ka ren wigen Discovering the Japanese Alps: Meiji Mountaineering and the Quest for Geographical Enlightenment

Abstract: The landscape known today as the Japanese Alps is a cultural artifact of the mid-Meiji era. During the decade between the Sino-Japanese and RussoJapanese Wars, as imperial competition thrust mountains into new prominence across the globe, central Honshus ranges came into focus for the rst time. The visionaries who produced the Japanese Alps for the Japanese public during these years, notably Shiga Shigetaka and Kojima Usui, simultaneously imbued the alpine landscape with an exalted purpose. Synthesizing science and aesthetics with practical advice, their writings helped shape a new sensibility toward mountains: one where climbing was yoked to what might be called geographical enlightenment.

The volcanic peaks that tower over central Honshu have long been the object of veneration and pilgrimage. Yet at the turn of the last century, the Shinano highlands came into focus through a new lens: that of modern alpine exploration. Starting in the 1890s, a small cadre of cosmopolitan climbers and geographical pedagogues began drawing the publics attention to the rugged ranges that ring Nagano Prefecture. In the process, they effectively invited the Japanese public to discover a new landscape, known to this day by the Meiji neologism Nihon Arupusu. This toponym has become such a xture of modern Japanese maps that it takes an effort to imagine how foreign it must have sounded a century ago. For years after Walter Weston published his landmark work, MountaineerThis research was generously supported by a fellowship at the National Humanities Center, where Eliza Robertson provided indispensable and indefatigable help tracking down materials. Colleagues at Duke, Stanford, and elsewhere offered thoughtful responses to earlier oral versions; special thanks to Takashi Fujitani, Elise Edwards, Rick Vinograd, and two anonymous reviewers for JJS for astute criticisms on the written draft. While I have not been able to take all suggestions on board, the article has been greatly improved by the penetrating insights of many interlocutors.
Journal of Japanese Studies, 31:1 2005 Society for Japanese Studies

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ing and Exploration in the Japanese Alps (1896), the appellation evidently remained foreign to many. A leading proponent of mountain climbing in Japan would refer a decade later to the majestically towering range that forms the Shinano-Hida border as the so-called Japanese Alps. 1 And the term could still sound exotic to an urbane college student as late as 1916. While browsing in a bookstore in Tokyo that year, the young Nakajima Masafumi came across a special issue of Sangaku, bulletin of the newly formed Nihon Sangaku Kai (Japan Alpine Society), dedicated to the Japanese Alps. My eyes were opened by [that rst encounter with] alpine literature, Nakajima would recall a quarter-century later. The novel outlook summed up in the unfamiliar term, Nihon Arupusu, penetrated deep into my soul, such that even now I remember that volume with intense nostalgia. 2 The present essay attempts to analyze what this arresting novel outlook entailed. To that end, it explores the work of Japans earliest alpine ideologues: the journalist Shiga Shigetaka (1863 1927) and the amateur climber Kojima Usui (1874 1948). More than any others, it was the celebrated writings of these men that shaped the mid-Meiji sensibility toward the Japanese Alps. Through lofty rhetoric, scientic reportage, and vivid descriptions of the mountaineers experience, Shiga and Kojima threw the Shinano highlands into sharp relief for the Japanese public for the rst time. In the process, I contend, they metaphorically moved Honshus mountains out of the background and onto center stage for a new pedagogical project. One dening context for that project was patriotic fervor. Tellingly, the onset of expeditions to the Japanese Alps coincided with the beginning of Japans imperial expansion abroad. It was during the heady decade between the Sino-Japanese (1894 95) and Russo-Japanese (1904 5) Wars that Naganos jumbled peaks snapped into view, acquired a name, and loomed up on the national horizon as a locus for economic and symbolic investment. The nationalism of this third Meiji decade was characterized by a widespread reaction against the headlong Westernization of preceding years, as well as by a growing impatience with the unequal treaties. To understand the ideological tenor of Meiji alpinism, it is essential to map the complicated currents of nativist backlash and enlightenment effort that swirled through public discourse at this crucial time, as Japan struggled to throw off its quasi-colonial status and join the ranks of the great powers.3
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 Japan Alps. Kiyomizu Tadao and Sakabe Masami, Sangaku ni kansuru hongo bunken, in Minamijo Hatsugoro , ed., Sangaku ko za (Tokyo: Kyo rissha, 1935), p. 275. 3. For more on nationalism and landscape in the third Meiji decade, see Kenneth B. Pyle,

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Closely related to the competition for empire, and equally important for the discovery of the Japanese Alps, was the rise of geography as an academic discipline.4 Ever since the abrupt Western intrusions at mid-century, gathering and disseminating up-to-date knowledge of the world had been a top priority for the Japanese government. Fukuzawa Yukichis massively popular Seiyo jijo (Conditions in the West) served as a stop-gap geographical textbook in the early Meiji schools,5 but modernizers recognized the need for institutionalizing a eld that was increasingly regarded as both the queen of the sciences and an indispensable tool of statecraft. One step in that direction was the 1879 chartering of the prestigious Tokyo Geographical Society, modeled on the Royal Geographical Society of London. With an elite membership of aristocrats, military ofcers, and diplomats, the society was charged with a mission as much military and political as it was scholarly; one of its rst mandates was to settle border disputes in Hokkaido and Sakhalin. Concurrently, important steps were taken to enhance geographical training for the nations teachers and their pupils. Chairs of geography were established at the major normal schools in the 1890s, with university positions soon to follow.6 Finally, intertwined with both the rise of empire and the rise of geography was the transformation of global mountaineering culture. The heyday of imperialism and geographical science was also the heyday of group climbs. Where earlier Europeans had treated the peaks as a place for individual men of means to pursue their own edication, high-altitude zones came into view in the late nineteenth century as a site for youth mobilizaThe New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 18851895 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969); Takeuchi Keiichi, Landscape, Language and Nationalism in Meiji 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, in Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith, eds., Geography and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 188 206. 5. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Seiyo jijo (Tokyo: Sho ko do , 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 Dusenbury (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1984). The institutionalization of geography is discussed in Ishida Ryu jiro , Nihon ni okeru kindai chirigaku no seiritsu (Tokyo: Daimeido, 1984); Takeuchi Keiichi, Languages, Paradigms and Schools in Geography (Tokyo: Hitotsubashi University 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 of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 346 477. On the disciplines less prestigious position in China, see Douglas Howland, Borders of Chinese Civilization: Geography and History at Empires End (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).

