discovering the japanese alps_meiji moutainner

1Journal of Japanese Studies, 31:1

2005 Society for Japanese Studies

This research was generously supported by a fellowship at the National Humanities Cen-ter, where Eliza Robertson provided indispensable and indefatigable help tracking down mate-rials. Colleagues at Duke, Stanford, and elsewhere offered thoughtful responses to earlier oralversions; special thanks to Takashi Fujitani, Elise Edwards, Rick Vinograd, and two anony-mous reviewers for JJS for astute criticisms on the written draft. While I have not been able totake all suggestions on board, the article has been greatly improved by the penetrating insightsof many interlocutors.

karen wigen

Discovering the Japanese Alps: Meiji Mountaineer-ing and the Quest for Geographical Enlightenment

Abstract: The landscape known today as the Japanese Alps is a cultural artifactof the mid-Meiji era. During the decade between the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, as imperial competition thrust mountains into new prominenceacross the globe, central Honshus ranges came into focus for the rst time. Thevisionaries who produced the Japanese Alps for the Japanese public during these years, notably Shiga Shigetaka and Kojima Usui, simultaneously imbuedthe alpine landscape with an exalted purpose. Synthesizing science and aesthet-ics with practical advice, their writings helped shape a new sensibility towardmountains: one where climbing was yoked to what might be called geographi-cal enlightenment.

The volcanic peaks that tower over central Honshu have long been the ob-ject of veneration and pilgrimage. Yet at the turn of the last century, the Shi-nano highlands came into focus through a new lens: that of modern alpineexploration. Starting in the 1890s, a small cadre of cosmopolitan climbersand geographical pedagogues began drawing the publics attention to therugged ranges that ring Nagano Prefecture. In the process, they effectivelyinvited the Japanese public to discover a new landscape, known to this dayby the Meiji neologism Nihon Arupusu.

This toponym has become such a xture of modern Japanese maps thatit takes an effort to imagine how foreign it must have sounded a century ago.For years after Walter Weston published his landmark work, Mountaineer-

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Angelia Fellnew muse

2 Journal of Japanese Studies 31:1 (2005)

1. Kojima Usui, Tozan ni tsukite, in Takato Shoku, ed., Nihon sangakushi (Tokyo:Hakubunkan, 1906), p. 2.

2. Nakajima Masafumi, Kita Arupusu no shiteki kenkyu (Toyama: Shibutani Bunsenkaku,1986), p. 500. A 1935 essay on Japanese alpine literature conrms that the November 1906 issue of Sangaku was one of the rst publications to popularize the still-new toponym Ja-pan Alps. Kiyomizu Tadao and Sakabe Masami, Sangaku ni kansuru hongo bunken, in Mi-namijo Hatsugoro, ed., Sangaku koza (Tokyo: Kyorissha, 1935), p. 275.

3. For more on nationalism and landscape in the third Meiji decade, see Kenneth B. Pyle,

ing and Exploration in the Japanese Alps (1896), the appellation evidentlyremained foreign to many. A leading proponent of mountain climbing in Ja-pan would refer a decade later to the majestically towering range that formsthe Shinano-Hida border as the so-called Japanese Alps.1 And the termcould still sound exotic to an urbane college student as late as 1916. Whilebrowsing in a bookstore in Tokyo that year, the young Nakajima Masafumicame across a special issue of Sangaku, bulletin of the newly formed NihonSangaku Kai (Japan Alpine Society), dedicated to the Japanese Alps. Myeyes were opened by [that rst encounter with] alpine literature, Nakajimawould recall a quarter-century later. The novel outlook summed up in theunfamiliar term, Nihon Arupusu, penetrated deep into my soul, such thateven now I remember that volume with intense nostalgia.2

The present essay attempts to analyze what this arresting novel out-look entailed. To that end, it explores the work of Japans earliest alpineideologues: the journalist Shiga Shigetaka (18631927) and the amateurclimber Kojima Usui (1874 1948). More than any others, it was the cele-brated writings of these men that shaped the mid-Meiji sensibility towardthe Japanese Alps. Through lofty rhetoric, scientic reportage, and vivid de-scriptions of the mountaineers experience, Shiga and Kojima threw the Shi-nano highlands into sharp relief for the Japanese public for the rst time. Inthe process, I contend, they metaphorically moved Honshus mountains outof the background and onto center stage for a new pedagogical project.

One dening context for that project was patriotic fervor. Tellingly, theonset of expeditions to the Japanese Alps coincided with the beginning ofJapans imperial expansion abroad. It was during the heady decade betweenthe Sino-Japanese (1894 95) and Russo-Japanese (1904 5) Wars that Na-ganos jumbled peaks snapped into view, acquired a name, and loomed upon the national horizon as a locus for economic and symbolic investment.The nationalism of this third Meiji decade was characterized by a wide-spread reaction against the headlong Westernization of preceding years, aswell as by a growing impatience with the unequal treaties. To understand theideological tenor of Meiji alpinism, it is essential to map the complicatedcurrents of nativist backlash and enlightenment effort that swirled throughpublic discourse at this crucial time, as Japan struggled to throw off itsquasi-colonial status and join the ranks of the great powers.3

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Wigen: Japanese Alps 3

The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 18851895 (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1969); Takeuchi Keiichi, Landscape, Language and Nationalism inMeiji Japan, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Sciences, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1988), pp. 25 40.

4. On the linked histories of geography and empire globally, see Morag Bell, Robin Butlin, and Michael Heffernan, eds., Geography and Imperialism, 1820 1940 (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1995). For Japan, this linkage is explored in Takeuchi Keiichi,The Japanese Imperial Tradition, Western Imperialism and Modern Japanese Geography, inAnne Godlewska and Neil Smith, eds., Geography and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994),pp. 188206.

5. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Seiyo jijo (Tokyo: Shokodo, 1870).6. On the development of modern science in nineteenth-century Japan, see Nakayama

Shigeru, Academic and Scientic Traditions in China, Japan, and the West, trans. Jerry Dusen-bury (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1984). The institutionalization of geography is dis-cussed in Ishida Ryujiro, Nihon ni okeru kindai chirigaku no seiritsu (Tokyo: Daimeido, 1984);Takeuchi Keiichi, Languages, Paradigms and Schools in Geography (Tokyo: HitotsubashiUniversity Laboratory of Social Geography, 1984); and Unno Kazutaka, Cartography in Japan, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, Vol. 2, Bk. 2:Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1994), pp. 346 477. On the disciplines less prestigious position in China, seeDouglas Howland, Borders of Chinese Civilization: Geography and History at Empires End(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).

Closely related to the competition for empire, and equally important forthe discovery of the Japanese Alps, was the rise of geography as an aca-demic discipline.4 Ever since the abrupt Western intrusions at mid-century,gathering and disseminating up-to-date knowledge of the world had been atop priority for the Japanese government. Fukuzawa Yukichis massivelypopular Seiyo jijo (Conditions in the West) served as a stop-gap geographi-cal textbook in the early Meiji schools,5 but modernizers recognized theneed for institutionalizing a eld that was increasingly regarded as both thequeen of the sciences and an indispensable tool of statecraft. One step in thatdirection was the 1879 chartering of the prestigious Tokyo GeographicalSociety, modeled on the Royal Geographical Society of London. With anelite membership of aristocrats, military ofcers, and diplomats, the societywas charged with a mission as much military and political as it was schol-arly; one of its rst mandates was to settle border disputes in Hokkaido andSakhalin. Concurrently, important steps were taken to enhance geographi-cal training for the nations teachers and their pupils. Chairs of geographywere established at the major normal schools in the 1890s, with universitypositions soon to follow.6

Finally, intertwined with both the rise of empire and the rise of geogra-phy was the transformation of global mountaineering culture. The heydayof imperialism and geographical science was also the heyday of groupclimbs. Where earlier Europeans had treated the peaks as a place for indi-vidual men of means to pursue their own edication, high-altitude zonescame into view in the late nineteenth century as a site for youth mobiliza-

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7. Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 1990); Reuben Ellis, Vertical Margins: Mountaineering and theLandscapes of Neoimperialism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); RaymondHuel, The Creation of the Alpine Club of Canada: An Early Manifestation of Canadian Na-tionalism, Prairie Forum, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1980), pp. 25 43; Jay Mechling, On My Honor: BoyScouts and the Making of American Youth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); LauraWaterman and Guy Waterman, Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Ad-venture in the Northeast Mountains (Boston: Appalachian Mountain Club, 1989). On youthculture and mobilization in Japan during these years, see David R. Ambaras, Treasures of theNation: Juvenile Delinquency, Socialization, and Mobilization in Modern Japan, 18951945(Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1999); and Donald Roden, Schooldays in Imperial Japan: AStudy in the Culture of a Student Elite (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

