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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76180371727590940562015-03-31T13:28:29.050+02:00One Hundred MountainsOn and around Fukada Kyūya's Nihon HyakumeizanProject Hyakumeizanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-37359472114868707082015-03-29T18:41:00.001+02:002015-03-29T21:24:57.753+02:00Story of a reviewIt seems scarcely possible that the same person who commissioned the original Nihon Hyakumeizan in the late 1950s could, more than half a century later, be the first to review One Hundred Mountains of Japan, the book's English version. Yet exactly this has just happened.

The generous and perceptive review of the translated Nihon Hyakumeizan that you read in the previous post is by Ohmori Hisao (above), one of the Japanese Alpine Club's senior statesmen. The original Japanese version of the review appeared in a recent JAC newsletter.

An authority on the European Alps, Ohmori-sensei has a long list of mountain and travel books to his name. He also introduced the latest edition of Fuji Annai and Fuyō Nikki, the journals by Nonaka Itaru and Chiyoko of their 82-day sojourn atop Mt Fuji in the winter of 1895.

In the late 1950s, Ohmori-sensei was working for a small publisher in Tokyo, Hōbundō, having recently studied French at university. It was probably thanks to this background that he got to know Fukada Kyūya, the future Hyakumeizan author, who was then translating a French mountaineering work for Hōbundō.

Here Ohmori-sensei himself takes up the story:

As Hōbundō was a small company, I had to do everything by myself. While editing books, I also had to help edit magazines. Thanks to this, I acquired the necessary skills on the job. One day, the editor of the monthly magazine Yama to Kōgen (Mountains and Highlands) retired, and I was asked to take on this work.

Just then, I came across Mr Fukada's essay on "Uncrowded Meizan – in pursuit of repose and solitude," which he'd written for a special issue of Bungei Shunjū. It was in this article that he first floated the idea of 'a hundred famous mountains of Japan'. "That's it!" I thought to myself – this would definitely make an excellent project.

You see, I wanted to make something more of this magazine than just something for outdoor or mountaineering club members. And the literary prowess and the mountain experience that Mr Fukada brought to the table was exactly what I had in mind. So I called on him at his home in Setagaya, did some negotiation with him, and got his agreement to write.

The Nihon Hyakumeizan series as it first appeared
in "Yama to Kogen" magazine

The rest is history. What later became the definitive One Hundred Mountains of Japan started life in the March 1959 edition of Yama to Kōgen. Chōkai and Nantai were the first essays to appear. Readers subsequently voted this the best feature in the magazine, which published two of Fukada's mountains every month until April 1963. The articles were collected and published by Shinchōsha in July 1964 in an edition that you can still buy today.

It's good to know that the work's original commissioning editor is also still going strong. Domo o-sewa ni narimashita, Ohmori-sensei!Project Hyakumeizanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-57877802719360794802015-03-26T21:01:00.000+01:002015-03-30T22:53:11.443+02:00Review: One Hundred Mountains of JapanThe Hyakumeizan translation is reviewed in the Japanese Alpine Club newsletter:

This full translation of Fukada Kyūya's Nihon Hyakumeizan has been eagerly awaited.

The book has an introduction that summarises the development of mountaineering in Japan. As I've seen in France and Switzerland, people there are well aware of the activities of Japanese climbers in the Alps and the Himalaya, but they know almost nothing about Japan's mountains and mountaineering world. The only Japanese peak they know is Mt Fuji.

The introduction starts out by describing the arc of Fukada's life in mountains and literature from its start in Daishōji to its end on Kaya-ga-dake. Then it surveys Japan's traditions and literature of travel from the age of the Manyōshū to the Edo period, through the beginnings of modern mountaineering in the Meiji period, and the growth period after the second world war.

Tani Bunchō, Suzuki Bokushi, and Tachibana Nankei are introduced, as are the doings of Ernest Satow, William Gowland, and Walter Weston. Then come the 1902 ascent of Yari-ga-take by Kojima Usui and Okano Kinjirō, and their subsequent meeting with Walter Weston, as well as the catalytic influence of Shiga Shigetaka and his Theory of the Japanese Landscape. Unlike European alpinism, Japanese mountaineering was inspired by literature, not science, and this had a formative effect on Nihon Hyakumeizan, it is argued. Certain personalities such as Takeda Hisayoshi, a founder member of the Japanese Alpine Club, and Kogure Ritarō are introduced in separate sections.

The introduction is pleasant to read, and there is a good eye for detail in the narrative, which takes in diverse aspects such as the motivation for Kojima's epoch-making Yari climb - neither religion nor surveying, but quite simply "because it's there"; Kogure's ruminations on the most distant mountain that can be seen from Tokyo; and the famous meeting of alpinists on Kiri-ga-mine in the summer of 1935, in which both Fukada and the critic Kobayashi Hideo took part.

However, the word "meizan" in the book's title is left untranslated, although a note before the introduction explains why this was done. This reminds me of a conversation with the late Miyashita Keizō, a member of the Japanese Alpine Club and professor emeritus of German literature at Keio University - one of his works is referenced in this book. You can translate the Japanese words "meibutsu" or "meisan" with the English word "specialty", and likewise "meisaku" goes neatly into "masterpiece". But how do you translate "meizan"? As far as I can recall the professor's reply, there is no equivalent word in German. That seems to be the case in all European languages: there is no concept for "meizan" and hence no word for it. And, as you can't really call all of Fukada's one hundred "meizan" either 'famous' or 'notable', the translator has chosen to imply rather than translate that "mei-" element, or else he simply spells out the Japanese words "Nihon Hyakumeizan" in roman letters.

There is also a glossary of people, which looks to have been quite a labour. The one hundred or so entries seem to encompass pretty much everybody who appears in the book. Ranging from En-no-ozunu to Higuchi Ichiyō and Matsuura Takeshirō, the names are referenced to the chapters they appear in. Laudably, the names are given in the usual Japanese order - family name first - which is how they appear in the text too. The only exception is on the title page, where we read of "Kyūya Fukada"- why do this when the Japanese order is used in the main text? There are also some regrettable slips in some of the readings of mountain and personal names, as well as in the references. That said, I would like to see this introduction and the glossary of people mentioned in the text translated for Japanese editions of the book.

For this book is, all in all, a very good way of introducing a global audience to the unique work of literature that is Nihon Hyakumeizan, born as it is in our mountains - as well as to the mountain culture, history and traditions that the book embodies.

In fact, I wonder how many Japanese there are who have this sort of knowledge in their heads. My hope is that this translation will help to increase the number of mountain-lovers worldwide who have come to know and appreciate the Japanese mountains.

The translator is an Englishman who has climbed about one third of the Hyakumeizan, and there is photo in the book showing an ascent of Tsurugi-dake in the snow season. According to the evening edition of the Asahi Shimbun on January 7, he worked on the translation together with his wife, Harumi Yamada.

Peter Skov, the Canadian photographer who contributed the cover photo, was featured in Gakujin magazine in November 2009 and September 2011. The cover design for the paperback edition is fresh and original. There is also a hardback edition.

Ohmori Hisao, Japanese Alpine ClubProject Hyakumeizanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-76928747746547822242015-03-23T20:43:00.002+01:002015-03-30T02:36:57.150+02:00Masterclass on KaramatsuLearning the arts of high-mountain survival with a sensei of snowholes

Although Karamatsu-dake is not one of the original One Hundred Mountains of Japan, it does make the "New Hyakumeizan" listing that favours easier-to-reach mountains for Japan's silver generation. This distinction it owes to the Happo ski resort's lifts that waft you straight to 1,800 metres from the valley floor. The summit looks out towards rugged Tsurugi, one of the most alpine views in all Japan. And the long straggling ridge holds its snow into April, making it the ideal venue for a snowholing masterclass.

I'm not sure why Matsuo-san had decided to instruct us in the art of digging in. It could be that his fatherly instincts were prompted by an incident on Yatsugadake where two Workmen Alpinists were benighted while working down a steep gully. They'd saved themselves from freezing by excavating a shelter in a snow wall with their ice-axes and a teaspoon.

Be that as it may, nobody could be better qualified to teach snow holing. Matsuo-san is a true Setsudo Hakase, a doctor of mid-winter bivouacs. In his younger days, he had overnighted in deeply cryogenic places like the summit of Kashimayari, there to await and record the year's first sunrise.

