How not to have a blast

Japan’s authorities issue volcano safety guidelines for hikers

One-third of Japan’s popular One Hundred Mountains are active volcanoes. This can lead to tragedy. In September 2014, a sudden eruption on a volcano in central Honshū killed 63 people. Some of the victims were never found. To raise awareness of these hazards, Japan’s Home Ministry and its Meteorological Agency have recently issued a leaflet for hikers.

How volcanoes can damage your health

What follows is an outline summary of the Japanese text (PDF). The front sheet of “Be prepared for hiking on volcanoes” (火山への登山のそなえ) marks the location of Japan’s 110 active volcanoes – “active” means showing signs of life, or having erupted within the last 10,000 years. The 33 active volcanoes selected by Fukada Kyūya for his One Hundred Mountains are distinguished in red.

Red captions mark the active Nihon Hyakumeizan

Next are points to keep in mind when climbing a volcano:

• Eruptions can occur without warning, so stay alert to what is happening in and around the crater.
• If you see any unusual venting of steam or gases, take refuge or descend immediately and warn the local authorities, police or Meteorological Agency (which is responsible for monitoring volcanic activity in Japan).
• As volcanic gases are heavier than air, they tend to collect in hollows and valleys. Stay out of such locations.
• Keep your mobile phone on and check for official hazard alerts. Be aware of whether your phone has a connection to the network. Information about mobile phone coverage is published on the websites of some phone companies, or marked on certain hiking maps. Try to establish whether and where you will have mobile phone connectivity before you leave home.
• During an eruption, there is a major risk of death or injury from flying stones and lava bombs near the crater. Get away from the crater and take shelter in a hut or behind a rock. If you have them, put on a helmet and goggles, and breathe through a face-mask or towel.

Things not to leave home without

In addition to your normal hiking kit, map and compass, you should consider carrying a copy of the local volcanic hazard map, which will show you the range of previous eruptions, and also places to take shelter. A helmet, goggles and a towel will protect against ash and other fall-out, as will a rain-jacket. A headlight will help in bad visibility. And don’t forget a spare battery for your mobile phone and emergency rations/water for yourself.

The last sheet of the leaflet starts with a reminder of the 2014 Ontake disaster. Then (see top graphic) two cartoon volcanoes present the various types of eruptive threat – showers of heavy rocks that can fly up to four kilometres from the vent; smaller stones with a lethal range of 10 kilometres; volcanic ash that may, in the leaflet’s measured language, “affect your breathing”, pyroclastic flows that burn and bury; volcanic gases and mudflows. Each category is illustrated from an eruption in living memory.

The message is clear: these hazards are for real.

Related posts: volcanic excursions

Asama: Serious steam

Asama: The inner world

Asama: Fires of Tartarus

Bandai: Sole survivor

Mt Fuji: Journey to the centre of Mt Fuji

Gassan and Chōkai: The twentieth-century Tōhoku express

Kaimon: Slow train to Kaimon-dake

Ontake: The gateway

Sakurajima: The hot and cold Hyakumeizan challenge

Yake-dake: Burning mountain, bad snow

Yake-dake: Seasons of a stratovolcano

A home mountain stirs in its sleep

Volcanic earthquakes detected under Hakusan

NHK Kanazawa reports that, on 20 April, more than 40 small earthquakes occurred under Hakusan - the volcano in Japan's Hokuriku district best known as the home mountain of the Hyakumeizan author. One tremor of magnitude 2.2 occurred near the summit at 1.30 am. Bursts of seismic activity are not unusual under long-dormant volcanoes: on 1 December 2014, more than 150 small tremors were detected in the same area.

The title of this magazine article reads: "X-day for the looming Hakusan eruption".
Well, maybe not quite yet....

According to Wikipedia, the bulk of Hakusan dates back to eruptions that happened 30,000-40,000 years ago. In those days, the edifice may have been higher than Mt Fuji. In a kind of coda to the main action, Ken-ga-mine, a subsidiary summit, welled up as a lava dome about 2,000 years ago. Hakusan most recently erupted in 1659. Eruptions were also recorded in 1554, 1042 and 706 – the earliest one taking place just over a decade before Monk Taichō made the mountain's first ascent.