8. Nicholas Green, Looking at the Landscape: Class Formation and the Visual, in EricHirsch and Michael OHanlon, eds., The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Placeand Space (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 39. For related insights, see Jonas Frykman andOrvar Lofgren, Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle-Class Life (New Bruns-wick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983); Peter H. Hansen, Albert Smith, the Alpine Club,and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain, Journal of British Studies,Vol. 34, No. 3 (1995), pp. 300 324; Orvar Lofgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Kenneth Myers, The Catskills: Painters, Writ-ers, and Tourists in the Mountains, 1820 1895 (Yonkers: Hudson River Museum of West-chester, 1987); Roderick P. Neumann, Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood andNature Preservation in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Eric Pur-chase, Out of Nowhere: Disaster and Tourism in the White Mountains (Baltimore: Johns Hop-kins University Press, 1999).

tion. Besides mounting expeditions to remote corners of the earth, all themajor imperial metropoles saw movements exhorting young people to takeup hiking at home. Whether through the Boy Scouts in Britain, the heimatmovement in Germany, or the American hiking clubs that multiplied afterthe Civil War, rugged country was increasingly cast as a place to fortify bothphysical strength and native-place prideand, by implication, to enhanceyoung peoples tness for imperial rule.7

What made this kind of mountaineering fundamentally different fromthe recreational variety was its overtly social character. To be sure, middle-class nature tourism has always had social functions as well; the differenceis that they are consistently hidden from view. At the hands of hotel opera-tors and travel guides, outdoor recreationa quintessentially modern ac-tivityis typically constructed as an escape from the modern; natural sce-nery is marketed as an anticommodity; and wilderness adventure, whileindisputably serving to consolidate class and gender identities, is experi-enced as profoundly private. Indeed, scholars have argued that in order fornature tourism to work at all, modern vacationers have to fool themselvesabout what they are really up to. Other peopleand the apparatus that de-livered them into the wildernessmust be mentally erased from the scene,for it [is] at the level of personal experience and identity that the dialoguewith nature [is] socially effective.8

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9. Shiga Shigetaka, Chirigaku (1908), reprinted in Shiga Shigetaka Zenshu Kankokai, ed.,Shiga Shigetaka zenshu, Vol. 4 (Tokyo: Shiga Shigetaka Zenshu Kankokai, 1927), p. 237.

10. Richard Okada, Landscape and the Nation-State: A Reading of Nihon Fukei Ron,in Helen Hardacre, ed., New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan (Leiden: Brill, 1997), p. 102.Compare this with W. J. T. Mitchells claim that the panoramic point of view performs a kind ofdreamwork for the imperial mind: W. J. T. Mitchell, Imperial Landscape, in W. J. T. Mitch-ell, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 17.

11. On Alcocks climb of Mount Fuji, as well as earlier European forays into the Japa-nese highlands, see Tani Yuji, Kurobune Fujisan ni noboru!Bakumatsu gaiko ibun (Tokyo:Kadokawa Shoten, 2001).

12. William Gowland (18421923) came to Japan in the early Meiji period to work in thechemistry division of the Osaka Mint. He stayed for 15 years, transforming the mining andsmelting technologies in Japan.

By contrast, the late nineteenth-century alpine enthusiasts who concernus here felt no compulsion to disguise what they were up to. For this gener-ation, the social function of mountaineering was its main attraction, andrather than hide it, they broadcast it. Meiji alpine literature, like its Britishand Bavarian counterparts, was thus explicit about the potential of climb-ing to consolidate new identities and subjectivities. Likewise, turn-of-the-century alpine enthusiasts celebrated the fact that climbing mountains wasmodern (to the point of disowning its indigenous, premodern roots). And in-stead of minimizing the infrastructure of exploration, they advocated openlyfor it. Far from trying to preserve their favorite haunts for themselves, thesemountain men invited their compatriots along. The fundamental mission ofMeiji alpine boosters was educating for a new Japan, and mobilizing thenations youth up the slopes was key to this pedagogical project. What droveShiga and Kojima to call Japanese youth into the mountains was above alltheir conviction that all 47 million Japanese must cultivate knowledge ofgeography.9

As it turned out, however, putting this agenda into practice was nosimple matter. The Japanese Alps were not readily available in the 1890s foryouth mobilization and geographical pedagogy. For one thing, the necessaryinfrastructure was not yet in place. Even accurate maps and guidebooks, aswe shall see, were almost impossible to come by. For another thing, theadoption of a Western optic that linked climbing with claiming was compli-cated by Japans quasi-colonial relationship to the mountaineering powers.Since the very activity of climbing a mountain, combining as it does prop-erties of height with sight, easily interconnects with notions of conquest andsubjugation,10 it was an awkward fact that, by the late 1890s, Japans ownmountains had already been extensively explored by foreigners. The Britishdiplomat Rutherford Alcock had caused a sensation by leading an expedi-tion up Mount Fuji in 186011; the geologist William Gowland had made sev-eral pioneering climbs while assessing Naganos mineral resources for theMeiji government in the 1870s12; and the missionary Walter Weston had put

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13. Walter Weston, Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps (London: JohnMurray, 1896).

14. Ichiro Hori, Mountains and Their Importance for the Idea of the Other World in Jap-anese Folk Religion, History of Religions, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1996), pp. 123; Hitoshi Miyake,Shugendo: Essays on the Structure of Japanese Folk Religion (Ann Arbor: Center for JapaneseStudies, University of Michigan, 2002).

15. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University ofHawaii Press, 1994).

alpine Japan on the map for an international audience in the 1880s.13 Finally,modern mountaineers also had to contend with competing claims fromwithin, in the form of long-standing indigenous alpine practices. Most ex-plosive here were the taboos associated with shugendo, or mountain wor-ship.14 Japanese climbers could hardly explore the Shinano highlands with-out trampling on traditional sacred ground. Yet amid the nativist backlash ofthe mid-Meiji period, to court charges of sacrilege in the name of patrioticpedagogy was a dicey game indeed. One might fairly wonder what ideolog-ical use could be made of a landscape that, while still largely uncharted, hadalready been staked out as both the precinct of the native gods and the play-ground of foreign climbers.

The terms of this dilemma may have been peculiarly Japanese, but theMeiji alpinists conundrum points to a more general tension in the modern-ization project. In the late 1800s, mountaineering was part and parcel ofmodern geography, and modern geography was nowhere adopted in a vac-uum. As Thongchai Winichakul has painstakingly shown for Thailand,prior modes of apprehending the landscape generated frictions against thenew categories.15 In Japan, those promoting a modern approach to moun-tains likewise found themselves caught between competing geographicaldiscourses. The intellectuals who are the focus of this article were cele-brated precisely for their nesse in solving this dilemma. Their novel syn-theses of past and present, East and West, aesthetics and science allowedmountains to assume a central role in Japanese identity, while giving alpineadventure a central role in modern geographical pedagogy. Together, Shigaand Kojima promoted highland eldwork in a distinctively Japanese yet unmistakably modern key. It is that creative synthesis that the present essayexplores.

The article begins by probing the sense in which the Japanese Alps werediscovered in the middle of the Meiji era, a process that was at once phys-ical and conceptual. It then turns to the work of Shiga and Kojima, explor-ing why and how the mountains of Honshu mattered to these men. After aclose look at their key texts, the focus widens to consider the diverse strainsof alpine science and aesthetics on which both writers drew, with an eye toappreciating the canny synthesis they forged. The governing questionthroughout is essentially a discursive one: namely, what conceptual strate-

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16. Yutaka Sakaguchi, Characteristics of the Physical Nature of Japan with Special Ref-erence to Landform, in Association of Japanese Geographers, ed., Geography of Japan(Tokyo: Teikoku Shoin, 1980), pp. 328.

17. Kren Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750 1920 (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1995).

18. Donald McCallum, Zenkoji and Its Icon: A Study in Medieval Japanese Religious Art(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Constantine Vaporis, Breaking Barriers: Traveland the State in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Council on EastAsian Studies, 1994).

gies did this rst generation of alpine promoters use to claim the JapaneseAlps for an agenda of geographical enlightenment? As we see, while bothmade their name by yoking European science to Japanese aesthetics, eachwriter calibrated his synthesis differently. Shigas signal achievement was toground Japans traditional alpine aesthetic in physical geography. Kojima,building on Shigas pioneering work, worked to modernize that aesthetic,harnessing elements of both European and Japanese culture to the cause ofWestern-style alpinism. The combination was powerful. Together, Shigaand Kojima made a powerful case for turning the Japanese Alps not merelyinto a playground or proving ground, but into a prime site for geographicalenlightenment.

