road. A sturdy suspension bridge took us across a reservoir’s tea-green snowmelt and then in the strengthening day we’d rambled up through the beech woods.

On this May morning, the light roared vertically down onto our summit from a cloudless zenith. The glare picked out every leaf and shrub in hyper-real viridian. Westwards, the ultramarines of the Japan Sea merged into an azure sky.

Was it a day like this when Fukada Kyūya, the future Hyakumeizan author, was captured by the mountains? “My hometown is Daishōji, in Ishikawa Prefecture,” he records in an essay on the mountains of Echizen, “but my mother was from Fukui, and that’s why I went to Fukui Middle School (today’s Fujishima High School). So the blood of both Kaga and Echizen courses through my veins. And, in my final year at primary school, the first mountain I ever climbed was Fujisha-ga-dake, which straddles the border between the two prefectures. Although it is only 942 metres high, the mountain that overlooks my hometown is elegantly formed.”

Fujisha-ga-dake, a "Fuji-imitating peak"
(Photo courtesy of Yama to Keikoku magazine)

In the next paragraphs, Fukada explains what set him on the path towards his famous One Hundred Mountains:

People don’t just fall in love with mountains. They need some kind of impetus. In my case, somebody praised me for being a strong walker – if you want to get somebody to do something, the first thing to do is flatter them. In my hometown, there was a lad called Inasaka Kenzō, five years older than me, who was already studying medicine in Kanazawa at the time I started middle school. Ken-chan was a mountain-lover who was already doing climbs in the Northern Alps, and it was this great sempai who first taught me mountain ways. And a good guide is the second thing you need if you’re going to really get involved with something.

On this blindingly bright top, the first thing that involved me was to slap on more sun-cream. And the second was to sit down on a convenient log and sink my teeth into one of the Sensei’s industrial-strength onigiri – we’d had an early start. Around us, couples and families were spreading out picnic cloths and tucking into their Hello Kitty lunch boxes – Fujisha is still a good mountain for children. Primus stoves were roaring too, so that sybarites could sip hot soup or filtered coffee while gazing out into the blue distances.

Equipment choices were simpler in Fukada Kyūya’s youth:

I climbed many of our local mountains while I was in middle school. For seven and a half sen, you could buy a sheet of the Army General Staff’s 1:50,000 scale maps, and I liked to mark mine up with red pencil lines to show where I’d been. There were still no rucksacks and so I just slung my schoolbag over my shoulder and set off in straw sandals and leggings. By the time I went on to high school in Tokyo, I’d fallen completely in thrall to the mountains.

In high school, he fell for poetry too. Under the nom-de-fudé of Kyūzan (“Nine Mountains”), he churned out haikus and, with friends from his native Hokuriku, started a school literary journal. His enthusiasm for seventeen-syllable effusions faded after he moved on to Tokyo University – short stories and novels were more the thing now – but he kept composing the odd verse all through his life. It was one of these later poems that the Sensei wanted to show me. Somebody had recently put it up on this mountaintop, she said.

We walked over to a neighbouring clearing but found it empty, except for that telltale post. The poem had flown. Or somebody had taken it down. Probably Fukada would have preferred it this way – not a few of his Nihon Hyakumeizan chapters end with acerb comments on people who try to embellish mountaintops with statues, monuments and other tat: “You never saw such things in the old days and, speaking for myself, I prefer my summits unencumbered with them,” he wrote in the chapter on Senjō-dake.

In the end, we didn’t need a text – the Sensei discovered that she could remember the poem and, on the way down the mountain – note to potential visitors from Omote-Nihon: this path is horribly slippery even in fine weather – she recited it to me:-

山の茜を顧みて／一つの山を終りけり／何の俘のわが心／早も急かるる次の山

Yama no akane wo kaerimite/hitotsu no yama wo owarikeri/nan no toriko no wagakokoro/hayamo isogaru tsugi no yama

Still the evening peaks are burning
And though our climb is hardly done
My captive heart’s already yearning,
Aye desperately, to find our next one.

When the meaning of these words had trickled through, I looked at the Sensei with amazement. It was as if old Fukada had just read our minds. “So, where will you take us next?” I asked.