Here was why we needed those lifts. To combine his twin passions of snowholing and photography, Matsuo-san had brought along so much gear that he had to turn his skis into a makeshift sledge. So we set out looking more like a trans-Antarctic survey than a party of weekend ski-tourists. A damask fold of cloud curled over the nearby summits as we started out, adding to the expeditionary feeling.

There was no need to go far. Picking a likely looking snowbank on the lee, southward side of the ridge, Matsuo-san snapped together a sonde and demonstrated how to probe for a suitable depth of snow. Evidently, the snow was not only deep enough but had good holding powers too – the lower half of the probe stayed embedded in the drift.

We set to work under a hot spring sun. Some snowholing precepts you'll read in all the manuals – site the door on the downwind side (almost automatic when digging into a lee slope), and angle the entry way slightly upwards, so as to trap warm air in the dwelling. Others are obvious when you think about it – mark out your territory by parking your skis around it, unless you want an unexpected guest to come crashing through the roof at dinner time.

One point: if you're building a snowhole for five, then snow shovels are, quite literally, not going to cut it. You might get away with them in fluffy early-season snow, but for the sterner consistencies of spring névé, you're going to need snow-saws, the sharper and toothier the better. Saw the snow into blocks, and lift out with the snow shovels.

Brandishing our new snow-saws like the finest Gassan blades, we took it in turns to tunnel. Quickly we discovered another key principle of snowholing – allow plenty of time. A comfortable five-person bivvy is going to take three to four hours of unremitting labour to finish. So forget about leaving it until nightfall to start work.

Once we'd roughed out the sleeping chamber, Matsuo-san took a large sheet of thin polythene and pinned it to the ceiling with small bamboo pegs – a lightweight solution to the usual irk of unrefined snowholes, which is water dripping from the roof. Remember you read this tip here first.

Even in spring, the temperature on Karamatsu drops suddenly once the sun sinks below the ridge. It was time to test our new abode. Leaving our packs in the vestibule, we snake-crawled inside one by one – yes, the ceiling was low, but no more humiliating than the average teahouse. The Yamato Nadeshiko, like a Heian lady disappearing behind a screen, took up residence in a far corner; possibly she found the company too raucous.

Well exercised by the sawing and shovelling, we slept soundly in our quiet subnivean cocoon. How quietly we didn't fully appreciate until next morning, when we compared notes with two friends who'd overnighted on the ridge above – slatting and flapping in the stiff night wind, their tent had been as lively as a Roppongi tavern, and they hadn't had a wink of sleep. Not a wink.

Snowholes, though ... you gotta dig them.Project Hyakumeizanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-10679844280219336852015-03-20T19:02:00.003+01:002015-03-21T19:48:46.471+01:00Watch out for the easy placesSage climbing advice from a literary essayist of the Kamakura period

Snowsqualls harried us as we approached the hut. Getting there involved a climbing traverse across a slope so icy that the ski-crampons could hardly bite. We found it a bit sketchy. Afterwards, the Sensei said that in such places she always recalls the advice of Kenkō. Who was he, I asked. He published a blog called Tsurezuregusa, she said - only Sei Shonagon ever got more page views, they say. Suitably admonished, I looked up the relevant passage. It runs like this:-

A man who was famous as a tree climber was guiding someone in climbing a tall tree. He ordered the man to cut the top branches, and, during this time, when the man seemed to be in great danger, the expert said nothing. Only when the man was corning down and had reached the height of the eaves did the expert call out, "Be careful! Watch your step coming down!" I asked him, "Why did you say that? At that height he could jump the rest of the way if he chose." "That's the point," said the expert. "As long as the man was up at a dizzy height and the branches were threatening to break, he himself was so afraid I said nothing. Mistakes are always made when people get to the easy places."

Sage advice, that. According to Donald Keene, whose masterly translation is quoted above, Yoshida Kenkō was a Buddhist priest who lived from 1283 to 1350. The essays collected in Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) centre around court life and customs around Kyoto. But the paragraph above makes me wonder if he didn't, in his younger days, sneak out and climb a famous mountain or two.Project Hyakumeizanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-90937462158939506312015-03-14T15:53:00.003+01:002015-03-24T04:13:08.374+01:00"Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape" (4)Continued: a disquisition on the aesthetics of volcanoes and alpine landscapes by Kojima Usui, founder of the Japanese Alpine Club

Once on the heathland of Oiwake, I came upon a young student making a sketch of Mt Asama, the volcano quiescent, as if slumbering in its robes of tawny velvet. Just at that instant, the mountain woke to life with a thunderous explosion, throwing up, one after another, great hydrangea heads of scabrous, sulphurous smoke, into a column that reached up from the crater to the clouds.

In an instant, the mountain took on a sombre, apoplectic tone and the student, seeming to despair of capturing such a sudden change, gave up on his sketch and glancing in my direction, exchanged an uneasy smile with me. Such dramatic scene-changing might be all very well in the play of light falling from a fairweather sky, but how on earth could something as solid, so resolutely un-plastic, as Mt Asama undergo such an instantaneous transformation.

This sense of an emotional outburst, or outright rage, really can be evinced by volcanoes I believe, solid and inorganic as they may be. In the same way that you see the blue veins stand out under a person's sensitive skin, or see his face suddenly change colour, volcanoes too are seething with skins of soft sand, or ash or tilth that form clean-cut lines and shapes when eroded by the flow of water or etched by sliding snow.

Looking at the hundreds of gullies on Mt Fuji – take Dainichi-sawa or Sakura-zawa, for instance – and you see that all are formed by the erosive force of water or snow, and when you start out climbing the mountain by the Gotemba route, you'll see two hillocks of rubble projecting about a hundred feet above the ashy slopes of Hoeizan, stretching their skirts southwards.

This is Ni-tsu-zuka, the twin volcanoes or side vents (or, as the savants say, parasite cones, although I question whether it is fitting to call them so when they are part and parcel of the parent volcano rather than something alien, as in the plant world, that battens on a host plant of a different species) on whose black sands the wind whistling down from the mountain scours its tracks.

All volcanoes are characterized by a magnificent simplicity, but if you look at them closely, you can see the traces left by the wind and, although this phenomenon is by no means confined to volcanoes, it is on the soft, easily scoured flanks of volcanoes that such traces are most clearly etched.

References

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.

Image: courtesy of Ueda Cable Vision.Project Hyakumeizanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-76560419649614426492015-03-09T20:38:00.001+01:002015-03-24T04:13:52.103+01:00By fair meansClimbing the One Hundred Mountains of Japan without fossil fuels

After Tim Macartney-Snape's sea-to-summit ascent of Mt Everest in 1990 and Göran Kropp's solo, unsupported, ascent of Mt Everest in May 1996 - without bottled oxygen and after cycling to Nepal all the way from Sweden - it was inevitable that somebody would apply the same thoroughgoing ethic to Japan's One Hundred Mountains.

That somebody turned out to be Tanaka Yōki, a thirty-year old self-styled "adventure racer", who climbed the One Hundred Mountains of Japan last year using only "human power". Starting out on 1 April on the southernmost of the peaks, Miyanoura-dake on Yakushima, he completed his 100th mountain on Rishiri-dake, at the northern tip of Hokkaidō, 208 days later, on 26 October.

"Human power" means what it says. Tanaka not only walked between mountains, trashing fifteen pairs of running shoes en route, but paddled a sea kayak over the sea crossings between Yakushima, Kyūshū, Shikoku, Honshū and Hokkaidō. "Using just my own motive power meant that I felt the full force of the changing seasons and Japan's beautiful nature," he said, adding that he was relieved when the journey was over.

Tanaka was born in Saitama, but his father moved the family to Furano in Hokkaidō when he was still a toddler - it seems that his father was captivated by the portrayal of the northern island in the TV soap drama, "Kita no kuni kara". He competed in cross-country skiing at a national level while still a student and later branched out into adventure racing, twice taking part in the Patagonia Expedition Race.

His human-powered "Great Traverse" was filmed by NHK for a television series. It also coincided with the 50th anniversary of the first publication of the original Nihon Hyakumeizan, although that might have been accidental.

References

Photos are from NHK's Great Traverse website Project Hyakumeizanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-63153011397207143302015-02-27T20:23:00.002+01:002015-03-24T04:14:11.895+01:00Meizan inspirationsHow Japan's most famous mountain erupted into an Impressionist painting

As it was the Sensei's birthday, we dropped in at Japanese Inspirations, a new exhibition at the Zurich Kunsthaus. If you happen to be an aspirant meizanologist, you meet Meizan everywhere. So it was no surprise to find Mt Fuji featuring in several landscapes by Hokusai and Hiroshige. The idea behind the exhibition is to highlight how these artists of the floating world influenced the Impressionists, by placing their prints side by side with paintings by Monet, Gauguin, van Gogh and others.