The Discovery of the Japanese Alps

The ranges known today as the Nihon Arupusu encompass the mostrugged terrain in the Japanese archipelago. Three major mountain systemsconverge in Nagano Prefecture (former Shinano Province): the northeasternand southwestern arcs of Japan, and the Bonin arc from the Pacic. Thehighlands that have formed where these arcs intersect are young in geolog-ical time; their topography is a product of Quaternary uplift as well as vol-canism. A jumble of older granite ridges punctured by numerous volcaniccones, the region contains a dozen peaks in the 10,000-foot (3,000-meter)range. The most popular destinations in the regionincluding a hikingcourse known already by the 1930s as the Ginza of the Alpsare foundto the north (toward the Sea of Japan), where the forest cover is thin, thesnowfall is heavy, and the geological relief is especially stark.16

Rugged as it is, this terrain could hardly be characterized as a tracklesswilderness on the eve of the twentieth century. Shinanos mountains hadlong been exploited for raw materials, including timber, fuel, fertilizer, fod-der, meat, minerals, and medicines.17 At the same time, the province was en-meshed in the Tokugawa culture of travel, sending thousands of laborers tothe lowlands every year, and drawing thousands of metropolitan visitors upto the mountains.18 Many outsiders came as pilgrims, drawn especially tothe Buddhist temple complex of Zenkoji, or to climb the sacred peak ofMount Ontake. But other kinds of cultural circuits penetrated the region as

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19. Anne Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the MeijiRestoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

20. Kuroiwa Ken, Tozan no reimei: Nihon Fukeiron no nazo o otte (Tokyo: Perikansha,1979), p. 124.

21. Kojima Usui, Nihon sangakushi no senshu ni tsukite, in Takato Shoku, ed., Nihonsangakushi (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1906), pp. 114 (separately paginated preface).

22. A contemporary appreciation of the new maps was carried in Sangaku, Vol. 8, No. 3(1913); see Kiyomizu and Sakabe, Sangaku ni kansuru hongo bunken, p. 286.

23. Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. B. Mason, A Handbook for Travellers in Japan (Lon-don: John Murray, 1891). From the 1st through 7th edition [i.e., from 1891 to 1903], this bookwas the sole reliable alpine travel guide available to would-be climbers in Japan. Kiyomizuand Sakabe, Sangaku ni kansuru hongo bunken, p. 261.

well. Metropolitan poets, painters, and itinerant scholars networked exten-sively in this area, seeking patronage from local landlords in exchange forthe cultural capital their cosmopolitanism could confer.19 In short, far frombeing isolated, Shinano was deeply drawn into the commercial and culturallife of the archipelago.

Yet it remains fair to say that the Japanese Alps had to be discoveredin several senses at the turn of the twentieth century. First, throughout theTokugawa period, highland Shinano remained essentially uncharted. Theprovinces river valleys and road networks had been carefully mapped sincethe 1600s, but the ridges themselves had never been systematically sur-veyed. As Kojima Usui later recalled, in those days, . . . no one knew eventhe names of the mountains, much less their locations or elevations. To gomountaineering was literally to strike out into unknown country. This wasno idle boast; the maps available to would-be mountaineers at the turn of the century were remarkably crude. The rst 1:20,000 geological surveysheets, issued in 1890, noted the names of the major peaks, but their topog-raphy was largely guesswork. Prefectural maps from the turn of the centurylikewise featured the names of the major peaks but consistently got the de-tails of contour and drainage wrong.20 As Kojima complained in 1906, un-til our topographic maps are based on accurate surveys, they will be of nouse to a person who enters the mountains.21 Accurate maps of the kind Ko-jima called for would not become available until the last years of the Meijiperiod.22

Meanwhile, it was not just maps that were in short supply; reliable de-scriptive accounts were also lacking. After 1891, English-language readersembarking on highland adventure could nd useful information in BasilHall Chamberlain and W. B. Masons Handbook for Travellers in Japan, butno comparable guidebook existed in Japanese for decades.23 For the pur-poses of mountaineers, existing gazetteers and geographies were of littleutility. As Kojima complained, Most merely name the ranges, or say thatsuch and such a mountain exists, in the style of a place-name index. Withone or two exceptions, none gives an adequate description of individual

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24. Kojima, Nihon sangakushi no senshu ni tsukite, p. 1.25. In Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps, Walter Weston published a

photograph of two hunters who guided his own explorations in the area.26. Kadokawas Nihon chimei daijiten (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1990) notes, however,

that both Gowland and Weston used the term Japan Alps to refer only to the northern (Hida)range. Kojima Usui is credited with extending the conceptual region to include the central andsouthern Alps.

27. The most celebrated analysis of the discovery of landscape in Meiji Japan is KarataniKojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); seealso Minami Hiroshi, Nihonjinron no keifu (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1980).

28. Marcia Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in theTokugawa Period (16031868) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 60.

29. In Mimi Yiengpruksawans formulation, a meisho was a scene that had becomecharged with specic emotive content; it call[ed] up a mood and a sense of nostalgia for a mo-

peaks.24 Under these circumstances, the mountains of Nagano truly repre-sented terra incognita except to local residents with rst-hand knowledge.Indeed, once a climber ascended above tree line, even local knowledge wasscarce; the only mountain residents who could serve as reliable guides to thehighest slopes were a handful of bear hunters.25

If the 1890s was thus a decade of physical exploration in the Naganohighlands, it was also a decade of mental mapping, for the Japanese Alpshad never previously been conceived as a unitary place. It is not entirely sur-prising that there were no indigenous terms for the discontinuous jumble ofmountains that would come to be known as the Nihon Arupusu. More inter-esting is the lack of historical names for the three ranges (north, central, andsouth) into which they are now conventionally grouped. As Kojima noted,even individual peaks were typically known by diverse toponyms. It took anEnglish geologist, William Gowland, to conceive of this swath of terrain asforming a coherent landscape, comparable to the European Alps; and it wasleft to another Englishman, Walter Weston, to canonize Gowlands geo-graphical conception, deploying it as a de facto proper noun.26

Finally, beyond the novelty of naming, the discovery of the JapaneseAlps partook as well of a still more fundamental shift: a new way of think-ing about landscape per se. This process has been remarked by historians ofMeiji culture in many different domainsfrom new perspectives in paint-ing, to a new sense of exterior space as a setting for psychological ction, tonew ideologies that sought a timeless Japanese essence in the physical en-vironment.27 While diverse, these novel conceptions of site and scene sharedan attempt to move beyond the earlier Japanese landscape convention cen-tered on famous places, or meisho. For Tokugawa literati, famous places hadfunctioned as gateway[s] offering a focused view extending back in time aswell as a gaze outward in space.28 The literary canon told travelers whereto look, and scenic value was largely determined by poetic aura. Indeed, po-ets dictated not only where to look, but how to feel.29 It was this convention

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ment now lost. Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, review of Taigas True Views by MelindaTakeuchi, Art Bulletin, Vol. 75, No. 2 (June 1993), p. 331.

30. As the ten-page bibliography in Gavins recent biography testies, Shigas work has at-tracted considerable attention over the years on both sides of the Pacic. Masako Gavin, ShigaShigetaka, 1864 1927: The Forgotten Enlightener (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2001). Forrepresentative English-language perspectives on Shigas work with the Nihonjin circle, seePyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan, chapter three, and Kimitada Miwa, Shiga Shige-taka (18631927), a Meiji Japanists View of and Actions in International Relations (Tokyo:Sophia University, Institution of International Relations for Advanced Studies on Peace andDevelopment in Asia, Research Papers Series A-3, 1970).

31. Miwa, Shiga Shigetaka, pp. 817. For an account of Clarks pioneering work in Sap-poro, see John M. Maki, A Yankee in Hokkaido: The Life of William Smith Clark (Lanham, Md.:Lexington Books, 2002).

32. While the Nanyo of Shigas title is usually rendered in English as South Seas,Miwa Kimitada makes a compelling case for reading it here not as a maritime designation but

with which Japanese artists and intellectuals began to break in the 1890s.Without entirely abandoning the famous places of the past, they began ex-ploring other kinds of landscapes as welland writing new emotionalscripts for the responses that landscape might provoke.