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tion. Besides mounting expeditions to remote corners of the earth, all the major imperial metropoles saw movements exhorting young people to take up hiking at home. Whether through the Boy Scouts in Britain, the heimat movement in Germany, or the American hiking clubs that multiplied after the Civil War, rugged country was increasingly cast as a place to fortify both physical strength and native-place prideand, by implication, to enhance young peoples tness for imperial rule.7 What made this kind of mountaineering fundamentally different from the recreational variety was its overtly social character. To be sure, middleclass nature tourism has always had social functions as well; the difference is that they are consistently hidden from view. At the hands of hotel operators and travel guides, outdoor recreationa quintessentially modern activityis typically constructed as an escape from the modern; natural scenery is marketed as an anticommodity; and wilderness adventure, while indisputably serving to consolidate class and gender identities, is experienced as profoundly private. Indeed, scholars have argued that in order for nature tourism to work at all, modern vacationers have to fool themselves about what they are really up to. Other peopleand the apparatus that delivered them into the wildernessmust be mentally erased from the scene, for it [is] at the level of personal experience and identity that the dialogue with nature [is] socially effective. 8
7. Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Reuben Ellis, Vertical Margins: Mountaineering and the Landscapes of Neoimperialism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Raymond Huel, The Creation of the Alpine Club of Canada: An Early Manifestation of Canadian Nationalism, Prairie Forum, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1980), pp. 25 43; Jay Mechling, On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Laura Waterman and Guy Waterman, Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains (Boston: Appalachian Mountain Club, 1989). On youth culture and mobilization in Japan during these years, see David R. Ambaras, Treasures of the Nation: Juvenile Delinquency, Socialization, and Mobilization in Modern Japan, 1895 1945 (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1999); and Donald Roden, Schooldays in Imperial Japan: A Study 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 Eric Hirsch and Michael OHanlon, eds., The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 39. For related insights, see Jonas Frykman and Orvar Lofgren, Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle-Class Life (New Brunswick, 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, Writers, and Tourists in the Mountains, 1820 1895 (Yonkers: Hudson River Museum of Westchester, 1987); Roderick P. Neumann, Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Eric Purchase, Out of Nowhere: Disaster and Tourism in the White Mountains (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

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By contrast, the late nineteenth-century alpine enthusiasts who concern us here felt no compulsion to disguise what they were up to. For this generation, the social function of mountaineering was its main attraction, and rather than hide it, they broadcast it. Meiji alpine literature, like its British and Bavarian counterparts, was thus explicit about the potential of climbing to consolidate new identities and subjectivities. Likewise, turn-of-thecentury alpine enthusiasts celebrated the fact that climbing mountains was modern (to the point of disowning its indigenous, premodern roots). And instead of minimizing the infrastructure of exploration, they advocated openly for it. Far from trying to preserve their favorite haunts for themselves, these mountain men invited their compatriots along. The fundamental mission of Meiji alpine boosters was educating for a new Japan, and mobilizing the nations youth up the slopes was key to this pedagogical project. What drove Shiga and Kojima to call Japanese youth into the mountains was above all their conviction that all 47 million Japanese must cultivate knowledge of geography. 9 As it turned out, however, putting this agenda into practice was no simple matter. The Japanese Alps were not readily available in the 1890s for youth mobilization and geographical pedagogy. For one thing, the necessary infrastructure was not yet in place. Even accurate maps and guidebooks, as we shall see, were almost impossible to come by. For another thing, the adoption of a Western optic that linked climbing with claiming was complicated by Japans quasi-colonial relationship to the mountaineering powers. Since the very activity of climbing a mountain, combining as it does properties of height with sight, easily interconnects with notions of conquest and subjugation, 10 it was an awkward fact that, by the late 1890s, Japans own mountains had already been extensively explored by foreigners. The British diplomat Rutherford Alcock had caused a sensation by leading an expedition up Mount Fuji in 1860 11; the geologist William Gowland had made several pioneering climbs while assessing Naganos mineral resources for the Meiji government in the 1870s 12; and the missionary Walter Weston had put
9. Shiga Shigetaka, Chirigaku (1908), reprinted in Shiga Shigetaka Zenshu Kanko kai, ed., Shiga Shigetaka zenshu , Vol. 4 (Tokyo: Shiga Shigetaka Zenshu Kanko kai, 1927), p. 237. 10. Richard Okada, Landscape and the Nation-State: A Reading of Nihon Fu kei 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 of dreamwork for the imperial mind: W. J. T. Mitchell, Imperial Landscape, in W. J. T. Mitchell, 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 Japanese highlands, see Tani Yu ji, Kurobune Fujisan ni noboru!Bakumatsu gaiko ibun (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 2001). 12. William Gowland (1842 1923) came to Japan in the early Meiji period to work in the chemistry division of the Osaka Mint. He stayed for 15 years, transforming the mining and smelting technologies in Japan.

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alpine Japan on the map for an international audience in the 1880s.13 Finally, modern mountaineers also had to contend with competing claims from within, in the form of long-standing indigenous alpine practices. Most explosive here were the taboos associated with shugendo , or mountain worship.14 Japanese climbers could hardly explore the Shinano highlands without trampling on traditional sacred ground. Yet amid the nativist backlash of the mid-Meiji period, to court charges of sacrilege in the name of patriotic pedagogy was a dicey game indeed. One might fairly wonder what ideological use could be made of a landscape that, while still largely uncharted, had already been staked out as both the precinct of the native gods and the playground of foreign climbers. The terms of this dilemma may have been peculiarly Japanese, but the Meiji alpinists conundrum points to a more general tension in the modernization project. In the late 1800s, mountaineering was part and parcel of modern geography, and modern geography was nowhere adopted in a vacuum. As Thongchai Winichakul has painstakingly shown for Thailand, prior modes of apprehending the landscape generated frictions against the new categories.15 In Japan, those promoting a modern approach to mountains likewise found themselves caught between competing geographical discourses. The intellectuals who are the focus of this article were celebrated precisely for their nesse in solving this dilemma. Their novel syntheses of past and present, East and West, aesthetics and science allowed mountains to assume a central role in Japanese identity, while giving alpine adventure a central role in modern geographical pedagogy. Together, Shiga and Kojima promoted highland eldwork in a distinctively Japanese yet unmistakably modern key. It is that creative synthesis that the present essay explores. The article begins by probing the sense in which the Japanese Alps were discovered in the middle of the Meiji era, a process that was at once physical and conceptual. It then turns to the work of Shiga and Kojima, exploring why and how the mountains of Honshu mattered to these men. After a close look at their key texts, the focus widens to consider the diverse strains of alpine science and aesthetics on which both writers drew, with an eye to appreciating the canny synthesis they forged. The governing question throughout is essentially a discursive one: namely, what conceptual strate13. Walter Weston, Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps (London: John Murray, 1896). 14. Ichiro Hori, Mountains and Their Importance for the Idea of the Other World in Japanese 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 Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002). 15. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).