Some of the prints had once been in the personal collection of Vincent van Gogh. An enthusiastic fan of Hokusai and Hiroshige, the artist owned about 400 Japanese prints in all, papering the wall of his studio with them. As if in homage to the master, he even made oil painting renditions of two scenes by Hiroshige (above). The attraction of Japanese woodprints is explained in a letter to his brother:

I envy the Japanese artists for the incredible neat clarity which all their works have. It is never boring and you never get the impression that they work in a hurry. It is as simple as breathing; they draw a figure with a couple of strokes with such unfailing easiness as if it were as easy as buttoning one's waist coat.

Seeing these prints made me wonder what part Japan's top mountain played in van Gogh's artistic development. He knew Hokusai's famous views of Mt Fuji, urging his long-suffering brother in a letter of August 1888 to "take (ie buy) the Hokusais as well then, 300 views of the sacred mountain and scenes of manners and customs". And he greatly admired The Great Wave, one of Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji, commenting on it in another letter to his brother the same year:-

When Paul Mantz saw Delacroix's violent and exalted sketch, Christ's boat, at the exhibition that we saw in the Champs-Elysées, he turned away from it and cried out in his article, 'I did not know that one could be so terrifying with blue and green'. Hokusai makes you cry out the same thing — but in his case with his lines, his drawing, since in your letter you say to yourself: these waves are claws, the boat is caught in them, you can feel it.

As any art historian will tell you, those waves with claws have crashed with resistless force into van Gogh's Starry Night, painted less than a year after he wrote the letter quoted above. Mt Fuji itself, alas, seems to have been washed away in the process, unless you discern it, subtly transmogrified into that church steeple or those mountains in the picture's background.

Unfortunately, the Starry Night wasn't in this exhibition: quite understandably, the New York Museum of Modern Art wouldn't be keen to let the painting out of its sight.

So, navigating through shoals of banquiers and their lamé-clad dames – this is Zurich, remember – we had a quick look round to see if Japan's most famous mountain had left its mark on any other works by the Dutch master.

Standing in front of the Portrait of Père Tanguy (left), I thought that perhaps we'd struck lucky. The background to this painting shows a selection of Japanese prints, pinned to the wall of van Gogh's studio, and there, right behind the subject's hat, was a tell-tale shape – conical in form, yet maddeningly indistinct.

One couldn't be certain; the white blur might be the snowy profile of Japan's most famous mountain. Or, then again, it might just be a cone of sherbert.

It turns out, though, that van Gogh painted three versions of this portrait - Père Tanguy was a figure of some importance to impecunious artists, kindly providing them with paint in return for a drawing or two. The picture shown in Zurich was the second version. But the final one (right), which today hangs in the Musée Rodin, Paris, shows Mt Fuji with dramatic clarity.

It's as if, after years of absorbing the lessons of his Japanese mentors, van Gogh had finally gained total confidence in the power of line and colour. And, with it, the painterly panache to give the top Meizan its full due.

Project Hyakumeizanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-24280195719272763852015-02-14T12:13:00.000+01:002015-03-24T04:12:47.562+01:00"Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape" (3)Continued: a disquisition on the aesthetics of volcanoes and alpine landscapes by Kojima Usui, founder of the Japanese Alpine Club

Unlike previous theorists of the landscape, I don't favour volcanoes as special to the exclusion of all other mountains, nor am I taken with the idea, like some young people today, of excluding the volcanoes from the Japan Alps, as if they were some kind of unwanted stepchildren.

Illustrations of volcanic rocks from Shiga Shigetaka's
Theory of the Japanese Landscape (Nihon Fukeiron)

If the beauty of volcanoes lies, as many have noted, in their dignified solemnity of form, and that of alpine mountains in their ice and snow and ridgelines, then the beauty of volcanic mountains must consist in their contours and colouring. Compared with alpine mountains, where you sometimes have to climb over ice and snow, the stark, bare boulders of Japanese volcanoes must be tackled as pure rock scrambling.

If this is what you choose, you should not garb yourself in two layers of clothing, or wear crampons and nailed boots over three pairs of socks, or carry an alpenstock, as in some alpine expedition, but tramp onwards in straw sandals and so work your way up to the summit crater, grabbing hold of ochre boulders so that you can at last touch the congealed effusions of former eruptions, like so much frozen bile.

What makes volcanoes beautiful is the way they show the exquisiteness of their form. I've read my Ruskin thoroughly, but I find it utterly tedious to read the landscape aesthetics of a person who never experienced volcanoes – in fact, it's like being preached at in a foreign language. In his Stones of Venice Book 1, Chapter XX, Materials of Ornament, Section XIX, Ruskin describes the line of a small glacier of the second order, about three quarters of a mile long, on a spur of the Aiguille de Blaitière at Chamonix as "the most beautiful simple curve I have ever seen in my life" (he was then thirty-three years old).

To which I say, unhappy Ruskin, that he never saw a woodprint of Hokusai or Hiroshige and thus could never even imagine the exquisiteness of the curve presented by Mt Fuji on its left-hand skyline. This is the great line that falls - if you stand looking up from somewhere between Yoshihara on the Tōkaidō and Iwabuchi - that falls in one strong, bold catenary sweep from an altitude of 3,788 metres, a line that all but thrums with tension as it falls through the pure empyrean of an autumn or a winter sky. Or it is the line that, in the vaporous days of spring and summer, almost fades from sight, like the easy curve of a kite's string.

Apart from the horizon on land or sea, this is the mightiest line, curved or slanting, that you'll ever see in our country of Japan, and so I am convinced every time I gaze up at it from the train on that Tōkaidō line.

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. Project Hyakumeizanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-79787764551951762432015-02-12T18:35:00.003+01:002015-03-24T04:14:25.843+01:00Images and ink (23)

Image: On Arashima-dake, Fukui Prefecture

Ink: Cheryl Strayed on mountains, from "Wild", a memoir of the Pacific Crest Trail:

"As I ascended, I realized I didn't understand what a mountain was, or even if I was hiking up one mountain or a series of them glommed together. I'd not grown up around mountains. I'd walked on a few, but only on well-trod paths on day hikes. They'd seemed to be nothing more than really big hills. But they were not that. They were, I now realized, layered and complex, inexplicable and analogous to nothing."Project Hyakumeizanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-37954166328984532172015-02-09T20:48:00.002+01:002015-02-15T20:43:10.736+01:00Translating Hyakumeizan (1)Why it's good to invoke a dead poet before launching into your translation project

People who plan to confront an NHK video camera should be warned - the journalistic staff of Japan's national broadcasting company are fearsomely well prepared. During our video interview about Nihon Hyakumeizan, which took place atop Arashima-dake last October, the director Miura-san asked me about the way I'd translated this sentence:-

"A mountain watches over the home village of most Japanese people ..."

Now this isn't just any old sentence. It happens to be the first words of the first paragraph of the chapter about Hakusan, the Hyakumeizan author's home mountain. And, so aptly does that paragraph seem to sum up the book's spirit and theme, that I'd chosen to use it as the epigraph for the English version of Nihon Hyakumeizan:

A mountain watches over the home village of most Japanese people. Tall or short, near or far, some mountain watches over our native village like a tutelary deity. We spend our childhood in the shadow of our mountain and we carry it with us in memory when we grow up and leave the village. And however much our lives may change, the mountain will always be there, just as it always has been, to welcome us back to our home village.

Miura-san sounded aggrieved. "The Japanese doesn't run like that at all," she pointed out "so why did you translate it in this way?" Miura-san had raised an interesting point. The Japanese sentence runs as follows:-

日本人はたいていふるさとの山を持っている。

Which you might translate as:

Most Japanese have a home-village mountain.

So why did I choose an alternative wording? Hard to say, really. This random and unpremeditated act of translation took place one evening more than a decade ago, after a full day's work at the office. I might have been thinking that, rhetorically speaking, it would be neat to carry the subject and syntax of the first sentence through the entire paragraph.

Or I might just have been overcome by the warmth of a drowsy summer dusk - or even by the fumes from the glass of the Bündner pinot noir that I may from time to time have poured myself to wash away the dust of dictionary work.

Debates like this erupt about almost any translation. This is why the classics are ceaselessly reinterpreted, usually once a generation. The poet, playwright and critic John Dryden (1631-1700), who reinterpreted quite a few classics himself, said that translations could range between the poles of "metaphrase" and "imitation".