In yesterday’s episode, the type of low-frequency tremors that signal the movement of magma or volcanic gases was absent, suggesting that an eruption is probably not imminent. So it’s unlikely that the 1,300th anniversary of Taichō’s ascent, which falls this summer, will be marked or marred by a volcanic outburst.

Images and ink (35)

Image: Asama erupts in 1783, from Illustrations of Japan (1822), by Dutch trader Isaac Titsingh. He wrote: “The flames burst forth with a terrific uproar ... Everything was enveloped in profound darkness ... A great number of persons were consumed.”

Ink: On Asama-san, from Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964):

Together with Aso in Kyūshū, Asama is the very model of a Japanese volcano. It has trailed smoke from its summit for untold ages, it was born in a roiling cloud, and its plume is far-famed to this day. While in normal times it emits only the faintest white wisp of vapor, Asama occasionally throws restraint to the winds and blows its stack. In just the last two decades, there have been more than 1,800 eruptions, large and small. This adds up to an amazing frequency of outbursts over the volcano’s lifetime. One of the most famous was the eruption in the third year of Tenmei (1783), when the lava surged forth for several kilometers, ravaging the foot of the mountain with fire. The famous Oni-Oshidashi, or Devil’s Flow, is a relic of that episode.

Image courtesy of the Bodleian, Oxford: the “Volcanoes” exhibition is on at the Weston Library from 10 February to 21 May 2017.

Related post: Serious steam

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 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.

"Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape" (7)

Concluded: a disquisition on the aesthetics of volcanoes and alpine landscapes by Kojima Usui, founder of the Japanese Alpine Club

Illustration of Mt Fuji from
an early edition of Nihon Fukeiron

The European Alps have limestone mountains, while ours do not. Limestone is leached away by the carbonic acid dissolved in water trickling down into the ground, or carried in subterranean streams, to form huge caves with narrow entrances, as can be seen in our own mountains of Chichibu and elsewhere. The Japan Alps have a cave known as the Demon’s Castle and the “Tsuitōshi” rock arch near Shirahone hot springs, but these minor masterpieces don’t add much to the landscape as a whole.

For there are no limestone mountains in our Japanese Alps. Thus we have nothing to compare with those Italian dolomite mountains in the European Alps, with their pure violet shadows and their rich array of peacock hues. Fortunately, however, the elegant forms of volcanoes such as Ontake, Norikura and, beyond the Japan Alps, Hakusan create a mountain scenery where – just as the European Alps combine “Swiss ruggedness” and “Italian grace” – the Japan Alps bring together in a balanced composition granite and quartz porphyry, the hard, rugged igneous rocks with the softer outlines of the volcanic rocks, composing a symphony of colour and line that is rarely seen in this world.

And thanks to the interplay of igneous and volcanic rocks in the Japan Alps, and to the ways in which they were extruded or erupted, they form on the one hand sharp sky-raking spires like Yari-ga-take and Kashimayari (depending in the latter case on the angle of view). Granite, on the other hand, generally takes the form of giant blocks, while volcanoes are conical, so that the mountains are built up in lofty domes that recall some magnificent temple framed by human genius. Heaving up their broad shoulders as they do, Hodaka, Kasumizawa, Kasa, Renge, Jōnen, Ōtenshō and Tsurugi are all mountains of this ilk.

Yet the great and gracious sovereign over all these Japan Alps, from north to south, ruling over them by both destiny and deserving, is none other than Mt Fuji. For not only does Mt Fuji surpass them all in altitude, in beauty of form, exquisite colouring and elegance of bearing, but she stands apart from them, as if on a raised dais and disdaining to join the throng of alpine mountains, preferring instead to raise her imperial throne in solitary splendour over the Pacific coast.

As the Japan Alps are inextricably linked with the Fuji volcanic belt in point of geological history, so must they be too in terms of mountain scenery. This being the case, it is unfathomable that anybody could have the presumption or the audacity to exclude our august Mt Fuji from any discussion of the special characteristics of Japan’s mountain scenery.