Shiga Shigetaka

Leading this turn was the towering public intellectual, Shiga Shigetaka(18631927). Cofounder of the Seikyosha (Society for Political Education)and longtime editor of its journal, Nihonjin (The Japanese), Shiga was aprominent gure in his day, and he has remained in the historical spotlightever since, largely for his promotion of kokusui, or national essence.30 Buthe was rst and foremost a geographer.

Born in the last years of the old regime to a samurai family fromOkazaki domain, the young Shiga was sent to Tokyo at the age of ten tostudy at Kogyoku Juku, a private academy led by the Dutch studies scholarKondo Makoto (183186). In contrast to Fukuzawa Yukichis Keio Gijuku(forerunner of todays Keio University), which aimed to prepare leaders forthe Japanese business world, Kondos academy was designed to groom fu-ture ofcers for the navy and merchant marine. Its strongly nationalist cur-riculum accordingly emphasized both history and geography. Shigas deci-sion to major in geography laid a strong foundation for his later work at theSapporo Agricultural College, where he would follow Uchimura Kanzo andNitobe Inazo in studying under William Smith Clark. It may also have in-oculated him against the prevailing pro-Western sentiments at Sapporo.While accepting Clarks insistence on modern ethics and attitudes, Shigawould never adopt Christianity; instead, he would turn his Western educa-tion into a tool for articulating and advancing Japans national interests.31

Shiga made his public debut with a book entitled Nanyo jiji (Current affairs in the south).32 Published in 1887, when Shiga was just 24 years old, Nanyo jiji recounted the authors observations from a ten-month tour

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as a conceptual counterpart to Toyo and Seiyo, the common terms for East and West.Miwa, Shiga Shigetaka, p. 7; see also Kuroiwa, Tozan no reimei, pp. 1820.

33. Mita Hiroo, Yama no shisoshi (Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko, 1973), p. 59.34. This passage is discussed in ibid., pp. 59 60, and Gavin, Shiga Shigetaka, p. 81.35. Shiga Shigetaka, Nihon fukeiron (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1894).36. For analyses of On Japanese Landscape as a seminal text for the creation of a new

landscape aesthetic, see Matsuura Akiko, Nihon fukeiron no iji, in Toda Hiroko, ed., ShigaShigetaka: kaiso to shiryo (Tokyo: Toda Hiroko, 1994), pp. 17585; Okada, Landscape andthe Nation-State; Akiko Ono, Landscape of Powers: Shiga Shigetaka and the Emergence ofa National Landscape Discourse in Japan (M.A. Thesis, State University of New York, 1998);Omuro Mikio, Shiga Shigetaka Nihon fukeiron seidoku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003); andYamamoto Norihiko and Ueda Yoshimi, Fukei no seiritsu: Shiga Shigetaka to Nihon fukei-ron (Osaka: Kaifusha, 1997). For an incisive treatment of Shiga within the broader discourseof nature in turn-of-the-century Japan, see Julia Thomas, Reconguring Modernity: Concepts

through Southeast Asia and Oceania on the Japanese troop ship Tsukuba.Joining a naval entourage for an extended exercise abroad was an unprece-dented journalistic privilege, and one for which Shigas naval connectionswere essential. He had lobbied for the voyage on the grounds that a geogra-pher like himself was uniquely qualied to conduct a botanical survey of theSouth Seasand that Japan, like Britain, stood to gain international pres-tige by granting civilian scientists access to military vessels. In short, ShigaShigetaka boarded the Tsukuba in the guise of a Japanese Charles Darwin.33

But as Mita Hiroo has pointed out, the Pacic was a far different placefor a Japanese geographer in the 1880s than it had been for a British natu-ralist in the 1830s. Embarking from a nation gripped by anxiety about its in-ternational status, Shiga found himself compelled less by natural historythan by human history, manifest throughout his travels in the stark gap be-tween colonizers and colonized. His itinerary allowed him to witness rst-hand how island peoples across the South Pacicfrom Australia and NewZealand to Fiji, Samoa, and Hawaiiwere losing their resources to indus-trious, well-organized Anglo-Saxon colonists. Accordingly, rather than con-ducting a detached scientic survey, he penned a warning to Japan about thechallenge of European imperialism. To avoid the fate of the Maori, Shigawrote, the Japanese must rapidly develop their own archipelagos resourcesthrough industrialization and trade. As New Zealand had become the Brit-ain of the South, so Japan must become the Britain of the East.34

Nanyo jiji was an instant success. Two additional printings would ap-pear in 1889, with a revised edition in 1891. This record in turn generatedan eager audience for Shigas second book, a weighty tome called Nihonfukeiron (On Japanese landscape, 1894).35 Here Shiga turned his attentionto domestic geography, elaborating his earlier call for industrialization byenumerating and celebrating Japans natural resources. Suffused with bothpoetic allusions and technical termsas well as attering comparisons tothe Asian mainlandNihon fukeiron provided a seamless link betweengeophysical science, economic development, and national pride.36

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of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001),chapter seven.

37. Mita Hiroo suggests that, as tetto was Shigas alternative to the sublime, shosha and bitogether answered to the European picturesque; Mita, Yama no shisoshi, p. 60.

38. Mita suggests that these startlingly original ideas, which are not foreshadowed in anyof Shigas prior writings, may have been borrowed from John Lubbocks 1892 book, The Beau-ties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live In (London: Macmillan), which is citedin Nihon fukeiron. Both texts combine extensive quotations from nature-praising poetry withexcerpts from the journals of natural scientists, and both texts sing the praises of the authorsown countryside, rather than bowing to the grandeur of the Swiss Alps. Mita, Yama no shisoshi,pp. 5859.

39. Okada, Landscape and the Nation-State, p. 95.40. The table of contents advertised in July 1894 did not include the famous addendum,

suggesting that it may have been inspired by the onset of war with China. Kuroiwa, Tozan noreimei, p. 29.

Nihon fukeiron was, on the face of it, an unlikely bestseller. Denselywritten in classical prose and structured like a textbook, it featured long,erudite discussions of climate and currents, steam and mists, volcanicmountains and rock, and waterborne erosion. Its core argument held that theJapanese archipelago was endowed with ve distinctive features. First wasits unique beauty, captured in a trio of aesthetic terms: shosha (elegance), bi(beauty), and tetto (wildness), an elusive concept that Shiga evidently in-tended as an answer to the European sublime.37 Second was its tremendousclimatic variation, ranging from the subtropic to the subarctic, which in turngave Japan an extraordinarily diverse ora; Shiga described its oak-pinecomplex in particular as a world-class treasure. Third, high humidity lent aspecial hue to the landscape, with vapors and typhoons being two of its spe-cial features. Fourth, heavy rainfall led to severe erosion and gullying, cre-ating the steep ravines and craggy features that embued the archipelago withboth peril and charm. But the crowning feature of Japanese geography wasits profusion of volcanoes. Shiga went so far as to claim that, just as volcanicRome had served as the font of Western civilization in the past, so volcanicJapan must serve as the font of Eastern civilization in the future.38 In Rich-ard Okadas apt summation, Nihon fukeiron was essentially an extendedencomium to the splendors and superiority of the Japanese landscape, espe-cially its mountains and mountain ranges.39

Indeed, alpine geography played a central role in Shigas vision of Jap-anese landscape. The section on mountains was the longest in the book, of-fering a virtual tour of every famous peak in the Japanese archipelago, fromSakhalin to Kyushu. But most novel in Shigas approach to mountains wasits call to action. The chapter on volcanoes was not only salted with injunc-tions to readers to climb the peaks for themselves (with a generous sprin-kling of advice on how to do so), but was followed by a ten-page addendumon the need to cultivate a mountaineering spirit (tozan no kifu o kosakusubeshi). Evidently added to the book at the last minute,40 this supplement

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41. Shiga, Nihon fukeiron, p. 180. Richard Okada offers a different rendition of part of thispassage; Landscape and the Nation-State, p. 100.

42. Takato Shoku, Nihon sangakushi (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1906). Its author, scion of awealthy landlord family from Niigata, also underwrote the Japan Alpine Club nancially, con-

consisted mostly of mundane advice for rst-time climberstips on cloth-ing, gear, ropes, rst aid, and other thoroughly practical concerns. But itopened with a orid preamble that struck a decidedly more exalted tone.