Metaphrase is "turning an author word for word, and line by line, from one language into another" - in other words, a fairly literal approach, as practised by the likes of Google Translate. Imitation, on the other hand, is "where the translator - if he has not lost that name - assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion".

In his own translations of Ovid, Virgil, Juvenal and others, Dryden sought a middle way. Steering somewhere between metaphrase and imitation, he aimed for a "paraphrase", which he defines as a "translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense, and that, too, is admitted to be amplified but not altered."

In practice, Dryden was not above slipping into a bit of imitation if the mood took him. And, when the going got tough, he could resort to metaphrase. Yet his overriding purpose was always the same. According to Nobuyuki Yuasa, an expert on Japanese-to-English literary translation, this was no less than to "make the ancient author speak as he would have done if he had lived in the present age".

It's a pity that John Dryden couldn't have joined us in person atop Arashima-dake. Had he been there, Miura-san might have got a much more informed answer to her question.

References

David Hopkins, John Dryden: Translator and Theorist of Translation, Lecture, University College London, 7 March 2013

Noboyuki Yuasa, Translating 'The sound of water': Different versions of a hokku by Bashō, in The translator's art: Essays in honour of Betty Radice, edited by William Radice and Barbara ReynoldsProject Hyakumeizanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-73975679587874590962015-02-04T21:33:00.001+01:002015-02-12T20:48:24.896+01:00Mountain photography in yellow brick modeCamera review: wading with a Weathermatic up the wildest river in the Japan Alps

Ah, the joys of yestergear. Yes, you read that right – I mean, today's gear gets plenty of attention from Bre'er Hendrik and many other puissant hiking and mountaineering bloggers.

But what about the kit that Workmen Alpinists used twenty years ago? Who's going to write about that? Well, I guess I'll have to fill the gap myself, starting with a review of the Minolta Weathermatic Dual 35 (above). This, for the benefit of youthful readers, was an imaging device that captured light on a chemical-smeared synthetic substrate. We called it "film".

As I had to get my Weathermatic in a hurry, from Yodobashi Camera's pullulating multi-storey emporium in Tokyo's Shinjuku district, I probably paid close to the full list price of ¥36,800. Back home, I unpacked what looked like a yellow brick, solid as a bank vault, with an armoured window jutting from its front casing.

"Your Minolta Weathermatic DUAL 35 is a fully waterproof 35mm camera that is designed so that you can take pictures anywhere you go," I read in the instruction leaflet. Apparently, I was the proud owner of "the world's first waterproof camera that lets you select either standard (35mm) or tele (50mm) lenses at the touch of a button."

I needed a waterproof camera because Sawa Control had just invited me on his return match with the fearsome Kurobe River, a multi-day swimming and scrambling expedition through the upper reaches of Honshu's wildest mountain river gorge. No ordinary camera was going to survive this epic. And even the Weathermatic's creators seemed to have their doubts.

"The Weathermatic DUAL 35's watertight seals and rugged body are designed so that you take pictures in any weather and anywhere," the manual says, "however, special attention must be given to the following precautions:"

In the event, the river let us off lightly - there was no need to surf or dive. In just two days, we made it all the way through the Kurobe's "inner corridor" to the hut in Yakushi-sawa. Perhaps we relaxed too much. On the second day, I tripped over in a boulder field, falling on top of the camera. The Weathermatic wasn't even scratched; it was my ribs that came away with contusions.

But can this yellow brick actually take pictures? Eccentrically, the camera works only with two film speeds – ASA 100 or 400. I opted for 400-speed Fuji slide film, as river gorges can be dark and gloomy. Alas, the Provia proved a touch too fast in brightly lit places, where some pictures came out overexposed.

Where it mattered, though, the Weathermatic's metering was spot on. The photo above shows Sawa Control moving pack-awash through a deep channel. Note how the film manages to capture the shadowed foreground without getting completely burned out by the sunlit rocks behind. That's a trick that digital sensors still struggle to emulate.

Sharpness, said Henri Cartier-Bresson, is a bourgeois concept. Weathermatic users are compelled to agree. In anything less than the brightest light, this lens is what Ansel Adams would call a fuzzy-wuzzy. It harasses the light a little as it passes by; its zones of confusion would extend beyond the planet Pluto. It is, in short, an optic of the Anti-Leica.

Does it matter, though? To my mind, the unsharp image (right) does honour to the way that the late-afternoon light shimmered off the river as we worked our way towards that first day's bivouac site. On the other hand, National Geographic is never going to beat a path to your door if you use a Weathermatic.

On the fourth and final day of our expedition, we went home over Washiba-dake. The camera's metering coped well with all manner of lighting, from the pre-dawn airglow over Yari, through fogbows above the clouds, to the gloom of forest glades on the long, straggling ridge that we descended. Only the flower pictures were a bust – the autofocus couldn't cope with close-up subjects.

After this trip, though, the crappy lens, the limited zoom (35mm or 50mm, but nothing in between), and the sketchy autofocus meant that the Weathermatic stayed at home whenever I could get away with something less robust. On our second visit to the Kurobe, three years later, I took along one of the newfangled Pentax Zoom WR90s, which had a proper zoom lens and better metering.

My last outing with the Weathermatic was a winter climb on Yatsu-ga-take. The last pitch of Sekison Ridge takes you into a steeply angled lava tube, almost like a miniature subway tunnel, except that the roof had fallen in. I was halfway up this defile when the rope came tight – we'd run out of slack, and Mike, belaying 50 metres below, couldn't hear my shouts for him to come up.

For a moment, it looked as if an unstructured situation might develop. Jammed in my tube like a Northern Line train in the London Underground, I could move neither up (no rope) nor down (too steep). Spindrift came blasting up the tunnel, driven by a fierce cold northerly. The last piece of protection was far below. A giant chock was desperately needed, to slot into the only wide crack within reach. Unfortunately I had no such gear with me. Unless, perhaps, the camera would fit.

Before the Weathermatic could be put to this ultimate test, Mike moved up and the rope came free. So I never did find out how this most bombproof of cameras might function as a makeshift bong. No, not that kind of bong. In our day, a bong was a kind of expanded piton made of folded aluminium, specially shaped for off-width cracks. Really, is it necessary to spell out everything for the youth of today? Project Hyakumeizanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-57472596087331150322015-01-30T19:19:00.002+01:002015-02-13T19:05:30.920+01:00"Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape" (2) Continued: a disquisition on the aesthetics of Honshu's mixed volcanic and alpine scenery, by Kojima Usui, founder of the Japanese Alpine Club

Cover of an early edition of Shiga
Shigetaka's Nihon Fukeiron

When we compare our mountains with those of the Himalaya and the Alps, certainly those ranges have things ours do not. But, by the same token, our mountains have things that those others do not.

As to what those things are, we have volcanoes in addition to plutonic and sedimentary rocks, and landscapes formed by the creative and destructive effects of those volcanoes, and I don't believe that anybody would deny that it is this blend of landforms that gives the mountain scenery of Japan its special character.

Mountains of the Himalayan and Alpine type can be formed more or less anywhere as long as the crust of our gradually congealing planet continues to warp and tilt, throwing up large or small elevations.

Volcanoes, however, erupt only along the lines defined by today's volcanic fronts so that, even in this country of volcanoes, they are arrayed only in specific places. In the Kinki and Sanyōdō, and on Shikoku, among other regions, there are with few exceptions no volcanoes worthy of the name, even if some volcanic rocks have been extruded in the past.

Our country's most prominent volcanic front is, of course, the Fuji Belt, with Mt Fuji itself as its syntaxis and anchor, weaving southwards through Hakone and the Izu peninsula out to sea, and northwards under Kaya-ga-take, Kana-ga-take and Yatsu-ga-dake.

Standing opposite them, across the graben of the Chikuma River, are the purely sedimentary ranges of the Shirane and Kaikoma mountains, throwing into relief as nowhere else even in Japan the contrast between sedimentary and plutonic rocks, and highlighting the particular character of each.

In those Akaishi mountains and in the Japan Alps, or at their foot, where the clearly defined strata are free of volcanic ash, one would expect to find fossils as a means of assigning them to the appropriate geological eras. So far, alas, although many people have looked for them, no such fossils have come to light and one scholar now active in Shinshū opines, as if with a sigh, that volcanic ash may after all have buried beyond reach such indispensable indicators for the geological timescale.