Reference

Beta translation from Kojima Usui, Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape (日本山岳景の特色), originally published in "Nippon Arupusu" (1910), Vol IV, reprinted in Nippon Arupusu, Iwanami Bunko edition, 1992.

"Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape" (6)

Continued: a disquisition on the aesthetics of volcanoes and alpine landscapes by Kojima Usui, founder of the Japanese Alpine Club

Mikuri-ga-ike on Tateyama
(Photo courtesy of Sunnybeauty on flickr)

When one compares not just Kami-kōchi but the Japan Alps in general with their European counterparts, it’s as if our volcanoes in some way and in certain aspects make up for the lack of glaciers in our Alps of Japan.

In the Swiss Alps, for instance, glaciers have created a wealth of mountain lakes but, in our Japanese Alps, the five pools on the summit of Ontake, Ō-ike and Nyū-ike on Norikura, as well as Midori and Mikuri-ga-ike on Tateyama can all be ascribed to the action of volcanoes.

Indeed, these pools are higher than the alpine lakes, and what they lack in depth and extent, they more than make up in the clarity of their waters. North of Yari-ga-take, below the granodiorite summit block of Washiba, there is a little crater lake around which scorched blocks of lava lie scattered like fragments of coral around a reef.

It is in such sights, I venture to say, which are hardly to be encountered in any other mountain range, that the special character of Japan’s mountain scenery consists.

Continued

Reference

Beta translation from Kojima Usui, Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape (日本山岳景の特色), originally published in "Nippon Arupusu" (1910), Vol IV, reprinted in Nippon Arupusu, Iwanami Bunko edition, 1992.

Autumn meizan (4)

Travelogue continued: getting to know Hakusan again after a long gap

The life-size tyrannosaurus did discombobulate me - not that I took it for real, of course, though it seemed to lunge at us out of the twilight. As the Sensei had already explained – she was driving – the hulking beast was made of nothing more terrifying than papier-mâché. And it stands guard over a new dinosaur museum. But that was exactly what worried me: the creature was new.

As a rule, mountaineers aren’t fond of change – we like our mountains the way they always have been. This morning, though, innovations leapt out at every bend in the road. That’s only to be expected when you revisit a favourite mountain for the first time in decades. When we reached the end of the forest road, the Sensei parked her van in a multi-level car park; in the old days, this was just a patch of gravel.

Shrouded in mist, our mountain looked suitably mysterious. Hakusan is one of Japan’s three most sacred summits, along with Mt Fuji and Tateyama. It was the home mountain of the author who wrote up the Nihon Hyakumeizan, and the first high one that he climbed. "I could write for ever about Hakusan," Fukada Kyūya wrote, "so much has the mountain given me."

Unfortunately, the instant success of Fukada's book greatly increased the popularity of the mountains he described. That is all the more ironic in the light of the acerbic comments about new roads, ski resorts and summit installations that he sprinkles through his mountain essays. For Fukada was an arch-conservative. In the afterword to Nihon Hyakumeizan, he has this to say about “famous mountains” that let themselves be Disneyfied:

A peak that people admire from morning to night, that they crown with a shrine, necessarily qualifies as an "eminent mountain". A true spirit of reverence inheres in such places. Unfortunately, the crowds mobilized by mass tourism have debased some of these mountains, hallowed by tradition though they once were, and driven the mountain gods from their haunts. Such mountains are no longer eligible as Meizan.

Could Hakusan too be in danger of losing its Meizan brevet? As we shrugged on our packs in front of a grandiose visitor pavilion, I was starting to worry. The spirit of reverence seemed to be much in abeyance around here. True, the climbing path leads out under a concrete torii, but this structure serves mainly to funnel visitors over giant doormats. These are supposed to wipe the seeds of alien weeds from hikers’ boots, said the Sensei. A little later, she pointed out such an intruder, sprouting by the path.

Cloud kept our valley in shadow, though fitful shafts of light played on distant hills. Soon we stopped to take off our jackets: in the old days, frost pillars would push out of the ground in this season, and snow would already have dusted the summits. Today was more late summer than early winter. No wonder those alien plants are moving uphill.