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gies did this rst generation of alpine promoters use to claim the Japanese Alps for an agenda of geographical enlightenment? As we see, while both made their name by yoking European science to Japanese aesthetics, each writer calibrated his synthesis differently. Shigas signal achievement was to ground 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 of Western-style alpinism. The combination was powerful. Together, Shiga and Kojima made a powerful case for turning the Japanese Alps not merely into a playground or proving ground, but into a prime site for geographical enlightenment. The Discovery of the Japanese Alps The ranges known today as the Nihon Arupusu encompass the most rugged terrain in the Japanese archipelago. Three major mountain systems converge in Nagano Prefecture (former Shinano Province): the northeastern and southwestern arcs of Japan, and the Bonin arc from the Pacic. The highlands that have formed where these arcs intersect are young in geological time; their topography is a product of Quaternary uplift as well as volcanism. A jumble of older granite ridges punctured by numerous volcanic cones, the region contains a dozen peaks in the 10,000-foot (3,000-meter) range. The most popular destinations in the regionincluding a hiking course known already by the 1930s as the Ginza of the Alpsare found to the north (toward the Sea of Japan), where the forest cover is thin, the snowfall is heavy, and the geological relief is especially stark.16 Rugged as it is, this terrain could hardly be characterized as a trackless wilderness on the eve of the twentieth century. Shinanos mountains had long been exploited for raw materials, including timber, fuel, fertilizer, fodder, meat, minerals, and medicines.17 At the same time, the province was enmeshed in the Tokugawa culture of travel, sending thousands of laborers to the lowlands every year, and drawing thousands of metropolitan visitors up to the mountains.18 Many outsiders came as pilgrims, drawn especially to the Buddhist temple complex of Zenko ji, or to climb the sacred peak of Mount Ontake. But other kinds of cultural circuits penetrated the region as
16. Yutaka Sakaguchi, Characteristics of the Physical Nature of Japan with Special Reference to Landform, in Association of Japanese Geographers, ed., Geography of Japan (Tokyo: Teikoku Shoin, 1980), pp. 3 28. 17. Kren Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 18. Donald McCallum, Zenko ji and Its Icon: A Study in Medieval Japanese Religious Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Constantine Vaporis, Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1994).

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well. Metropolitan poets, painters, and itinerant scholars networked extensively in this area, seeking patronage from local landlords in exchange for the cultural capital their cosmopolitanism could confer.19 In short, far from being isolated, Shinano was deeply drawn into the commercial and cultural life of the archipelago. Yet it remains fair to say that the Japanese Alps had to be discovered in several senses at the turn of the twentieth century. First, throughout the Tokugawa period, highland Shinano remained essentially uncharted. The provinces river valleys and road networks had been carefully mapped since the 1600s, but the ridges themselves had never been systematically surveyed. As Kojima Usui later recalled, in those days, . . . no one knew even the names of the mountains, much less their locations or elevations. To go mountaineering was literally to strike out into unknown country. This was no idle boast; the maps available to would-be mountaineers at the turn of the century were remarkably crude. The rst 1:20,000 geological survey sheets, issued in 1890, noted the names of the major peaks, but their topography was largely guesswork. Prefectural maps from the turn of the century likewise featured the names of the major peaks but consistently got the details of contour and drainage wrong.20 As Kojima complained in 1906, until our topographic maps are based on accurate surveys, they will be of no use to a person who enters the mountains. 21 Accurate maps of the kind Kojima called for would not become available until the last years of the Meiji period.22 Meanwhile, it was not just maps that were in short supply; reliable descriptive accounts were also lacking. After 1891, English-language readers embarking on highland adventure could nd useful information in Basil Hall Chamberlain and W. B. Masons Handbook for Travellers in Japan, but no comparable guidebook existed in Japanese for decades.23 For the purposes of mountaineers, existing gazetteers and geographies were of little utility. As Kojima complained, Most merely name the ranges, or say that such and such a mountain exists, in the style of a place-name index. With one or two exceptions, none gives an adequate description of individual
19. Anne Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 20. Kuroiwa Ken, Tozan no reimei: Nihon Fu keiron no nazo o otte (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1979), p. 124. 21. Kojima Usui, Nihon sangakushi no senshu ni tsukite, in Takato Shoku, ed., Nihon sangakushi (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 (London: John Murray, 1891). From the 1st through 7th edition [i.e., from 1891 to 1903], this book was the sole reliable alpine travel guide available to would-be climbers in Japan. Kiyomizu and Sakabe, Sangaku ni kansuru hongo bunken, p. 261.

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peaks. 24 Under these circumstances, the mountains of Nagano truly represented terra incognita except to local residents with rst-hand knowledge. Indeed, once a climber ascended above tree line, even local knowledge was scarce; the only mountain residents who could serve as reliable guides to the highest slopes were a handful of bear hunters.25 If the 1890s was thus a decade of physical exploration in the Nagano highlands, it was also a decade of mental mapping, for the Japanese Alps had never previously been conceived as a unitary place. It is not entirely surprising that there were no indigenous terms for the discontinuous jumble of mountains that would come to be known as the Nihon Arupusu. More interesting is the lack of historical names for the three ranges (north, central, and south) into which they are now conventionally grouped. As Kojima noted, even individual peaks were typically known by diverse toponyms. It took an English geologist, William Gowland, to conceive of this swath of terrain as forming a coherent landscape, comparable to the European Alps; and it was left to another Englishman, Walter Weston, to canonize Gowlands geographical conception, deploying it as a de facto proper noun.26 Finally, beyond the novelty of naming, the discovery of the Japanese Alps partook as well of a still more fundamental shift: a new way of thinking about landscape per se. This process has been remarked by historians of Meiji culture in many different domainsfrom new perspectives in painting, to a new sense of exterior space as a setting for psychological ction, to new ideologies that sought a timeless Japanese essence in the physical environment.27 While diverse, these novel conceptions of site and scene shared an attempt to move beyond the earlier Japanese landscape convention centered on famous places, or meisho. For Tokugawa literati, famous places had functioned as gateway[s] offering a focused view extending back in time as well as a gaze outward in space. 28 The literary canon told travelers where to look, and scenic value was largely determined by poetic aura. Indeed, poets dictated not only where to look, but how to feel.29 It was this convention
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 and southern Alps. 27. The most celebrated analysis of the discovery of landscape in Meiji Japan is Karatani Ko jin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); see also Minami Hiroshi, Nihonjinron no keifu (Tokyo: Ko dansha, 1980). 28. Marcia Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period (16031868) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 60. 29. In Mimi Yiengpruksawans formulation, a meisho was a scene that had become charged with specic emotive content; it call[ed] up a mood and a sense of nostalgia for a mo-