Yet it is precisely there – where the Fuji Belt converges on the Kamanashi hills cast down from the Kaikoma range, and to the north, where the Ontake and Tateyama volcanoes erupt from the Hida range, that the volcanic and sedimentary rocks of the Japan Alps are thrown together in inextricable confusion – that the unique scenic character of the Japanese mountains creates a landscape unparalleled in the Himalaya, roof of the world though it may be, or in the European Alps with all its endless profusion and variety of peaks.

(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. Project Hyakumeizanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-82672020074379848142015-01-26T19:14:00.000+01:002015-02-02T00:41:42.936+01:00Was Walter Weston a gear freak?Or, how to kit yourself up for mountain action in mid-Meiji Japan

Must admit, I'm a sucker for those lightweight hiking kit reviews over there on Bre'er Hendrik's blog. Same with Ken Rockwell's ruminations on cameras. (Ladies, excuse us - this is a guy thing.) But the other day, this gear fixation got me wondering. Was it ever thus?

The compleat mid-Meiji alpinists: super-guide Kamijo Kamonji (left) and
mountaineering missionary Walter Weston (right)

Maybe it was. I mean, you'd expect an Anglican missionary of the late Victorian age to be above such crass materialism. Yes, it's Walter Weston (1861-1940), I'm talking about here. And, to be sure, most of his best book is admirably free of commentary on the latest kit. He just gets on with his Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps (1896).

But, wait a moment, there in Chapter XVI - "Hints on Outfit, Provisions, etc" - out comes Walter Weston's inner nerd. And surely we hear a note of self-exculpation in his preamble: "As it has been intimated that some hints on travel in the higher mountain districts of Japan might be profitably added, a few suggestions are accordingly offered in the hope that they may be of use to those whose experience has not yet reached to the districts remote enough from the beaten tracks to need a little special care and preparation for travel of a rougher kind than that to which the ordinary visitor is accustomed."

Now Bre'er Hendrik himself couldn't have put that more eloquently.

Footwear for "districts remote enough from the beaten tracks to need
a little special care and attention"

Not that these hints aren't worth listening to. When it comes to dress, Weston was onto layering a century before Mark Twight, and with so much more style: "a Norfolk jacket with plenty of pockets, and loose knickerbockers of a strong grey flannel will be found serviceable, whilst for underwear the lightest and thinnest woollen, or silk-and-woollen, vests and shirts are best, since there is less risk of getting a chill after being over-heated. The best material for this is that made by Dr. Jaeger's Company."

Best for ordinary walking

He also gave straw sandals a try, as still used by sawa traditionalists: "The waraji give a better foothold on smooth rocks than hob-nailed boots, but the latter are best for ordinary walking." The blue-cotton gaiters known as kiya-han also get a good review, as they "afford much more protection to the legs than woollen stockings when a way has to be made through the rough undergrowth so often found on the lower slopes of the mountains."

As for bivouacs, Weston's solution could be even lighter than CJW's minimalist set-up: "In such cases a good substitute for a tent can be made by means of three large pieces of strong oiled paper. One piece is shaped by folding it over a line stretched between two uprights, and the other two are tied to it by strings fastened on the edges."

Not needed if you have oiled paper

Yet, there's a limit to how far he's willing to adopt local methods. OK, the "native kōri", a kind of wicker basket (you can get yours here), is convenient for carrying "provisions, books, instruments etc". But for everything else, "the Swiss rück-sack is far better". Same with lighting: "A railway reading-lamp is a great boon when in country places, where the native lamps are usually of a poor kind; and it is far more satisfactory also than the native chōchin when walking has to be done at night on strange roads or rocky hillsides."

Rück-sacks are better

Now we cut to the chase: "The question of food is, to most persons, of considerable importance." Can't argue with that, though not everybody will share the good missionary's British tastes: "Bovril makes a capital soup, and where hot water for this cannot be got, Valentine's meat juice, with a little cold water, is a valuable stimulant." Also on the menu is Halford's curried fowl, and De Jongh's cocoa "for those who care for that kind of drink."

Regarding trail mix, "A handful of good prunes, raisins, or dates may be put into the pocket at the beginning of a climb, the last being especially sustaining as well as tasty during the walk." Much cheaper than PowerBars too.

For costs, alas, have surged between Weston's day and ours. Away from the main thoroughfares, he advises, "innkeepers usually charge from 15 to 40 or 50 sen for hatago ('supper, bed, and breakfast'), though a chadai is of course expected in addition." Compare that with a crisp ten thousand yen note for a single hatago in today's mountain huts. One sen was worth 100th of a pre-inflation yen, you will recall.

Giving gaijin mountaineers a bad name

Fall out with your host, though, and you probably have only yourself to blame: "One generally finds that on many of the highways of foreign travel in Japan, the manners of the innkeepers, &c, are extremely objectionable. There may be other explanations, but one certainly is this:- the lack of politeness and courtesy too often shown by the foreign traveller himself, the repetition of which in succeeding instances comes at last to be reflected in the unmannerly behaviour of the innkeeper himself."

Now there is a hint that's timeless. And it isn't even about the gear.

Project Hyakumeizanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-41875726846358039032015-01-21T20:21:00.000+01:002015-01-30T20:24:23.659+01:00"Characteristics of the Japanese mountain landscape" (1)Honshu's volcanoes and alpine mountains are braided together as if in a chain of platinum and steel, wrote Kojima Usui, the founder of the Japanese Alpine Club ...

When we travelled in our student days, the "famous mountains" of Japan were practically all volcanoes, so that if you'd climbed Mt Fuji, it stood to reason that all other mountains were lower, smaller, less impressive. In those days, apart from the volcanoes of Tateyama and Ontake, all we knew of the mighty range now called the "Japan Alps" was Kiso-komagatake (which is composed mainly of biotite granite). And I can't help smiling to recall that, when I saw in a list of mountains the name of Shiramine in the Akaishi mountains as the next-highest peak after Mt Fuji, none of us at that time, neither my friends nor my teachers, had any idea where this Shiramine might be situated.

Illustrations from Shiga Shigetaka's Theory of the Japanese Landscape

I was born in Sanuki on Shikoku, where the Emperor Sutoku lies entombed on a "Shiramine" that is mentioned in both Ueda Akinari's Tales of Moonlight and Rain, and Kōda Rohan's acclaimed Tales of Two Days. But joking aside, I thought, it can't possibly be this Shiramine that is meant.

When I came to read Shiga Shigetaka's Theory of the Japanese Landscape, I did get to know a little more about mountain names, but this book deals only with volcanoes and mountains of igneous rock. Mountains of sedimentary origin get but a cursory mention, and there's no way of finding out about Shiramine or Akaishi. In the chapter on granitic mountains, I read that "After those composed of volcanic rock, Japan's highest mountains are all made of granite (except for the Shirane mountains of Kai, which are formed from chert)". This was when I realised that the Shirane in Kai was one and the same peak as the "Shiramine" that forms the highest point of the Akaishi range. These days, anybody with the slightest familiarity with mountain geography would know this, but I mention it just an example of how clueless we were and how shallow our knowledge of the mountains except for the time-honoured volcanoes.

Today, of course, the entire Japanese Alps have been traversed by the Army General Staff surveyors and members of the Japanese Alpine Club, from the Akaishi range in the south through the Kiso range in the centre to the uplands and mountains of the Hida range in the north. Untrodden sanctuaries and virgin forests are no more.

As for the 1:50,000-scale General Staff maps, it's said that the ones covering the Japan Alps and other mountains sell best of all. In contrast to former days, mountaineering buffs now deem only mountain ranges and ridges to be worth climbing, whether of sedimentary or of igneous origin. Volcanoes tend to be looked down on as paltry and second-best. Yet, having put forward a theory of volcanic landscape, I would say rather that one should first climb a volcano to appreciate the sublimity of the Japanese Alps and then launch into those Alps in order to acknowledge the beauty of volcanoes.

Indeed, I would go further. The most remarkable characteristic of Japan's mountain landscapes is that the Japan Alps and the volcanoes of the Fuji belt, each with its mighty peaks of about 3,000 metres, are braided together as if in a chain of platinum and iron.

(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. Project Hyakumeizanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-70727827026207835182015-01-13T18:55:00.001+01:002015-01-14T04:30:11.659+01:00Category killerNobody can say what kind of book Nihon Hyakumeizan is, but please don't let that stop you from enjoying the translation

Ah, the oxygen of publicity. Thanks to an article in the Asahi Shimbun, pre-orders on Amazon's Japanese site have temporarily lofted One Hundred Mountains of Japan into best-seller territory. For two weeks or so, the book duked it out among the top 100 foreign titles. It even nipped briefly (so to speak) at the heels of Fifty Shades of Grey.