Coming up to a pair of mountain birches that mark the start of Hakusan’s sub-alpine zone, the Sensei patted the silvery bark and announced them as old friends. A while later we reached the midway hut at Jin-no-suke. Or rather we reached the large blockhouse that replaced the small wooden hut which used to merge unobtrusively into the hill. We took our half-way break on the new concrete terrace, where once there was a forest glade.

Above the hut, we came to an outcrop of conglomerate rock, rounded pebbles frozen into a concrete-like matrix. Not the kind of rock you’d expect half way up a not-yet-extinct volcano; you could almost see the gravels rolling along the bed of some ancient river, washed down from a vanished mountain range.

It turns out that we were looking at the Tetori Group, the very formation that, lower down the mountain, yielded up the dinosaur bones for the new museum. The Sensei, who indulges my interest in rocks as a harmless eccentricity, walked on ahead while I took a photo. Some novelties do have to be accommodated, even if they go back more than a hundred million years.

Climbing back into the realm of lava, we passed a giant boulder that must have surfed downhill in one of Hakusan’s eruptions. Now the view opened up across a plain of rustling panda grass. This was Midagahara, the Buddhist name signalling a kind of gateway to the upper world. Years ago, we’d met the monks of Eiheiji here, black-robed and straw-sandalled, each carrying down a creel full of empty drink cans. No sign of them today.

At around 2,200 metres, panda grass gave way to an avenue of creeping pines. The gnarled branches looked to be in good health, green and glossy, with no trace of the strange blight that was reported last year.

We came up to Murodo. For a century or more a large hut has dominated this belvedere below Hakusan’s summit cone. Now a cluster of buildings sprawls across the plateau, big enough for 700 guests at once. This late in the season, all were shuttered. A few hikers were brewing up on gas stoves on the concrete ledges under the eaves. Most wore down jackets against the autumnal chill.

We'd left Murodo below when the clouds were rifted away, like a prestidigitator's tablecloth, to reveal a wild hassle of sunlit hilltops tumbling away in the distance. From out to sea, the clear autumn light cascaded over our mountaintop. Was it in search of visions like this that old Monk Taichō pioneered the way up here in the first year of Yōrō, almost a millennium and a third ago?

At the summit, the wind from the sea blustered against a stone revetment. Behind it sheltered the “okumiya”, the innermost sanctuary of the Hakusan shrine. Brightly dressed folk paid their respects in front of the weathered timbers. Others, at the trig point a few yards away, took selfies. We stepped up to the highest point and looked down at the little crater lake, faithfully reflecting the sky as it always has done.

The Sensei led the way – this is her native mountain too – to a sheltered spot below some boulders, and unpacked three of her industrial-strength onigiri. Our lunchspot faced inland, towards the Japan Alps. Ranges of lower hills rolled away at our feet, as if paying homage to our peak. Hakusan is a high mountain.

Some might cavil at that assertion. After all, Hakusan tops out more than a kilometre below Mt Everest's base camp. Or, to put it another way, you'd have to jack Hakusan up by the best part of two kilometres before it could face off against the Matterhorn. Yet Hakusan never fails to impress me as a mountain of stature.

Tucking into one of those industrial-strength onigiri, I wondered how this could be so. Something to do with the expansive views of an “island peak”, perhaps. Or the way that the summit cone stands aloof from the sublunary world of trees and grass. Or the frost-sculpted landscape of the craters below – the stepped slopes and snow hollows must be some of the southernmost periglacial features on this side of Honshū.

The Sensei interrupted my thoughts. “Just below us is the cave where Monk Taichō meditated,” she said. “With my mountaineering club, we visited it once – it took a while to find, searching around on those steep slopes.”

Naruhodo, I realised, however often you visit a “famous mountain”, there’ll always be something new to discover. It’s almost like a continuing conversation, one with a person of depth and character. I looked over at the Sensei at this, wondering if I should run the idea by her, but she was busy with her own onigiri. As for Hakusan, you know, one could do a lot worse for a Meizan-in-law…