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with which Japanese artists and intellectuals began to break in the 1890s. Without entirely abandoning the famous places of the past, they began exploring other kinds of landscapes as welland writing new emotional scripts for the responses that landscape might provoke. Shiga Shigetaka Leading this turn was the towering public intellectual, Shiga Shigetaka (1863 1927). Cofounder of the Seikyo sha (Society for Political Education) and longtime editor of its journal, Nihonjin (The Japanese), Shiga was a prominent gure in his day, and he has remained in the historical spotlight ever since, largely for his promotion of kokusui, or national essence.30 But he was rst and foremost a geographer. Born in the last years of the old regime to a samurai family from Okazaki domain, the young Shiga was sent to Tokyo at the age of ten to study at Ko gyoku Juku, a private academy led by the Dutch studies scholar Kondo Makoto (1831 86). In contrast to Fukuzawa Yukichis Keio Gijuku (forerunner of todays Keio University), which aimed to prepare leaders for the Japanese business world, Kondo s academy was designed to groom future ofcers for the navy and merchant marine. Its strongly nationalist curriculum accordingly emphasized both history and geography. Shigas decision to major in geography laid a strong foundation for his later work at the Sapporo Agricultural College, where he would follow Uchimura Kanzo and Nitobe Inazo in studying under William Smith Clark. It may also have inoculated him against the prevailing pro-Western sentiments at Sapporo. While accepting Clarks insistence on modern ethics and attitudes, Shiga would never adopt Christianity; instead, he would turn his Western education 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
ment now lost. Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, review of Taigas True Views by Melinda Takeuchi, Art Bulletin, Vol. 75, No. 2 (June 1993), p. 331. 30. As the ten-page bibliography in Gavins recent biography testies, Shigas work has attracted considerable attention over the years on both sides of the Pacic. Masako Gavin, Shiga Shigetaka, 1864 1927: The Forgotten Enlightener (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2001). For representative English-language perspectives on Shigas work with the Nihonjin circle, see Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan, chapter three, and Kimitada Miwa, Shiga Shigetaka (1863 1927), a Meiji Japanists View of and Actions in International Relations (Tokyo: Sophia University, Institution of International Relations for Advanced Studies on Peace and Development in Asia, Research Papers Series A-3, 1970). 31. Miwa, Shiga Shigetaka, pp. 8 17. For an account of Clarks pioneering work in Sapporo, 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

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11

through Southeast Asia and Oceania on the Japanese troop ship Tsukuba. Joining a naval entourage for an extended exercise abroad was an unprecedented journalistic privilege, and one for which Shigas naval connections were essential. He had lobbied for the voyage on the grounds that a geographer like himself was uniquely qualied to conduct a botanical survey of the South Seasand that Japan, like Britain, stood to gain international prestige by granting civilian scientists access to military vessels. In short, Shiga Shigetaka 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 place for a Japanese geographer in the 1880s than it had been for a British naturalist in the 1830s. Embarking from a nation gripped by anxiety about its international status, Shiga found himself compelled less by natural history than by human history, manifest throughout his travels in the stark gap between colonizers and colonized. His itinerary allowed him to witness rsthand how island peoples across the South Pacicfrom Australia and New Zealand to Fiji, Samoa, and Hawaiiwere losing their resources to industrious, well-organized Anglo-Saxon colonists. Accordingly, rather than conducting a detached scientic survey, he penned a warning to Japan about the challenge of European imperialism. To avoid the fate of the Maori, Shiga wrote, the Japanese must rapidly develop their own archipelagos resources through industrialization and trade. As New Zealand had become the Britain of the South, so Japan must become the Britain of the East. 34 Nanyo jiji was an instant success. Two additional printings would appear in 1889, with a revised edition in 1891. This record in turn generated an eager audience for Shigas second book, a weighty tome called Nihon fu keiron (On Japanese landscape, 1894).35 Here Shiga turned his attention to domestic geography, elaborating his earlier call for industrialization by enumerating and celebrating Japans natural resources. Suffused with both poetic allusions and technical termsas well as attering comparisons to the Asian mainlandNihon fu keiron provided a seamless link between geophysical science, economic development, and national pride.36
as a conceptual counterpart to To yo and Seiyo , the common terms for East and West. Miwa, Shiga Shigetaka, p. 7; see also Kuroiwa, Tozan no reimei, pp. 18 20. 33. Mita Hiroo , Yama no shiso shi (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 fu keiron (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 fu keiron no iji, in Toda Hiroko, ed., Shiga Shigetaka: kaiso to shiryo (Tokyo: Toda Hiroko, 1994), pp. 175 85; Okada, Landscape and the Nation-State; Akiko Ono, Landscape of Powers: Shiga Shigetaka and the Emergence of a National Landscape Discourse in Japan (M.A. Thesis, State University of New York, 1998); muro Mikio, Shiga Shigetaka Nihon fu O keiron seidoku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003); and Yamamoto Norihiko and Ueda Yoshimi, Fu kei no seiritsu: Shiga Shigetaka to Nihon fu keiron (Osaka: Kaifu sha, 1997). For an incisive treatment of Shiga within the broader discourse of nature in turn-of-the-century Japan, see Julia Thomas, Reconguring Modernity: Concepts

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Nihon fu keiron was, on the face of it, an unlikely bestseller. Densely written in classical prose and structured like a textbook, it featured long, erudite discussions of climate and currents, steam and mists, volcanic mountains and rock, and waterborne erosion. Its core argument held that the Japanese archipelago was endowed with ve distinctive features. First was its unique beauty, captured in a trio of aesthetic terms: sho sha (elegance), bi (beauty), and tetto (wildness), an elusive concept that Shiga evidently intended as an answer to the European sublime.37 Second was its tremendous climatic variation, ranging from the subtropic to the subarctic, which in turn gave Japan an extraordinarily diverse ora; Shiga described its oak-pine complex in particular as a world-class treasure. Third, high humidity lent a special hue to the landscape, with vapors and typhoons being two of its special features. Fourth, heavy rainfall led to severe erosion and gullying, creating the steep ravines and craggy features that embued the archipelago with both peril and charm. But the crowning feature of Japanese geography was its profusion of volcanoes. Shiga went so far as to claim that, just as volcanic Rome had served as the font of Western civilization in the past, so volcanic Japan must serve as the font of Eastern civilization in the future.38 In Richard Okadas apt summation, Nihon fu keiron was essentially an extended encomium to the splendors and superiority of the Japanese landscape, especially its mountains and mountain ranges. 39 Indeed, alpine geography played a central role in Shigas vision of Japanese landscape. The section on mountains was the longest in the book, offering a virtual tour of every famous peak in the Japanese archipelago, from Sakhalin to Kyushu. But most novel in Shigas approach to mountains was its call to action. The chapter on volcanoes was not only salted with injunctions to readers to climb the peaks for themselves (with a generous sprinkling of advice on how to do so), but was followed by a ten-page addendum on the need to cultivate a mountaineering spirit (tozan no kifu o ko saku subeshi). Evidently added to the book at the last minute,40 this supplement
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, sho sha and bi together answered to the European picturesque; Mita, Yama no shiso shi, p. 60. 38. Mita suggests that these startlingly original ideas, which are not foreshadowed in any of Shigas prior writings, may have been borrowed from John Lubbocks 1892 book, The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live In (London: Macmillan), which is cited in Nihon fu keiron. Both texts combine extensive quotations from nature-praising poetry with excerpts from the journals of natural scientists, and both texts sing the praises of the authors own countryside, rather than bowing to the grandeur of the Swiss Alps. Mita, Yama no shiso shi, pp. 58 59. 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 no reimei, p. 29.