A funny thing happened during this heady period. For a while, the book held the top slots for any Amazon Japan-listed foreign book in three widely differing categories - travel, ecology and science. "Travel" seems logical enough - I mean, you do have to cover quite a swathe of territory if you plan to climb all of Fukada Kyūya's favourite mountains.

But science and ecology? In all fairness, prospective readers with a technical bent should be warned of possible disappointment. Given that mountains are piles of rock and dirt, it's amazing how little space Fukada gives to geological ruminations. You will usually look in vain if you want to find out what a mountain is made of. Although, as noted before on this blog, the Hyakumeizan author did know his flowers.

This embarrassment of categories calls to mind a conversation that Project Hyakumeizan once had with the commissioning editor of an eminent publishing house. This took place soon after the translation was completed, a few years back. Unfortunately, said the editor, he couldn't take on the book - it wouldn't sell because it didn't fit into any recognizable genre.

Actually, he had a point. One Hundred Mountains is devilishly hard to categorise. Not unlike the geological mélange of Kita-dake, that mountain for philosophers, it blends together bits of this and bobs of that - a soupçon of travelogue here, fragments of literature and history there, all mixed up, but with masterly assurance, into a zany matrix of zuihitsu-style essay writing.

This categorical confusion is nothing new, by the way. When the original Nihon Hyakumeizan first came out, in 1964, it promptly won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature - in the category for biography and criticism. Biography? Criticism? Fukada's former climbing companion, Kobayashi Hideo, who was on the panel of judges, explained his advocacy as follows:

This is one of the most original works of criticism that I've seen in recent years. The objects of critical thought are, in this case, mountains. The author has chosen to write about mountains as if they were people. To do so, he has engaged with them face-to-face, so to speak, in all the remotest corners of our land.

Regrettably, Amazon doesn't rank the Hyakumeizan translation in either biography or criticism. But, as of Monday this week, the internet giant is performing a much more vital service - it is starting to ship the book, at least from its Amazon.com mother ship. Shipments from Amazon Japan will also start soon, I'm assured. So you can now buy one copy of the English-language Hyakumeizan, a mountain book, and get several extra literary genres packaged with it, at no additional charge.

Just don't expect me to tell you which they are, though.Project Hyakumeizanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-89821181411349514292015-01-07T19:20:00.002+01:002015-01-09T20:32:53.080+01:00"Tei: A memoir of the end of war and beginning of peace"Book review: how Tei Fujiwara brought her children to safety from Manchuria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

Account of how Tei's book inspired Nitta Jirō's career is from Fuji-san: oinaru shizen no kensho, Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1992.Project Hyakumeizanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-90829193932413841382015-01-05T21:07:00.003+01:002015-01-26T20:41:27.766+01:00New Year resolutionResolve may fade with time, but the blog goes on ...

At about half-height, my glasses began to steam up, adding to the pressure. Nobody tells you about this hazard in the ice-climbing manuals, I whinged to myself, and started to drive the axes too deeply into the glutinous blue wall, as if compensating for the fading visibility. Now every move sapped twice as much energy. Below, my belayer endured the shower of ice divots in silence, but I got the unspoken message: "Stop faffing, and get a move on."

Just before the rope ran out, a darker blur loomed through the condensation. I lurched towards it, torn between haste and caution on the lumpy ice bulges. After wrapping a couple of grateful slings around a mountain birch, I wiped the mist off my glasses and looked upwards – the next pitch would take us up a spiral staircase of crystal into the heart of mountain. But this vision had to remain unrealised – my lead of Komatsuzawa F1 had burned up so much time that there could be no question of going further. After Yamada-san had come up, we rapelled to safety. Well, sort of. There was still the frozen river to descend.

In those days, we resolved to start the year as we meant to go on. So we'd pointed our weatherbeaten Subaru into the frozen Japan Southern Alps – the more rugged Northern ranges would be too much for our modest talents – hiked half the night up a snowy track to a bivvy hut, and then lit out before the year's first dawn for our chosen waterfall. Thanks to the recent eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines, and its climate-cooling effects, ice was everywhere in the Japanese mountains. And somebody had to climb it.

Fast forward a decade or two, and I have to confess my appetite has waned for pressing my nose up against a congealed cascade. The objective hazards of New Year excursions remain, though. We saw in the Year of the Sheep at a Swiss mountain hut. Our ski-tour on January 1st started tentatively – the avalanche forecast stood at Level 3 or "considerable". And the forecast was not kidding. Less than twenty minutes after leaving the hut, we triggered a first "whoomf" sound, a sure sign of weak, avalanche-prone layers in the snowpack.

As in Komatsuzawa, we would have to forgo our summit. Pausing below an old moraine to strip the skins off our skis, we looked wistfully up at the Jammspitz and recalled the sage advice of Don Whillans: "The mountain will always be there tomorrow; make sure you are too." A few hours later, we boarded the little red train back to the big city. From that you may surmise – and I won't deny it – that my appetite for winter driving has waned too.

Back in town, an e-mail was waiting of the kind that warms the heart of any translator. "Can I get a copy of your book through a European distributor or should I just order it from the University of Hawaii press (in January/February)?" Well, Denis, Amazon appears to be telling prospective buyers of One Hundred Mountains of Japan that they'll ship in mid-January, and I have no better information than that. As for distributors outside the United States, the book won't reach them for another month or so. So Amazon or the University of Hawaii Press are probably your best bets for now.

Now the Hyakumeizan translation is out – or almost so – the question arises of what next. After all, Project Hyakumeizan is out of a job, so to speak. But one thing leads to another. The Sensei has just helped me to put the finishing touches to a translation of an essay about Japan's mountain scenery by Kojima Usui (1873–1948), the banker, writer and founder of the Japanese Alpine Club. I look forward to sharing the disquisition on this blog soon.

Further ahead, there is a full translation to finalise of Nonaka Chiyoko's diary of a Meiji-era mid-winter sojourn on Mt Fuji. Her adventure was recently the subject of an NHK mini-series. The translation might be published as an e-book. Unless anybody out there would like to consider bringing it out in conventional ink-on-dead trees format? If so, please get in touch. Now that would be another really welcome e-mail…

Meanwhile, Project Hyakumeizan wishes all readers a great start to the year. Be safe, don't push your luck in avalanche conditions, and may your ski-goggles or spectacles never steam over.

Project Hyakumeizanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-86352733080689860352014-12-16T18:17:00.001+01:002015-01-14T04:36:58.347+01:00An apologyOne Hundred Mountains: coming soon, but not quite as soon as expected

Sumimasen: I have to apologise. In an earlier update, you were promised the English translation of Nihon Hyakumeizan by Christmas. Well, it now appears that you will have it in good time for Christmas 2015. The printing presses are running as I write, which will let us claim - just about - that One Hundred Mountains of Japan came out in time to mark the half-century of the original book's appearance. Alas, copies will reach the shops, online and otherwise, only in the New Year. Zuibun o-matase shimashita.

It occurs to me that several readers of this blog have actually climbed all of Fukada Kyūya's hundred mountains - with all the costs, travelling and placating of office bosses that this entails - in far less time than it took to translate the book's 460-odd pages, let alone get it published. For the record, Project Hyakumeizan started the translation in 2003 and finished it three years later. Yet, as you see, more than twice that much time again was needed to actually get the book out of the door.

Just for fun, I was tempted to see how this tardy-gaited performance stacks up against the Paris-Dakar rally of Japanese-to-English translation - the challenge of turning Genji Monogatari into English. Actually, it might have been better not to venture on that comparison. For it doesn't show Project Hyakumeizan in a good light. Summoning the shade of the immortal Arthur Waley (1889-1966) to the witness stand, we find that he took a mere twelve years for his "transcreation", as he called it, starting in 1921 and completing the last of six volumes in 1933.

Picking up the baton two generations later, Edward Seidensticker (1921-2007) pared that time down to a round decade, bringing out his modernized Shining Prince in 1976. Another few years were knocked off this record by Royall Tyler (born 1936) with his acclaimed 2001 version of Genji, started in 1993. Of course, the Tale of Genji has been translated into many more languages than English. It seems that Setouchi Jakucho, a Kyoto-based nun, took just four years to finish her recension of Lady Murasaki's tale into modern Japanese. And she started at the age of seventy.