Shigas preamble opened with a rhetorical question. Given the melan-choly feeling that comes with looking down on ones fellow man, even froma modest hill in Tokyo, why would a person want to go climbing about inthe great craggy peaks that thrust themselves up to the heavens? To thisShiga offered a two-fold answer. First, he described the tremendous varietyof sights accessible from the slopes. Mountains have dazzling colors, heenthused; they offer the beauty of clouds, the mysteries of clouds, the gran-deur of clouds. They reveal the beauties of water, the mysteries of water, anda profusion of fascinating ora. By climbing a mountain, one can grasp theever-changing nature of the physical earth. Then he described the raptur-ous epiphany of panoramic vision that awaits the climber:

When you gain the summit and look down, it is as though a gorgeous paint-ing were opening up at your feet, revealing the contours of the earths sur-face spreading out before you. Once you gain this view, you will feel asthough you are no longer in the realm of human things, but have been liftedup above the heavens; it is positively as though you were looking down onour planet from another planet out in space. Such a sight will make yourheart expand, and your spirit will soar. Once you have experienced the sub-lime qualities of mountains; once you have awakened to their magnicentsplendor; once you have taken a deep breath of the alpine air, so fresh thatit seems to cleanse your lungs; once you have allowed your thoughts to fallstill and become immersed in the lonely quiet therethen your mind willbecome like those of the gods and sages, and you will experience rsthandthe glow of divine wisdom. . . . For these reasons, a mountain is at once themost fascinating, the most magnicent, the most noble, and the most sacredthing in the natural world. This is why we must cultivate a mountaineeringspirit. Yes, we must cultivate it to the utmost.41

Nor was this exhortation an isolated gesture. A decade later, Shigawould sound the same chord in an essay on the need to climb in the Japa-nese Alps. The occasion for the latter essay was the publication of anotherlandmark work: Takato Shoku (Nihei)s encyclopedic Nihon sangakushi,the rst comprehensive gazetteer of Japanese mountains. A massive compi-lation based on many years of research, Nihon sangakushi served up 2,070entries on individual peaks from Chishima to Taiwan, as well as numerousprefaces, appendices, maps, and illustrations. Filling more than 1,300 pages,the book became an indispensable reference work for the mountaineeringcommunity.42

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tributing 1,000 yen per year at a time when the normal membership dues were one yen; seeNunokawa Kinichi, Kindai tozan paionia, Taiyo, Vol. 103 (1998), p. 20.

43. Shiga Shigetaka, Nihon no arupusu yama ni noboru beshi, in Takato Shoku, Nihonsangakushi (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1906), pp. 6 8.

44. Ibid., pp. 811.45. On the myth that Shiga was an active mountaineer, see Mita, Yama no shisoshi, pp. 44

50; Yamamoto and Ueda, Fukei no seiritsu, pp. 3239.46. Kiyomizu and Sakabe, Sangaku ni kansuru hongo bunken, p. 261; Mita, Yama no

shisoshi, p. 58.

In his preface to this 1906 tome, Shiga invited all those gentlemen wholament the despoilation of Switzerland to visit the great scenery district(ichidai fukei kuiki) of Japan, recently christened by Reverend Walter Wes-ton the Japanese Alps. Comparing these alps with those alps at length,from rock formations to ora and fauna, he would argue that Naganos at-tractions were every bit as interesting as those of Switzerland, with theadded bonus of a primitive setting (genjin jidai no keiso). While some hotsprings might ll with summer visitors, vast stretches of alpine Japan re-mained almost deserted, especially in the beautiful fall and winter seasons.Thus Weston was right: while the Swiss Alps might be taller, the JapaneseAlps had more of that quality of the splendid and the sublime that [John]Ruskin celebrated, precisely because they had not yet been spoiled.43

Passages like these made Shiga a powerful advocate for alpinism. A pi-oneering intellectual who cast Naganos mountains in a strikingly new light,he also went out of his way to offer the practical tips needed to put alpineadventure in reach of his readers. In his essay on the Japanese Alps, for in-stance, Shiga worked out two detailed model itineraries. The rst beganwith a specic train from Ueno to Matsumoto, directing the reader to spendthe night there before heading west on the Takayama Road, through numer-ous named villages, to Mount Norikura. From Norikura, the traveler was ad-vised to retire to the Shirahone spa, head north across the Shinano-Hida bor-der, and visit another half dozen peaks and hot springs before descending toNaoetsu, a port on the Japan Sea coast, where he could board another trainand return to Tokyo. The second model itinerary embarked from Osaka; its highlight was a panoramic view of the Alps from the top of MountTateyama. Shiga estimated that a month should be adequate for either trip.He went on to describe the items a mountaineer must pack (waterproofclothes, blanket, oiled paper, hobnailed boots, etc.), to suggest various painremedies, and even to give advice on how to cook outdoors.44

Yet notwithstanding Shigas talent for convincing detailsand despitelegends about his early backwoods adventures in Hokkaido45Shiga isnow believed never to have climbed a mountain in his life. Many of Nihonfukeirons descriptions of particular peaks were lifted from Chamberlain andMasons Handbook for Travellers in Japan,46 while the technical informa-

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47. Kuroiwa, Tozan no reimei, pp. 149229.48. Kondo Nobuyuki, Kojima Usui: Yama no furyu shisha den (Tokyo: Sobunsha, 1978),

p. 166. For a broader discussion of Tokokus inuence on Japanese alpine thought, see Mita,Yama no shisshi, chapter two; on the Japan Romantic School as a whole, see Kevin Doak,Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 1994).

49. For an authoritative account of Kojimas life, see Kondo, Kojima Usui.

tion about ropes, tents, boots, and climbing technique appears to have beencopied from Francis Galtons Art of Travel (1855).47 In short, Shiga Shige-taka was to the last an armchair alpinist; his role was that of visionary andbooster. It was left to his youthful readers to embrace that vision and bringit to life.

Kojima Usui

Of all the young men captivated by Nihon fukeiron, none would takeShigas call more earnestly to heart than Kojima Usui. At the time he en-countered Nihon fukeiron in 1896, Kojima was a 22-year-old white-collarworker living in Yokohama. A banker by day, he devoted his spare time towriting book reviews, art criticism, and miscellaneous essays for Bunko, aTokyo monthly. Kojima was not entirely an alpine ingenue at the time; fromthe age of 12, he had accompanied his father on numerous trips to the high-land resort of Hakone. Moreover, he had already exhibited romantic pro-clivities. In particular, Kitamura Tokokus famous essay from the inauguralissue of Bungakukai, Fugaku no shigami o omou (Thoughts on MountFuji as muse), which appeared in print when Kojima was 19, had made adeep impression on him.48 In this sense, Kojima was primed for Nihon fukei-ron, with its romantic raptures, its paean to volcanoes, and its exhortation toalpine adventure.

Roused by Shigas passionate polemic, the aspiring writer determined to become an alpinist himselfand to write about his adventures. Withintwo years of encountering Nihon fukeiron, Kojima set out on his rst high-land foray; the following summer, at the age of 25, he traveled with a friendto Nagano. Wending their way through the Kiso Valley to Matsumoto, thepair climbed Mount Asama and laid eyes on Yarigatake, one of the least-known pinnacles of the northern Japanese Alps. Despite its towering heightof 3,180 meters, Yarigatake had gone virtually undocumented until the lateTokugawa period, when the Buddhist monk Banryu made three ascents beginning in 1826. In 1901, Kojima would set out to climb the forbid-ding peak, only to be turned back near the summit by bad weather. Theseand other expeditions to the mountains would become fodder for numer-ous essays in Bunko, earning Kojima the nickname yama hakase, orDr. Alpine.49

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50. Kuroiwa, Tozan no reimei, pp. 40 80.51. Kondo, Kojima Usui, p. 125. As Kojima well knew, Yarigatake had already been

climbed by Walter Weston as well. Still, it was undoubtedly dismaying to learn that govern-ment surveyors had beat him to the summit the very same year.

52. Kondo, Kojima Usui, p. 124.53. Kojima Usui, Yarigatake tankenki (Tokyo, 1904). Reprinted in Nihon sangaku zenshu,

Vol. 6 (Tokyo: Hobundo, 1960).54. Cited in Kondo, Kojima Usui, p. 221.