Wigen: Japanese Alps

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consisted mostly of mundane advice for rst-time climberstips on clothing, gear, ropes, rst aid, and other thoroughly practical concerns. But it opened with a orid preamble that struck a decidedly more exalted tone. Shigas preamble opened with a rhetorical question. Given the melancholy feeling that comes with looking down on ones fellow man, even from a modest hill in Tokyo, why would a person want to go climbing about in the great craggy peaks that thrust themselves up to the heavens? To this Shiga offered a two-fold answer. First, he described the tremendous variety of sights accessible from the slopes. Mountains have dazzling colors, he enthused; they offer the beauty of clouds, the mysteries of clouds, the grandeur of clouds. They reveal the beauties of water, the mysteries of water, and a profusion of fascinating ora. By climbing a mountain, one can grasp the ever-changing nature of the physical earth. Then he described the rapturous epiphany of panoramic vision that awaits the climber:
When you gain the summit and look down, it is as though a gorgeous painting were opening up at your feet, revealing the contours of the earths surface spreading out before you. Once you gain this view, you will feel as though you are no longer in the realm of human things, but have been lifted up above the heavens; it is positively as though you were looking down on our planet from another planet out in space. Such a sight will make your heart expand, and your spirit will soar. Once you have experienced the sublime qualities of mountains; once you have awakened to their magnicent splendor; once you have taken a deep breath of the alpine air, so fresh that it seems to cleanse your lungs; once you have allowed your thoughts to fall still and become immersed in the lonely quiet therethen your mind will become like those of the gods and sages, and you will experience rsthand the glow of divine wisdom. . . . For these reasons, a mountain is at once the most fascinating, the most magnicent, the most noble, and the most sacred thing in the natural world. This is why we must cultivate a mountaineering spirit. Yes, we must cultivate it to the utmost.41

Nor was this exhortation an isolated gesture. A decade later, Shiga would sound the same chord in an essay on the need to climb in the Japanese Alps. The occasion for the latter essay was the publication of another landmark work: Takato Shoku (Nihei)s encyclopedic Nihon sangakushi, the rst comprehensive gazetteer of Japanese mountains. A massive compilation based on many years of research, Nihon sangakushi served up 2,070 entries on individual peaks from Chishima to Taiwan, as well as numerous prefaces, appendices, maps, and illustrations. Filling more than 1,300 pages, the book became an indispensable reference work for the mountaineering community.42
41. Shiga, Nihon fu keiron, p. 180. Richard Okada offers a different rendition of part of this passage; Landscape and the Nation-State, p. 100. 42. Takato Shoku, Nihon sangakushi (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1906). Its author, scion of a wealthy landlord family from Niigata, also underwrote the Japan Alpine Club nancially, con-

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In his preface to this 1906 tome, Shiga invited all those gentlemen who lament the despoilation of Switzerland to visit the great scenery district (ichidai fu kei kuiki) of Japan, recently christened by Reverend Walter Weston the Japanese Alps. Comparing these alps with those alps at length, from rock formations to ora and fauna, he would argue that Naganos attractions were every bit as interesting as those of Switzerland, with the added bonus of a primitive setting (genjin jidai no keiso ). While some hot springs might ll with summer visitors, vast stretches of alpine Japan remained almost deserted, especially in the beautiful fall and winter seasons. Thus Weston was right: while the Swiss Alps might be taller, the Japanese Alps 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 pioneering 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 alpine adventure in reach of his readers. In his essay on the Japanese Alps, for instance, Shiga worked out two detailed model itineraries. The rst began with a specic train from Ueno to Matsumoto, directing the reader to spend the night there before heading west on the Takayama Road, through numerous named villages, to Mount Norikura. From Norikura, the traveler was advised to retire to the Shirahone spa, head north across the Shinano-Hida border, and visit another half dozen peaks and hot springs before descending to Naoetsu, a port on the Japan Sea coast, where he could board another train and return to Tokyo. The second model itinerary embarked from Osaka; its highlight was a panoramic view of the Alps from the top of Mount Tateyama. Shiga estimated that a month should be adequate for either trip. He went on to describe the items a mountaineer must pack (waterproof clothes, blanket, oiled paper, hobnailed boots, etc.), to suggest various pain remedies, and even to give advice on how to cook outdoors.44 Yet notwithstanding Shigas talent for convincing detailsand despite legends about his early backwoods adventures in Hokkaido 45Shiga is now believed never to have climbed a mountain in his life. Many of Nihon fu keirons descriptions of particular peaks were lifted from Chamberlain and Masons Handbook for Travellers in Japan,46 while the technical informatributing 1,000 yen per year at a time when the normal membership dues were one yen; see Nunokawa Kinichi, Kindai tozan paionia, Taiyo , Vol. 103 (1998), p. 20. 43. Shiga Shigetaka, Nihon no arupusu yama ni noboru beshi, in Takato Shoku, Nihon sangakushi (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1906), pp. 6 8. 44. Ibid., pp. 8 11. 45. On the myth that Shiga was an active mountaineer, see Mita, Yama no shiso shi, pp. 44 50; Yamamoto and Ueda, Fu kei no seiritsu, pp. 32 39. 46. Kiyomizu and Sakabe, Sangaku ni kansuru hongo bunken, p. 261; Mita, Yama no shiso shi, p. 58.

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tion about ropes, tents, boots, and climbing technique appears to have been copied from Francis Galtons Art of Travel (1855).47 In short, Shiga Shigetaka was to the last an armchair alpinist; his role was that of visionary and booster. It was left to his youthful readers to embrace that vision and bring it to life. Kojima Usui Of all the young men captivated by Nihon fu keiron, none would take Shigas call more earnestly to heart than Kojima Usui. At the time he encountered Nihon fu keiron in 1896, Kojima was a 22-year-old white-collar worker living in Yokohama. A banker by day, he devoted his spare time to writing book reviews, art criticism, and miscellaneous essays for Bunko , a Tokyo monthly. Kojima was not entirely an alpine ingenue at the time; from the age of 12, he had accompanied his father on numerous trips to the highland resort of Hakone. Moreover, he had already exhibited romantic proclivities. In particular, Kitamura To kokus famous essay from the inaugural issue of Bungakukai, Fugaku no shigami o omou (Thoughts on Mount Fuji as muse), which appeared in print when Kojima was 19, had made a deep impression on him.48 In this sense, Kojima was primed for Nihon fu keiron, with its romantic raptures, its paean to volcanoes, and its exhortation to alpine adventure. Roused by Shigas passionate polemic, the aspiring writer determined to become an alpinist himselfand to write about his adventures. Within two years of encountering Nihon fu keiron, Kojima set out on his rst highland foray; the following summer, at the age of 25, he traveled with a friend to Nagano. Wending their way through the Kiso Valley to Matsumoto, the pair climbed Mount Asama and laid eyes on Yarigatake, one of the leastknown pinnacles of the northern Japanese Alps. Despite its towering height of 3,180 meters, Yarigatake had gone virtually undocumented until the late Tokugawa period, when the Buddhist monk Banryu made three ascents beginning in 1826. In 1901, Kojima would set out to climb the forbidding peak, only to be turned back near the summit by bad weather. These and other expeditions to the mountains would become fodder for numerous essays in Bunko , earning Kojima the nickname yama hakase, or Dr. Alpine. 49
47. Kuroiwa, Tozan no reimei, pp. 149 229. 48. Kondo Nobuyuki, Kojima Usui: Yama no fu ryu shisha den (Tokyo: So bunsha, 1978), p. 166. For a broader discussion of To kokus 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: University of California Press, 1994). 49. For an authoritative account of Kojimas life, see Kondo , Kojima Usui.