Confronted with such examples of translation dash and derring-do, I can only bow at the acutest of angles - please feel free to imagine me tilting ritually forward at the podium like some disgraced company executive - and offer you my most abject moshiwake gozaimasen. So please bear with me until January, and in the meantime have yourself a memorable (but, perforce, One Hundred Mountains-free) Christmas and New Year ...Project Hyakumeizanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-15713498664779909802014-12-08T19:28:00.000+01:002014-12-08T21:26:08.969+01:00Images and ink (22)

Image: View of Mt Fuji from Mannenbashi, Fukagawa, by Andō Hiroshige (1797-1858)

Ink: Dazai Osamu on the appearance of Mt Fuji, from "One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji" (1939):

The appearance of Mt Fuji as one sees it from an apartment in Tokyo has little to recommend it. In winter, there's a good view of the mountain, this little white triangle sitting on the horizon, that's it there. Not a big deal, just a kind of Christmas cake. Careening perilously to the left, it looks like a stricken warship that's starting to slip, stern-first, beneath the waves.

 One winter, three years ago, somebody brought home to me an ugly truth - something I found quite unthinkable. Completely distraught, that night, in my apartment, I sat alone putting away glass after glass. I just drank; I didn't get a wink of sleep that night. At daybreak, I went to the bathroom and there, through the grille over the window, I caught sight of Mt Fuji, small, pallid, and heeled over somewhat to the left. I'll never forget this view of Fuji.

Outside, I heard a bicycle rush by on the asphalt street - it was the fishmonger and I heard him say to himself, with a shiver, that Fuji was clear this morning because of the cold. As for me, I was inside in the dark, running my hand over the window, and crying my eyes out. I hope never again to experience anything like this.

Project Hyakumeizanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-24927935857893452692014-12-05T19:55:00.001+01:002014-12-05T21:46:50.221+01:00Images and ink (21)

Image: Mt Fuji with flying clouds by Sasajima Kihei (1906-1993)

Ink: Dazai Osamu on the apparent height of Mt Fuji, from "One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji" (1939):

"Fujiyama, the glory of Japan": if foreigners find it "wonderful", this is because we've told them so a thousand times, so that Mt Fuji as become a sort of dream vision for them. But suppose you first caught sight of the mountain without first being subjected to all the hype - naively, in all innocence, mind like a blank sheet, as it were, what would you make of it then? Nothing would be for sure. It's a rather small mountain, after all. Yes, small in comparison with its base. Given the length of its base, Mt Fuji should be one and a half times as high.

Only once has the mountain looked high to me, and that was when I saw it from the Jikkoku pass. That was a memorable day. The summit being smothered in clouds, I traced the lines described by the lower slopes and made a guess at where exactly they would meet above. Then the clouds parted and I realised how wrong I'd been. There was the summit, with its blue-shaded tints, at least twice as high as I'd imagined it. But rather than surprise, I felt a sort of frisson and burst out laughing. "Well, Fuji had me there," I thought.

Project Hyakumeizanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-84862025463261806052014-12-04T19:06:00.002+01:002014-12-05T19:57:10.597+01:00Images and ink (20)

Image: Harajuku in the 1830s, not as it is now, by Andō Hiroshige.

Ink: Dazai Osamu on the angles of Mt Fuji, from "One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji" (1939):

The slopes of Mt Fuji converge at an angle of eighty-five degrees in the prints of Hiroshige, and at eighty-four degrees in those of Bunchō. Yet a glance at the Army General Staff map is enough to establish that the east-west slopes, in fact, come together at an angle of one hundred and twenty-four degrees. For the north-south slopes, the angle is one hundred and seventeen degrees.

Not that Hiroshige and Bunchō are doing anything very extraordinary; in almost any artistic representation of Mt Fuji, the angle formed by its slopes is shown as very acute, transforming the summit into something slender, aery and insubstantial. Hokusai indeed narrows that angle down to thirty degrees, creating a veritable Eiffel Tower.

In reality, though, Mt Fuji forms a rather obtuse angle; it is a mountain of gentle slopes. With those flanks of one hundred and twenty-four degrees in one direction and of one hundred and seventeen degrees in the other, there is nothing particularly lofty or spectacular about this mountain.

It seems to me that, were I in India or some other faraway country, and an eagle took me up in his talons and dropped me off on the coast of Japan somewhere near Numazu, the appearance of this mountain wouldn't in the slightest degree impress me.

More about the angles of Mt Fuji on this blog: Behind the curveProject Hyakumeizanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-26702039755914468532014-11-26T19:07:00.002+01:002015-03-21T08:48:07.326+01:00Autumn 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…

Project Hyakumeizanhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-82126306810084143912014-11-12T19:46:00.003+01:002015-01-14T19:22:49.975+01:00Autumn meizan (3)Travelogue continued: long day's interview into night on Arashima-dake

October 24: The Sound Man is having trouble. And if the Sound Man is in trouble, then we all are. I mean, you can't do much of a TV interview without a Sound Man.

While waiting for him, we're having an extended lunch break - I'm tucking into one of the Sensei's industrial-strength onigiri - on the summit of Arashima-dake. Nowhere could be more fitting, the local office of NHK has decided, as a location for an interview about the forthcoming translation of Nihon Hyakumeizan. After all, this is the eighty-eighth of Fukada Kyūya's One Hundred Mountains of Japan.

There's no need for the enamelled panorama table nearby, as the Sensei knows every one of her local mountains and most of the far-off ones too - that's Ontake in the hazy distance, still steaming. Closer at hand, under the flawless autumn sky, the array of peaks is just as Fukada describes it in our favourite book:

From the summit, Hakusan dominated the view . In front of it were arrayed the lesser peaks of Hō-onji, Kyō-ga-dake, 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 Taichō Daishi took when he made the first ascent of Hakusan.

The Sensei is particularly proud of Kyō-ga-dake - it's a former volcano, she says, and you can clearly see the crater. I turn in that direction, but the mountain looks a bit broken down, if you ask me. But I never disagree with the Sensei, especially about local mountains.

That reminds me: we're up here for an interview, but we're still missing the Sound Man. Over there, by the trig point, Yahara-san, the NHK cameraman, is setting up a heavy-duty video camera. And Miura-san, the director, is looking at her list of questions. Both know their way about mountains - Yahara-san is as likely to be found filming in the Himalaya as he is in his native mountains of Fukui, while Miura-san hails from serrated Shinshū. But the Sound Man, summoned at the last moment from NHK's office in the flatlands of Nagoya, is still missing.

Eventually, he struggles to the summit, larding the ground with sweat, his face perilously grey with the effort of porting a full-size boom mike and a ponderous box of recording gear up a 1,524-metre hill. This might be the first mountain he has ever climbed. Lesser men would have given up long ago. I feel a pang of guilt: surely, we should have given him more help.

But the show must go on. In minutes, the video and sound gear is deployed, and Miura-san asks the first question. "How did you come to translate Hyakumeizan?". I'm inclined to reply "In a fit of reckless insouciance," but realise that my rusting Japanese skills won't stretch to that. So I just say that, after moving to Europe, there was more time to read the book and I soon realised that it deserved every bit of its classic status. And that's true too.

Thanks to our late arrival, the sun is now blazing down and I've had to take off hat and sunglasses to face the camera. Even in October, the light is intense at this latitude. I ask Yahara-san if I can put on some sun protection - better not, he says, as it would look crummy on video. OK, all art demands sacrifice.

Next question - which do you prefer, the European or the Japanese Alps? Each in its special way, I reply, or words to that effect. So what's special about the Japanese mountains, Yahara-san follows up. Shinrin desu ne, I say - it's the woods, isn't it. After all, that's what Walter Weston said, though more eloquently: "the magnificence of the dark and silent forests that clothe their massive flanks."

We move over to the summit shrine. The sensei bows and folds her hands; I just stand there, respectfully, of course. "What do you think of when you see a shrine like this?" asks Yahara-san. Well, surely all 'famous mountains' should have a summit shrine. As the Hyakumeizan author observed about another mountain, "The Japanese will never cease from putting shrines on their favorite mountains."

Arashima-dake has had a shrine for a long time. Fukada noted it when he came this way in the 1950s or 1960s:

I noticed that the summit shrine contains several figures of Jizō, one of them sculpted in the first year of the Genji era (1864). Yes, I nodded to myself, this mountain has been revered and people have come up here to pay their respects for centuries.