On August 10, 1902 (coincidentally the same day that Shiga Shigetakawas elected to the Diet), Kojima was ready to launch a second attempt onYarigatake.50 Following the advice spelled out in Nihon fukeiron, he and hiscompanion, Okano Kinjiro, planned to hire a guide for their expedition atthe village of Shimajima. As it happened, all the porters of Shimajima werealready hired out to a government surveying party. Disregarding theirinnkeepers advice to wait until a knowledgeable guide returned, the twomen proceeded on their own. On their way, they happened across a younghunter who was making his way back down from Yarigatake, having headedinto the mountains some 40 days earlier to help put up a survey marker.While the appearance of this guide made Kojimas ascent possible, the dis-appointment of the two men may well be imagined. The trackless Yarigatakehad been traversed already after all.51

Disappointment or no, Kojimas ascent would go down in history as thedawn of modern Japanese mountaineering. As his biographer has noted,since Kojima [and his companion] proceeded without any better guide thanNihon fukeiron, and without accurate maps, groping their way toward thepinnacle of Yari, the Bunko editors were not wholly unjustied in claiming,There is nothing more dangerous than this in all of Honshu.52 Over thecourse of the following year, Kojima would recount the joys and mishaps ofthe two-week climb in nine issues of Bunko, later publishing the whole ac-count in book form as Yarigatake tankenki (Account of an expedition toMount Yarigatake).53

And this was only the beginning. In 1905, Kojima would publish hisown sweeping text on Japanese geography, Nihon sansui rona title sosimilar to Shigas that it is best rendered with identical English, as On Jap-anese Landscape. In extolling the beauty of the Japanese landscape and cat-aloguing its natural resources, Nihon sansui ron was very much of the samegenre as Nihon fukeiron. Indeed, at least one reviewer compared Kojima fa-vorably to his famous predecessor. Those who were unsatised with thepartial treatment of Japanese views of nature in Nihon fukeiron, a mildly in-teresting text but one written essentially as a geographical guidebook, willnd that at the hand of Kojima this subject at last comes alive in full color.54

Not surprisingly, Kojima echoed Shigas mountain-climbing rhetoric. Infact, on this score, Kojima went much further than Shiga, channeling his en-

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55. Cited in Nunokawa, Kindai tozan paionia, p. 18.56. Volumes I through IV appeared in 1910, 1911, 1912, and 1915, respectively. The se-

ries might have continued with a fth volume, but Kojima was transferred in 1915 to Califor-nia, where he would spend the next 12 years. Kiyomizu and Sakabe, Sangaku ni kansuruhongo bunken, p. 281.

57. Ibid.

thusiasm into activism. Striking up a correspondence and later friendshipwith Walter Weston (then living in Yokohama), he enlisted Westons help infounding the Nihon Sangaku Kai (Japan Alpine Club) in 1905. Accordingto its charter, the goal of the association was to pursue scientic, literary,and artistic studies of mountains and all the phenomena therein, includ-ing alpine forests, lakes, streams, meadows, waterfalls, fauna, ora, rockformations, and meteorology. In addition, it aims to encourage the spirit ofmountain climbing throughout the country and to work for the betterment ofhiking facilities for ordinary climbers.55 Recruiting members, hosting for-eign alpinists, and editing the associations journal would consume much ofKojimas energy over the following decade. Yet he would continue to devotehis summer vacations to exploring the Honshu highlandsand his winternights to writing about themthroughout this period. Scores of essays re-sulted, eventually lling a lavish four-volume series entitled Nihon Aru-pusu, which appeared in print between 1910 and 1915.56

Nihon Arupusu was a landmark in alpine literature. Visually stunning, itwas printed on the best paper, beautifully bound, and graced with numerousillustrations, including both Western-style paintings and photos by Japanstop alpine photographers. Likewise, the writing was widely praised for itselegance and sophistication. In the words of two early admirers, Kojima

took [our] childish landscape appreciation habits and made us understandthe pleasures of experiencing the mountains directly. Seen from the stand-point of literary history, he took an existing genre of purely impressionistictravel writing [tanjun naru shujiteki sansui kikobun] and uplifted it to thestatus of alpine scholarship, . . . achieving a harmonious synthesis of poetictravel writing, philosophical essay, and scientic reportage.57

As the foregoing quote suggests, Kojimas Nihon Arupusu was a delib-erately hybrid form, interspersing personal travelogues with folklore, artcriticism, and reports on the latest alpine science. The texts treatises dis-played a wide range of erudition, touching on everything from Ruskins viewof mountains to the physical structure of glaciers and the permanent snow-pack in Nagano. The narrative sections included harrowing accounts of theauthors adventures in the northern and southern Alps, as well as medita-tions on his pilgrimages to Mount Fuji (a notable inclusion for a book en-titled The Japan Alps). Finally, typical of the occasional essay genre is achapter on landscape preservation in Kamikochi. Originally published in

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58. Kojima Usui, Nihon Arupusu, Vols. I-IV (Tokyo: Maekawa Buneikaku, 1910, 1911,1912, and 1915).

59. Kiyomizu and Sakabe, Sangaku ni kansuru hongo bunken, p. 261.60. Although most critics at the time were impressed by this combination, Ito Kanetsuki

ridiculed Shigas weird assertions in a book of his own called Nihon fukei shinron (Tokyo:Maekawa Buneikaku, 1910); see Maruyama Hiroshi, Kindai Nihon kenshi no kenkyu (Tokyo:Shibunkan, 1994), pp. 348 49.

61. E.g., Yamazaki Yasuji, Shinko Nihon tozan shi (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1986); WolframManzenreiter, Die soziale Konstruktion des Japanischen Alpinismus: Kultur, Ideologie undSport im modernen Bergsteigen (Wein: Abteilung fr Japanologie, Institut fr Ostasienwis-senschaften, Universitt Wien, 2000); and Mita, Yama no shisoshi.

62. E.g., Keiichi Takeuchi, Landscape, Language and Nationalism in Meiji Japan, Hi-totsubashi Journal of Social Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1988), pp. 25 40; and Minami Hiroshi,Nihonjinron: Meiji kara konnichi made (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994).

the Shinano mainichi shinbun, this polemical essay extolled a spirit of rev-erence toward Kamikochi, which Kojima viewed not as a mere highlandbut as the gods wellspring. Other typical entries included essays on pre-serving Mount Fuji, Shinshu and landscape art, a theory of landscape in thenorthern Japanese Alps, the geography of exploration in the Japanese Alps,and the mountains and rivers of Hida as portrayed in Edo nishikie.58

Taken together, Shigas Nihon fukeiron and Kojimas Nihon Arupusugave voice to a self-consciously modern sensibility toward the alpine land-scape. Nihon fukeiron in particular brought this novel vision of the Japanesehighlands to a huge reading public. Its rst edition sold out within 20 days;new print runs followed initially at three-month intervals, and in eight years,the book had gone through 15 printings.59 While Kojimas audience wassmaller, his Nihon Arupusu too was recognized as an instant classic andmade a major splash in the literary world. Together, it is fair to say, thesebooks articulated for the Japanese public the novel outlook summed up inthe unfamiliar phrase, Nihon Arupusu.

What distinguished that outlook above all was its striking mixture ofscience and the sublime. As reviewers unfailingly noted, Shiga and Kojimawere literary alchemists, in whose hands mundane geography was trans-formed into a captivating art. Their eclectic methodology fused eldworkwith aesthetics; their idiom encompassed both detached description andrapturous revelation.60 The question most scholars have asked of this sensi-bility is where it led. One branch of inquiry pursues Shigas and Kojimaslegacy in the context of Japanese mountaineering61; another traces their im-port for twentieth-century nationalism.62 While each of these stories is com-pelling in its own right, our interest here lies in a slightly different question:namely, what were the sources of this sensibility in the rst place? And howwere those sources strategically combinedand selectively disguisedtocreate the novel synthesis that made mountains, and mountaineering, avail-able to the modernizing project of Meiji Japan?

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63. Kenneth R. Ireland, Westonization in Japan: The Topos of the Mountain in YasushiInoues Hyoheki, Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (1993), p. 20; see alsoNunokawa, Kindai tozan paionia, p. 17. Westons impact was largely indirect; his Moun-taineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps was not translated into Japanese until 1932.

64. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1996), pp. 430 31.65. Marjorie Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the

Aesthetics of the Innite (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1959).