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On August 10, 1902 (coincidentally the same day that Shiga Shigetaka was elected to the Diet), Kojima was ready to launch a second attempt on Yarigatake.50 Following the advice spelled out in Nihon fu keiron, he and his companion, Okano Kinjiro , planned to hire a guide for their expedition at the village of Shimajima. As it happened, all the porters of Shimajima were already hired out to a government surveying party. Disregarding their innkeepers advice to wait until a knowledgeable guide returned, the two men proceeded on their own. On their way, they happened across a young hunter who was making his way back down from Yarigatake, having headed into the mountains some 40 days earlier to help put up a survey marker. While the appearance of this guide made Kojimas ascent possible, the disappointment of the two men may well be imagined. The trackless Yarigatake had been traversed already after all. 51 Disappointment or no, Kojimas ascent would go down in history as the dawn of modern Japanese mountaineering. As his biographer has noted, since Kojima [and his companion] proceeded without any better guide than Nihon fu keiron, and without accurate maps, groping their way toward the pinnacle of Yari, the Bunko editors were not wholly unjustied in claiming, There is nothing more dangerous than this in all of Honshu. 52 Over the course of the following year, Kojima would recount the joys and mishaps of the two-week climb in nine issues of Bunko , later publishing the whole account in book form as Yarigatake tankenki (Account of an expedition to Mount Yarigatake).53 And this was only the beginning. In 1905, Kojima would publish his own sweeping text on Japanese geography, Nihon sansui rona title so similar to Shigas that it is best rendered with identical English, as On Japanese Landscape. In extolling the beauty of the Japanese landscape and cataloguing its natural resources, Nihon sansui ron was very much of the same genre as Nihon fu keiron. Indeed, at least one reviewer compared Kojima favorably to his famous predecessor. Those who were unsatised with the partial treatment of Japanese views of nature in Nihon fu keiron, a mildly interesting text but one written essentially as a geographical guidebook, will nd that at the hand of Kojima this subject at last comes alive in full color. 54 Not surprisingly, Kojima echoed Shigas mountain-climbing rhetoric. In fact, on this score, Kojima went much further than Shiga, channeling his en50. 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 government 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: Ho bundo , 1960). 54. Cited in Kondo , Kojima Usui, p. 221.

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thusiasm into activism. Striking up a correspondence and later friendship with Walter Weston (then living in Yokohama), he enlisted Westons help in founding the Nihon Sangaku Kai (Japan Alpine Club) in 1905. According to its charter, the goal of the association was to pursue scientic, literary, and artistic studies of mountains and all the phenomena therein, including alpine forests, lakes, streams, meadows, waterfalls, fauna, ora, rock formations, and meteorology. In addition, it aims to encourage the spirit of mountain climbing throughout the country and to work for the betterment of hiking facilities for ordinary climbers. 55 Recruiting members, hosting foreign alpinists, and editing the associations journal would consume much of Kojimas energy over the following decade. Yet he would continue to devote his summer vacations to exploring the Honshu highlandsand his winter nights to writing about themthroughout this period. Scores of essays resulted, eventually lling a lavish four-volume series entitled Nihon Arupusu, which appeared in print between 1910 and 1915.56 Nihon Arupusu was a landmark in alpine literature. Visually stunning, it was printed on the best paper, beautifully bound, and graced with numerous illustrations, including both Western-style paintings and photos by Japans top alpine photographers. Likewise, the writing was widely praised for its elegance and sophistication. In the words of two early admirers, Kojima
took [our] childish landscape appreciation habits and made us understand the pleasures of experiencing the mountains directly. Seen from the standpoint of literary history, he took an existing genre of purely impressionistic travel writing [tanjun naru shu jiteki sansui kiko bun] and uplifted it to the status of alpine scholarship, . . . achieving a harmonious synthesis of poetic travel writing, philosophical essay, and scientic reportage.57

As the foregoing quote suggests, Kojimas Nihon Arupusu was a deliberately hybrid form, interspersing personal travelogues with folklore, art criticism, and reports on the latest alpine science. The texts treatises displayed a wide range of erudition, touching on everything from Ruskins view of mountains to the physical structure of glaciers and the permanent snowpack in Nagano. The narrative sections included harrowing accounts of the authors adventures in the northern and southern Alps, as well as meditations on his pilgrimages to Mount Fuji (a notable inclusion for a book entitled The Japan Alps). Finally, typical of the occasional essay genre is a chapter on landscape preservation in Kamiko chi. Originally published in
55. Cited in Nunokawa, Kindai tozan paionia, p. 18. 56. Volumes I through IV appeared in 1910, 1911, 1912, and 1915, respectively. The series might have continued with a fth volume, but Kojima was transferred in 1915 to California, where he would spend the next 12 years. Kiyomizu and Sakabe, Sangaku ni kansuru hongo bunken, p. 281. 57. Ibid.

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the Shinano mainichi shinbun, this polemical essay extolled a spirit of reverence toward Kamiko chi, which Kojima viewed not as a mere highland but as the gods wellspring. Other typical entries included essays on preserving Mount Fuji, Shinshu and landscape art, a theory of landscape in the northern 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 fu keiron and Kojimas Nihon Arupusu gave voice to a self-consciously modern sensibility toward the alpine landscape. Nihon fu keiron in particular brought this novel vision of the Japanese highlands 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 was smaller, his Nihon Arupusu too was recognized as an instant classic and made a major splash in the literary world. Together, it is fair to say, these books articulated for the Japanese public the novel outlook summed up in the unfamiliar phrase, Nihon Arupusu. What distinguished that outlook above all was its striking mixture of science and the sublime. As reviewers unfailingly noted, Shiga and Kojima were literary alchemists, in whose hands mundane geography was transformed into a captivating art. Their eclectic methodology fused eldwork with aesthetics; their idiom encompassed both detached description and rapturous revelation.60 The question most scholars have asked of this sensibility is where it led. One branch of inquiry pursues Shigas and Kojimas legacy in the context of Japanese mountaineering 61; another traces their import for twentieth-century nationalism.62 While each of these stories is compelling 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 how were those sources strategically combinedand selectively disguisedto create the novel synthesis that made mountains, and mountaineering, available to the modernizing project of Meiji Japan?
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 fu kei 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); Wolfram Manzenreiter, Die soziale Konstruktion des Japanischen Alpinismus: Kultur, Ideologie und Sport im modernen Bergsteigen (Wein: Abteilung fr Japanologie, Institut fr Ostasienwissenschaften, Universitt Wien, 2000); and Mita, Yama no shiso shi. 62. E.g., Keiichi Takeuchi, Landscape, Language and Nationalism in Meiji Japan, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1988), pp. 25 40; and Minami Hiroshi, Nihonjinron: Meiji kara konnichi made (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994).