Interestingly, the shrine on Arashima-dake was taken down in a summit clean-up that took place a few years ago. For a while, the mountaintop was bare. But the local people clearly thought the shrine should be replaced.

Come to think about it, it's not so different in Europe. Around the start of the twentieth century, the Swiss and Italian villages of Zermatt and Valtournanche decided that their local mountaintop should be consecrated. After the Italians had fabricated a tall summit cross from wrought iron, no doubt at considerable expense, teams of mountain guides took two summer seasons to haul it up the mountain. And there you can see it to this day, on the Matterhorn's summit, with the Latin names for each village worked into the crossbar: Patrumbor and Vallistornench…

Alas, there isn't time to develop this theme in a news clip that's destined to last no more than a few minutes. So I just say that a mountaintop without a shrine (or cross) would seem - the word eludes me. "Mono-tarinai", suggests the sensei. Yes, that's it exactly – something would be missing.

It's time to go down. A sharp-edged section of ridge leads away from the summit. A few summers ago, somebody fell off there, observes Yahara-san. The body was only found when somebody remarked the stench rising from the gully below. We head carefully down the slippery path, between ramparts of panda grass, towards the dark and silent forests below.

Or not so dark. Slanting in under the trees, the afternoon sun backlights the leaves in spangles of red, yellow and gold. Yahara-san darts to and fro with his video camera, capturing seasonal footage. We have plenty of time to appreciate the autumn colours as the Sound Man is coming down almost as slowly as he went up - a sprained foot is now adding to his woes. But he still insists on carrying his own pack.

We wait for him again above the abandoned ski-piste. The sun has gone behind the ridge by now, and the pampas grass glows palely in the gathering dusk. Eventually, the Sound Man limps into view and I realise that, all day, it's been our colleague from the flatlands who's been cultivating the true mountaineering spirit. This time, the right words spring unprompted to mind. They are gaman and konjo. By the time we get to the cars, the light really is going.

Project Hyakumeizanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-45630780095590059512014-11-03T18:22:00.002+01:002014-11-03T18:58:23.678+01:00Autumn meizan (2)Travelogue continued: a summit meeting with the master of Tozan Tales

October 23: the Raichō ("Snow Ptarmigan") express arrived on time at Osaka station. That was good, because Wes Lang and I had arranged a rare summit meeting. And there was Wes now, waiting at the Sakurabashi exit. As a doyen of the Kansai Hyakumeizan scene, Wes should need no introduction to readers of this blog, as most will likely be frequent visitors to his Hiking in Japan guide and Tozan Tales.

Wes was looking a bit leaner than when we'd last met - an enforced sojourn with the local health system was to blame. You can read about this episode on Wes's witty yet perceptive blog, TB Tales. Others might have been discombobulated by the experience but, to a mountaineer of Wes's stamp, even soggy hospital toast can be turned to good account. The man is irrepressible.

But I digress. We had an hour before Wes had to entrain for his afternoon class in Kobe, so we headed for the Eikokuya café - how appropriate - atop one of the Ekimae area's tall buildings and ordered two morning sets. Being possessed of healthy appetites on this cool autumn morning, we desisted from turning the toast slices into caricatures of Mt Fuji.

Since we last met, Wes has turned his attention from Fukada Kyūya's Nihon Hyakumeizan - been there, done that - to the local equivalent, the One Hundred Mountains of the Kansai Region. The list has received the closest thing to official sanction in the shape of a handsome guidebook published by Japan's oldest publisher of mountain books and journals, Yama to Keikoku - a battered copy of which Wes now spread out on the counter in front of us.

"You know," he said, after taking a bit into an egg sandwich, "the Kansai really is unbeatable for mountain variety." As an ex-Tokyo man, I almost raised an eyebrow here - I mean, what with Tanzawa and Chichibu, and that cone-shaped mountain on the skyline, the Kantō didn't seem too bad for variety either. But Wes was in full swing now: "Where else can you hike up mountains within the city limits?", he asked rhetorically, pointing at Mt Rokko over yonder in the haze.

I had to admit that, for sheer in-your-face accessibility, the mountains round the Big Slope and its environs go one better than Tokyo. But what about variety? In reply, Wes turned to the contents page in his Yama to Keikoku guide - a quick glance of the pencil ticks against the mountain names revealed that he's a good way through the one hundred.

Not having encountered the Kansai Hyakumeizan before, I was intrigued to see which mountains entered into this list: Atago, Hiei, Ikoma, Ōmine, Ōdaigahara, Hyō-no-Sen, the "Icy Mountain" where no less an alpinist than Katō Buntarō cut his winter-mountaineering teeth - yes, these are Meizan that can hold their heads up in any company. But what was this? My eye lit on Hōrai-zan, a mountain on the shores of Lake Biwa - the train had passed by its foot that morning. It seems incongruous that you can ride a cable-car up to the summit of a mountain named for the Western Paradise.

Well, any listing of famous mountains is likely to stoke controversy - it seems that the original Kansai One Hundred were selected by Nakanishi Seiichirō, an experienced mountaineer. He was presumably miffed that Fukada Kyūya had let only four Kansai peaks into his original all-Japan Hyakumeizan. But Nakanishi came in for criticism himself, allegedly because he favoured summits in the southern Kansai districts over those in the west. The Yama to Keikoku listing was a later attempt to redress the balance, it's said. By the way, I'm indebted for this information to On Higher Ground, himself a Kansai resident.

Fortunately, the Eikoku-ya has a "bottomless" policy when it comes to refills. Starting on our second cups of coffee, we turned to the current mountain scene. There's a lot going on. Blogs and message boards mean that it's easier than ever for like-minded Meizan-seekers to meet up and arrange trips. Wes's recent Hiking in Japan camp at Togakushi is a case in point. And blogs are the ideal place to write up trips and publish compelling photography afterwards. All in all, it's never been a better time to be a foreign mountaineer in these parts.

Alas, our time was soon up. Wes showed me the way to Kinokuniya - by now, I wanted to buy my own copy of the Kansai Hyakumeizan - and then vanished into the crowd. Too late, I thought of a final question to ask him. And that is, will he be able to finish his round of the Kansai One Hundred before he becomes an oto-san .... ? Project Hyakumeizanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-7618037172759094056.post-4440543124812531102014-10-31T20:15:00.004+01:002014-10-31T21:02:32.368+01:00Autumn meizan (1)Travelogue: a distant view of Mt Fuji leads to a poetic eruption

October 21: And there it was now, sliding under the port wing at 450 knots – the Boeing was still climbing. As I'd let ANA assign me a seat on the wrong side, I had to scurry across the plane and peer through a miserable porthole in the rear door. But Mt Fuji never disappoints. There it was, soaring above a scattered cloud-deck, a conical island in a limitless blue ocean.

Like some mountain fashionista, Mt Fuji was modelling a turban-like capcloud. A shawl of rotor cloud trailed in its lee. I clicked away with my pocket camera until the spectacle drifted away aft. Returning to my seat, I noticed that the man in the row ahead had his newspaper open at a topical headline: "Three prefectures hold disaster drill to prepare for Mt Fuji eruption".

That was quick, I thought – it's only three weeks since Ontake blew and they're already practising for the next one. Turns out, though, that this exercise had been planned for months – after all, the authorities drew up a "hazard map" for the mountain years ago. The drill scenario seems to have been based on the 1707 eruption on Mt Fuji's southern flank.

The eruption of Ontake seen from Kasa-ga-dake (Photo: A Mikami)

Do the authorities know something we don't? Well, probably not. A volcano's intentions are notoriously hard to read. From time to time, seismometers have picked up movements of lava deep underneath the mountain – and, so far, nothing has happened. One thing is certain: Mt Fuji will erupt when it feels like it. Years ago, a poet summed up the matter perfectly:

Sometimes clouds furry like mufflers wind round and round Fuji
Sometimes classic pince-nez clouds float close by
The Osawa landslide must have carved out a huge mass of mountain
That too does not bother Fuji
Leaving everything to humanity and physics
Before long it may yet poke out again a tongue of fire.
That too is left to nature
Fuji is there
Fuji simply exists
Heaven overhead always

(From "Fuji" by Kusano Shinpei (1903-1988), Selected Poems 1943-1986 translated by Leith Morton)

Project Hyakumeizanhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com


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Marie Antoinette, Interview with a Vampire, Spider-Man,
Jumanji, Drop Dead Gorgeous
POSTED IN movies, movies we love, fun stuff, party ideas, sleepover
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subset: commoncrawl