Rhetorical Resources for Meiji Alpine Ideology

One overtly acknowledged inspiration for both Shiga and Kojima wasthe alpine literature of western Europe. Whereas mountains in the EastAsian tradition were sacred sites, regulated by strict taboos, Europeans hadfor some time seen them as secular spaces, available to be explored and ex-perienced at will. Whether in the name of research or for the sheer joy ofclimbing, Europeans could mount expeditions on any peak at any time. Thispractice had caused something of a sensation when applied to Japan by European climbers. Walter Weston in particular is credited with changingJapanese alpine attitudes; one scholar goes so far as to dub the shift from pil-grimage to sport a process of Westonization.63

But the Western alpine tradition on which both Shiga and Kojima drewinvolved much more than sport and represented a complex synthesis in its own right. One of its signature elements was the perception that high-altitude zones were a treasure-trove for scientic observation. Originatingin sixteenth-century Switzerland, this laboratory approach to mountain en-vironments had slowly spread northward over the succeeding centuries. Bythe early 1700s, wealthy English travelers had begun to venture into theSwiss Alps in the spirit of eldworkers, climbing with notebooks in hand to record their geological and climatic observations.64 A second element ofthe Western tradition incorporated by both Shiga and Kojima was theequally recent ethos of the sublime. In northern Europe, it had taken severalcenturies for the aesthetic habits associated with landscape art to be ex-tended from pastoral places to rugged, uncultivated prospects. But in tan-dem with the rise of alpine science, the range of landscape values had beenbroadened beyond the demure domestic scenes of the picturesque to includemore rugged, forbidding, and even gloomy prospects. The result, by thenineteenth century, was an aesthetic where mountain gloom could be cel-ebrated as mountain glory.65

These themes of natural abundance and aesthetic magnicence came to-gether in the alpine essays of John Ruskin (18191900), the nineteenth cen-turys most prolic and passionate art criticand the primary model for Ja-pans alpine enthusiasts. Toward the end of his ve-volume masterwork,Modern Painters, Ruskin had written a famous mountain polemic of hisown, directly linking alpine beauty to the scientic riches of the alpine en-vironment. To myself, he wrote,

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66. John Ruskin, Modern Painters (Boston: Dana Estes & Co., 1856 [1873]), Vol. 4,pp. 42527 and 431.

67. Kojima, Nihon sangakushi no senshu ni tsukite, p. 4.68. Kojima, Tozan ni tsukite, p. 1.

mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery. . . .[Indeed,]there may be proved to be . . . an increase of the absolute beauty of all sce-nery in exact proportion to its mountainous character . . . demonstrable bycalm enumeration of the number of lovely colors on the rocks, the variedgrouping of the trees, and the quantity of noble incidents in stream, crag, orcloud, presented to the eye at any given moment. . . .There are effects bytens of thousands, forever invisible . . . to the inhabitant of the plains, man-ifested among the hills in the course of one day.66

Ruskin went on to exhort painters to observe these manifold effects forthemselves, in order to convey the evanescent impressions afforded by thehigh-altitude world as accurately as possible. In his view, only extendedeldwork, backed by scientic study and meticulous observation, would al-low the artist to capture the grandeur of mountain scenery on canvas.

This vision of mountains as a place where scientic observation waslinked to sensory exaltation closely resembles that of the Japanese luminar-ies discussed above. Nor is this a coincidence. Both Shiga and Kojima areremembered as Japanese Ruskins; both drew explicitly on European ro-manticism in formulating their vision of the Japanese highlands. In onestrikingly close passage, after extolling the highland environment as a richresource for study, Kojima had concluded that mountain climbing allowsone to experience the changes of four seasons in a single day; both tempo-rally and spatially, it offers a compressed, intensied experience of the cos-mos.67 Indeed, Kojima went so far in embracing Ruskin as to declare the Japanese alpine tradition virtually useless. In the old days, he scoffed,Japanese travelers had either conned themselves to climbing a handful ofsacred mountains or (more often) had simply rested in the foothills andgazed up at the ridge line. They might sketch the peaks through the mist, or describe them in an impressionistic poem, but always from a distance. As a result, he lamented, although Japan is said to be a mountain country,there may no people on earth who are as ignorant about mountains as theJapanese.68

Yet it would be misleading to take this disparaging declaration at facevalue. As Kojima well knew, the Tokugawa legacy included a tradition ofserious alpine exploration. One repository of that tradition was travel liter-ature. A bibliography of alpine travel accounts that Kojima himself helpedto compile in 1935 includes half a dozen Tokugawa entries, including worksby Furukawa Koshoken, Ogyu Sorai, and Tsuda Masanari. Signicantly, theeditors noted that, while few in number, these works have less in common

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69. Kiyomizu and Sakabe, Sangaku ni kansuru hongo bunken, p. 258.70. Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan, chapter two.71. Kuo Hsi, An Essay on Landscape Painting, trans. Shio Sakanishi (London: John Mur-

ray, 1935), p. 40.72. Melinda Takeuchi, Taigas True Views: The Language of Landscape Painting in Eigh-

teenth-Century Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 155. On true views inMing China, see Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 15257.

with the age-old tradition of mountain worship and pilgrimage than with the[modern] alpinism of today.69 Nor is the existence of such texts surprising,given that Tokugawa travel writing was a highly ramied genre encompass-ing many careful, descriptive accounts based on rst-hand observation.70

Another relevant repository of an indigenous eldwork approach to the mountains was to be found in landscape paintings known as shinkeizu,or true views. True-view artists had attempted to accurately capture theappearance of natural forms, including rugged alpine landscapes, on canvas.In doing so, many followed the advice of the eleventh-century Chinese mas-ter Guo Xi (Kuo Hsi), who had insistedin words reminiscent of Ruskinthat each artist must personally scale the peaks to study them for himself.Anyone who would paint evocative landscapes must be intimate with moun-tains, observing their aspects in various kinds of weather, at different timesof day and year. Let one who wishes to portray these masterpieces of cre-ation rst be captivated by their charm; then let him study them with greatdiligence; let him wander among them; let him satiate his eyes with them;let him arrange these impressions in his mind. Then with eyes unconsciousof silk and hands unconscious of brush and ink, he will paint this marvelousscene with utter freedom and courage to make it his own.71

This kind of on-site training had been embraced with enthusiasm by IkeTaiga (1723 67), doyen of landscape painters in eighteenth-century Edo.Taiga had undertaken numerous alpine sojourns, closely scrutinizing thesoil, geological formations, watercourses, and waterfalls of Japans highcountry. In 1760, he traveled to Shinano, where he climbed three prominentvolcanoes and lled his diary with carefully annotated sketches. He returnedto his studio to produce a striking panorama, Asama shinkeizu (True viewof Mount Asama): a careful attempt to capture the atmosphere of a realplace, in a particular season, at a precise time of day. This was but one in aseries of such paintings, which Melinda Takeuchi credits with stimulatingthe movement toward empiricism that was one of the [hallmarks] of theeighteenth century.72

In short, both travel literature and landscape paintings from the laterTokugawa era reveal an alpine tradition that prized on-site exploration andcareful, empirical observation. Neither Ruskins appreciation of ruggedlandscapes, then, nor his insistence on rst-hand eldwork was entirely for-

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73. This tendency was greatly amplied by later writers such as Kuwabara Takeo, whoproudly contrasted the active alpinism of Taiga and other Tokugawa pioneers with the passivealpine appreciation of the Chinese. Kuwabara Takeo, Tozan no bunkashi (Tokyo: Heibonsha,1944), pp. 14 24.

74. See, e.g., Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936).75. Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British In-

dia, 17651843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Dane Kennedy, The MagicMountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

eign to Japan, for similar attitudes toward mountains had been nurtured inTokugawa empiricism long before European romanticism arrived. As a re-sult, it is not entirely surprising that Shiga and Kojimas novel synthesis ofeldwork and aesthetics resonated deeply with many of their readers. Bothwriters were able to mobilize cultural resources for their project from a di-verse repertoire, drawing on native as well as foreign elements. Shiga, themore strident patriot of the two, was happy to acknowledge this indigenouslegacyso long as it could be rmly located in the Japanese archipelago.73

In Kojimas writings, by contrast, the indigenous tradition of alpine explo-ration was largely covered up. A reader of Nihon Arupusu would think thatShigas manifesto on the need to cultivate a mountaineering spirit had ap-peared like a bolt out of the blue, jolting a slumbering culture out of its pas-sive, contemplative habits.

Rather than accepting Kojimas assertions on this point, it would seemwise to view his articially sharp East / West dichotomy as a strategic move.By the 1890s, European climbers had been organizing expeditions, collect-ing specimens, and publishing papers on alpine subjects for over 50 years.In addition, alpine science had helped to launch a major enterprise to sup-port mountain recreation. Tramways and lodgings were entrenched in themountaineers landscape, to the extent that serious climbers were alreadycomplaining that tourism had spoiled their favorite haunts.74 Nor were thesedevelopments conned to Europe. With the advance of empire, the modernalpine complex was rapidly spreading across the globe. The Great Trigono-metrical Survey of India, begun in the 1840s, had led to expeditions in theHimalayas, and hill stations were springing up throughout the highlandtropics.75 In Japan itself, hundreds of foreigners were already indulging inalpine recreation by the time Shigas and Kojimas seminal books went topress.