Wigen: Japanese Alps Rhetorical Resources for Meiji Alpine Ideology

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One overtly acknowledged inspiration for both Shiga and Kojima was the alpine literature of western Europe. Whereas mountains in the East Asian tradition were sacred sites, regulated by strict taboos, Europeans had for some time seen them as secular spaces, available to be explored and experienced at will. Whether in the name of research or for the sheer joy of climbing, Europeans could mount expeditions on any peak at any time. This practice had caused something of a sensation when applied to Japan by European climbers. Walter Weston in particular is credited with changing Japanese alpine attitudes; one scholar goes so far as to dub the shift from pilgrimage to sport a process of Westonization. 63 But the Western alpine tradition on which both Shiga and Kojima drew involved much more than sport and represented a complex synthesis in its own right. One of its signature elements was the perception that highaltitude zones were a treasure-trove for scientic observation. Originating in sixteenth-century Switzerland, this laboratory approach to mountain environments had slowly spread northward over the succeeding centuries. By the early 1700s, wealthy English travelers had begun to venture into the Swiss Alps in the spirit of eldworkers, climbing with notebooks in hand to record their geological and climatic observations.64 A second element of the Western tradition incorporated by both Shiga and Kojima was the equally recent ethos of the sublime. In northern Europe, it had taken several centuries for the aesthetic habits associated with landscape art to be extended from pastoral places to rugged, uncultivated prospects. But in tandem with the rise of alpine science, the range of landscape values had been broadened beyond the demure domestic scenes of the picturesque to include more rugged, forbidding, and even gloomy prospects. The result, by the nineteenth century, was an aesthetic where mountain gloom could be celebrated as mountain glory. 65 These themes of natural abundance and aesthetic magnicence came together in the alpine essays of John Ruskin (1819 1900), the nineteenth centurys most prolic and passionate art criticand the primary model for Japans alpine enthusiasts. Toward the end of his ve-volume masterwork, Modern Painters, Ruskin had written a famous mountain polemic of his own, directly linking alpine beauty to the scientic riches of the alpine environment. To myself, he wrote,
63. Kenneth R. Ireland, Westonization in Japan: The Topos of the Mountain in Yasushi Inoues Hyo heki, Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (1993), p. 20; see also Nunokawa, Kindai tozan paionia, p. 17. Westons impact was largely indirect; his Mountaineering 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).

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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 scenery in exact proportion to its mountainous character . . . demonstrable by calm enumeration of the number of lovely colors on the rocks, the varied grouping of the trees, and the quantity of noble incidents in stream, crag, or cloud, presented to the eye at any given moment. . . .There are effects by tens of thousands, forever invisible . . . to the inhabitant of the plains, manifested among the hills in the course of one day.66

Ruskin went on to exhort painters to observe these manifold effects for themselves, in order to convey the evanescent impressions afforded by the high-altitude world as accurately as possible. In his view, only extended eldwork, backed by scientic study and meticulous observation, would allow the artist to capture the grandeur of mountain scenery on canvas. This vision of mountains as a place where scientic observation was linked to sensory exaltation closely resembles that of the Japanese luminaries discussed above. Nor is this a coincidence. Both Shiga and Kojima are remembered as Japanese Ruskins; both drew explicitly on European romanticism in formulating their vision of the Japanese highlands. In one strikingly close passage, after extolling the highland environment as a rich resource for study, Kojima had concluded that mountain climbing allows one to experience the changes of four seasons in a single day; both temporally and spatially, it offers a compressed, intensied experience of the cosmos. 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 of sacred mountains or (more often) had simply rested in the foothills and gazed 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 the Japanese. 68 Yet it would be misleading to take this disparaging declaration at face value. As Kojima well knew, the Tokugawa legacy included a tradition of serious alpine exploration. One repository of that tradition was travel literature. A bibliography of alpine travel accounts that Kojima himself helped to compile in 1935 includes half a dozen Tokugawa entries, including works by Furukawa Kosho ken, Ogyu Sorai, and Tsuda Masanari. Signicantly, the editors noted that, while few in number, these works have less in common
66. John Ruskin, Modern Painters (Boston: Dana Estes & Co., 1856 [1873]), Vol. 4, pp. 425 27 and 431. 67. Kojima, Nihon sangakushi no senshu ni tsukite, p. 4. 68. Kojima, Tozan ni tsukite, p. 1.

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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 encompassing 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 the appearance of natural forms, including rugged alpine landscapes, on canvas. In doing so, many followed the advice of the eleventh-century Chinese master Guo Xi (Kuo Hsi), who had insistedin words reminiscent of Ruskin that each artist must personally scale the peaks to study them for himself. Anyone who would paint evocative landscapes must be intimate with mountains, observing their aspects in various kinds of weather, at different times of day and year. Let one who wishes to portray these masterpieces of creation rst be captivated by their charm; then let him study them with great diligence; let him wander among them; let him satiate his eyes with them; let him arrange these impressions in his mind. Then with eyes unconscious of silk and hands unconscious of brush and ink, he will paint this marvelous scene with utter freedom and courage to make it his own. 71 This kind of on-site training had been embraced with enthusiasm by Ike Taiga (1723 67), doyen of landscape painters in eighteenth-century Edo. Taiga had undertaken numerous alpine sojourns, closely scrutinizing the soil, geological formations, watercourses, and waterfalls of Japans high country. In 1760, he traveled to Shinano, where he climbed three prominent volcanoes and lled his diary with carefully annotated sketches. He returned to his studio to produce a striking panorama, Asama shinkeizu (True view of Mount Asama): a careful attempt to capture the atmosphere of a real place, in a particular season, at a precise time of day. This was but one in a series of such paintings, which Melinda Takeuchi credits with stimulating the movement toward empiricism that was one of the [hallmarks] of the eighteenth century. 72 In short, both travel literature and landscape paintings from the later Tokugawa era reveal an alpine tradition that prized on-site exploration and careful, empirical observation. Neither Ruskins appreciation of rugged landscapes, then, nor his insistence on rst-hand eldwork was entirely for69. 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 Murray, 1935), p. 40. 72. Melinda Takeuchi, Taigas True Views: The Language of Landscape Painting in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 155. On true views in Ming China, see Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 152 57.