Most important, in the cosmopolitan world of mountaineering, a full-blown alpine apparatus signied great power status. Having been personallybeaten to the peak of Yarigatake by a Western climber, Kojima was acutelyaware that Japan had some catching up to do in this department. In otherwords, reading Ruskin in the heyday of alpine exploration, Kojima encoun-tered the sublime not as a free-oating idea, but as part of a social package.It was the whole packagea bundle of attitudes, practices, and infrastruc-

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76. Kojima, Nihon sangakushi no senshu ni tsukite, pp. 6 7.

turethat he wanted for Japan: not just a sensibility, but an apparatus to gowith it. And he wanted it sooner rather than later.

The urgency of this goal is clear from the following complaint. In Eu-rope, Kojima chastened,

mountaineers have formed alpine clubs, carried out research on everypeak . . . , published detailed maps of topography and geology, investigatedthe basic alpine fauna and ora, developed alpine walking sticks, and evengone so far as to prepare alpine cases . . . lled with the medications neededby climbers. Inns have been established in every valley where hikers canspend the night, hiking paths have been cleared, guides have been trained,and columns on mountaineering have been carried for many years in thenewspapers and magazines of the popular press to enlighten the public.Compared with this climate of mountain-climbing boosterism, the shame-ful situation in our country is inexcusable.76

Nor did Kojima conne himself to complaining. After establishing the Ja-pan Alpine Club in 1905, he spoke at its forums, contributed to its journal,and in other ways served as a veritable missionary of mountaineering to theend of his days. In this context, Kojimas temporary amnesia about the na-tive alpine tradition might be understood as a ploy to shame his compatriotsinto building a more modern and capacious mountaineering apparatus.

To be sure, like Shiga before him, mountain climbing for Kojima wasabove all a way to modernize the climber. Modernizing the landscape per sewas not the point for this rst generation of alpine boosters. Yet neither wasit anathema to them. Railroads, hostels, hiking clubs, and the rest werewarmly welcomed by both men as a means to their primary goal: namely,mobilizing more Japanese up the slopes, where they could have their con-sciousnesses altered. Shiga and Kojima alike were convinced that alpineeldwork could help produce informed, modern subjects, and they pro-moted the Japanese Alps explicitly on that basis.

Consider the reasoning with which Shiga and Kojima encouragedwomen to climb mountains. Kojima in particular was voluble on this point,upholding Westons wife as a model. In his 1910 essay on Josei to shizenno mikata (Women and nature appreciation), he argued for cultivating Jap-anese womens alpine sensibilities as a means to developing more fully theirhuman potential. It is said that the greatest defect of Japanese women is thatthey lack moral character [ jinkaku], the essay opines. The author then of-fers examples of the keen sensibility toward nature that Western womenhave cultivated, noting perceptive reviews of alpine literature by a femalemember of the Canadian Alpine Club. To the extent that Japanese womensappreciation of nature can be developed, he concludes, they will grow inknowledge, their inner lives will be enriched, and in the process they will

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77. Kojima, Nihon Arupusu, Vol. 1, pp. 236 39. In fact, girls schools were one step aheadof boys schools in sponsoring climbs, sending their students to the mountains as early as 1902.For an overview of womens mountaineering in Japan, see Sakakura Tokiko and UmenoToshiko, Nihon josei tozan shi (Tokyo: Otsuki Shoten, 1992).

78. Jason G. Karlin, The Gender of Nationalism: Competing Masculinities in Meiji Japan, Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Winter 2002), pp. 4178.

79. The portrait, drawn by Ibaraki Inokichi, was printed in volume 3 of Kojimas NihonArupusu over the caption, presented to the author as a caricature. It is also reproduced be-tween pages 124 and 125 of Kondo, Kojima Usui.

80. Kobayashi Toshishige, Nihon Sangakukai Shinano Shibu sanjugo nen (Matsumoto:Nihon Sangakukai Shinano Shibu, 1981), p. 14.

81. See, for instance, the preface to Kojima, Nihon Arupusu, Vol. 1.

acquire dignity as women who command the worlds respect.77 The en-lightenment logic of this last sentence deserves underscoring. Women whoclimb mountains will experience mental and moral upliftearning Japangreater respect on the world stage in the process.

The desire to see mountaineering take root among the broadest possiblepublic may explain why these men downplayed the machismo of moun-tain climbing. Shiga Shigetaka may well have been reacting against the ef-fete, feminized hai-kara style of the Rokumeikan generation, advocating in-stead a more athletic, masculine nationalism.78 Yet Kojimathe one whoclimbed on a regular basismade a point of telling his readers that he wasa mild-mannered banker, not a muscle builder; if he could climb a 10,000-foot peak, anyone could. As if to clinch the point, volume three of NihonArupusu included an affectionate but hardly attering caricature of the au-thor that portrayed Kojima as a gangly literatus rather than a vigorous ath-lete.79 Here again, Kojima seems to have transcended dichotomies; just ashis writing combined art with science, so his persona suggested that it waspossible to be simultaneously a gentleman and an outdoorsman.

The same sense of mission that led Shiga and Kojima to downplay themachismo of mountaineering also led them to downplay the class aspect ofthis pursuit. In practice, mountain climbers in turn-of-the-century Japan (aselsewhere) were a very elite group: the charter members of the Japan AlpineClub were mostly doctors, lawyers, bankers, and students from the most se-lective imperial universities, along with a sprinkling of movie stars and im-perial princes.80 With dues set at one yen per annum, membership in the clubwas beyond the reach of all but the most well-to-do. Yet Shiga went out ofhis way to offer practical advice for rst-time climbers, and Kojima repeat-edly insisted that his was a pastime accessible to ordinary folk. In his travel-ogues, he talked again and again about ways to minimize cost and empha-sized that his own climbing was conned to brief summer vacations.81

Finally, appreciating this pedagogical vision allows us to understandwhy Shiga Shigetakaa geographer who apparently never climbed amountain in his lifefelt compelled to foster a mountain-climbing spirit in

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82. Margarita Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Al-exander von Humboldt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chapter seven.

83. Kren Wigen, Teaching About Home: Geography at Work in the Prewar NaganoClassroom, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 3 (August 2000), pp. 550 74.

Japan to begin with. In all likelihood, the experience that aroused this pas-sion was the authors trip to the South Pacic. That adventure had openedShigas eyes to Japans compromised position in the worldand left himwith a profound conviction that he must do all he could to open the eyes ofthe rest of the country. The surest path to the kind of insights Shiga wantedhis readers to attain would have been to put them all on ships headed to dis-tant parts of the world. But since it was not feasible for all 47 million Japa-nese to venture into different latitudes, the next best thing was to coax themasses into different altitudes.

This might sound far-fetched, but the notion of a correspondence be-tween latitude and altitude was in fact a central principle of nineteenth-century geography. Alexander von Humboldt, who had visited Peru in theearly 1800s, had noted that traveling up a mountainside in the tropics wascomparable to traveling toward the earths poles; both journeys took theeldworker through a similar progression of climatic and biological zones.82

As a geography major, Shiga would undoubtedly have been familiar withthis idea. He did not need to be a mountain climber himself to see the peda-gogical value of alpine vistas. In fact, educators at the turn of the centurywere convinced that observing the landscape from an elevated spot was anindispensable step in geographical education. Physically looking down ontheir everyday world would allow students to comprehend that world in amore abstract way, thrusting them into the panoramic perspective of a mapreader. This in turn could be used to help them apprehend map knowledge ina more immediate, experiential way. Accordingly, eld excursions to anearby hill were fast becoming a common feature of elementary-school in-struction in Japanespecially in Nagano Prefecture, where Shiga spent ayear as a teacher before his rst overseas voyage.83

Read in this light, Shigas and Kojimas manifestos for mountaineeringcan be understood as the product of a deeply pedagogical vision. Climbingwas a form of eldwork, and the Japanese Alps were a handy place to sendstudents for geographical enlightenment. By traversing the slopes with theireyes open, the youth of Japan would be able to grasp the ever-changing na-ture of the physical earth. So unlike the original Ruskin, who shuddered atthe prospect of carrying . . . a line of trafc through some green place ofshepherd solitude, the Japanese Ruskins embraced that prospect. Romanti-cism and developmentalism went hand in hand, for in the mid-Meiji context,alpinism was a tool to elevate the Japanese people as a whole: to a more re-ned sensibility, a more informed perspective, and a more exalted status in

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the hierarchy of nations. In short, the project for which mountains weremoved in the Meiji period was not a recreational but an educational one;what was ultimately discovered in the Japanese Alps at the turn of the cen-tury was a resource for geographical enlightenment.

Stanford University

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discovering the japanese alps_meiji moutainner

Documents

japanese public

socalled japanese alps

russojapanese wars

japanese studiesthis

new landscape

pan alps

new toponym

meiji decade