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eign to Japan, for similar attitudes toward mountains had been nurtured in Tokugawa empiricism long before European romanticism arrived. As a result, it is not entirely surprising that Shiga and Kojimas novel synthesis of eldwork and aesthetics resonated deeply with many of their readers. Both writers were able to mobilize cultural resources for their project from a diverse repertoire, drawing on native as well as foreign elements. Shiga, the more strident patriot of the two, was happy to acknowledge this indigenous legacyso long as it could be rmly located in the Japanese archipelago.73 In Kojimas writings, by contrast, the indigenous tradition of alpine exploration was largely covered up. A reader of Nihon Arupusu would think that Shigas manifesto on the need to cultivate a mountaineering spirit had appeared like a bolt out of the blue, jolting a slumbering culture out of its passive, contemplative habits. Rather than accepting Kojimas assertions on this point, it would seem wise to view his articially sharp East / West dichotomy as a strategic move. By the 1890s, European climbers had been organizing expeditions, collecting specimens, and publishing papers on alpine subjects for over 50 years. In addition, alpine science had helped to launch a major enterprise to support mountain recreation. Tramways and lodgings were entrenched in the mountaineers landscape, to the extent that serious climbers were already complaining that tourism had spoiled their favorite haunts.74 Nor were these developments conned to Europe. With the advance of empire, the modern alpine complex was rapidly spreading across the globe. The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, begun in the 1840s, had led to expeditions in the Himalayas, and hill stations were springing up throughout the highland tropics.75 In Japan itself, hundreds of foreigners were already indulging in alpine recreation by the time Shigas and Kojimas seminal books went to press. Most important, in the cosmopolitan world of mountaineering, a fullblown alpine apparatus signied great power status. Having been personally beaten to the peak of Yarigatake by a Western climber, Kojima was acutely aware that Japan had some catching up to do in this department. In other words, reading Ruskin in the heyday of alpine exploration, Kojima encountered 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 infrastruc73. This tendency was greatly amplied by later writers such as Kuwabara Takeo, who proudly contrasted the active alpinism of Taiga and other Tokugawa pioneers with the passive alpine 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 India, 17651843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

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turethat he wanted for Japan: not just a sensibility, but an apparatus to go with it. And he wanted it sooner rather than later. The urgency of this goal is clear from the following complaint. In Europe, Kojima chastened,
mountaineers have formed alpine clubs, carried out research on every peak . . . , published detailed maps of topography and geology, investigated the basic alpine fauna and ora, developed alpine walking sticks, and even gone so far as to prepare alpine cases . . . lled with the medications needed by climbers. Inns have been established in every valley where hikers can spend the night, hiking paths have been cleared, guides have been trained, and columns on mountaineering have been carried for many years in the newspapers and magazines of the popular press to enlighten the public. Compared with this climate of mountain-climbing boosterism, the shameful situation in our country is inexcusable.76

Nor did Kojima conne himself to complaining. After establishing the Japan 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 the end of his days. In this context, Kojimas temporary amnesia about the native alpine tradition might be understood as a ploy to shame his compatriots into building a more modern and capacious mountaineering apparatus. To be sure, like Shiga before him, mountain climbing for Kojima was above all a way to modernize the climber. Modernizing the landscape per se was not the point for this rst generation of alpine boosters. Yet neither was it anathema to them. Railroads, hostels, hiking clubs, and the rest were warmly welcomed by both men as a means to their primary goal: namely, mobilizing more Japanese up the slopes, where they could have their consciousnesses altered. Shiga and Kojima alike were convinced that alpine eldwork could help produce informed, modern subjects, and they promoted the Japanese Alps explicitly on that basis. Consider the reasoning with which Shiga and Kojima encouraged women to climb mountains. Kojima in particular was voluble on this point, upholding Westons wife as a model. In his 1910 essay on Josei to shizen no mikata (Women and nature appreciation), he argued for cultivating Japanese womens alpine sensibilities as a means to developing more fully their human potential. It is said that the greatest defect of Japanese women is that they lack moral character [ jinkaku], the essay opines. The author then offers examples of the keen sensibility toward nature that Western women have cultivated, noting perceptive reviews of alpine literature by a female member of the Canadian Alpine Club. To the extent that Japanese womens appreciation of nature can be developed, he concludes, they will grow in knowledge, their inner lives will be enriched, and in the process they will
76. Kojima, Nihon sangakushi no senshu ni tsukite, pp. 6 7.

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acquire dignity as women who command the worlds respect. 77 The enlightenment logic of this last sentence deserves underscoring. Women who climb mountains will experience mental and moral uplift earning Japan greater respect on the world stage in the process. The desire to see mountaineering take root among the broadest possible public may explain why these men downplayed the machismo of mountain climbing. Shiga Shigetaka may well have been reacting against the effete, feminized hai-kara style of the Rokumeikan generation, advocating instead a more athletic, masculine nationalism.78 Yet Kojimathe one who climbed on a regular basismade a point of telling his readers that he was a mild-mannered banker, not a muscle builder; if he could climb a 10,000foot peak, anyone could. As if to clinch the point, volume three of Nihon Arupusu included an affectionate but hardly attering caricature of the author that portrayed Kojima as a gangly literatus rather than a vigorous athlete.79 Here again, Kojima seems to have transcended dichotomies; just as his writing combined art with science, so his persona suggested that it was possible to be simultaneously a gentleman and an outdoorsman. The same sense of mission that led Shiga and Kojima to downplay the machismo of mountaineering also led them to downplay the class aspect of this pursuit. In practice, mountain climbers in turn-of-the-century Japan (as elsewhere) were a very elite group: the charter members of the Japan Alpine Club were mostly doctors, lawyers, bankers, and students from the most selective imperial universities, along with a sprinkling of movie stars and imperial princes.80 With dues set at one yen per annum, membership in the club was beyond the reach of all but the most well-to-do. Yet Shiga went out of his way to offer practical advice for rst-time climbers, and Kojima repeatedly insisted that his was a pastime accessible to ordinary folk. In his travelogues, he talked again and again about ways to minimize cost and emphasized that his own climbing was conned to brief summer vacations.81 Finally, appreciating this pedagogical vision allows us to understand why Shiga Shigetakaa geographer who apparently never climbed a mountain in his lifefelt compelled to foster a mountain-climbing spirit in
77. Kojima, Nihon Arupusu, Vol. 1, pp. 236 39. In fact, girls schools were one step ahead of 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 Umeno tsuki Shoten, 1992). Toshiko, Nihon josei tozan shi (Tokyo: O 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 Nihon Arupusu over the caption, presented to the author as a caricature. It is also reproduced between pages 124 and 125 of Kondo , Kojima Usui. 80. Kobayashi Toshishige, Nihon Sangakukai Shinano Shibu sanju go nen (Matsumoto: Nihon Sangakukai Shinano Shibu, 1981), p. 14. 81. See, for instance, the preface to Kojima, Nihon Arupusu, Vol. 1.

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Japan to begin with. In all likelihood, the experience that aroused this passion was the authors trip to the South Pacic. That adventure had opened Shigas eyes to Japans compromised position in the worldand left him with a profound conviction that he must do all he could to open the eyes of the rest of the country. The surest path to the kind of insights Shiga wanted his readers to attain would have been to put them all on ships headed to distant parts of the world. But since it was not feasible for all 47 million Japanese to venture into different latitudes, the next best thing was to coax the masses into different altitudes. This might sound far-fetched, but the notion of a correspondence between latitude and altitude was in fact a central principle of nineteenthcentury geography. Alexander von Humboldt, who had visited Peru in the early 1800s, had noted that traveling up a mountainside in the tropics was comparable to traveling toward the earths poles; both journeys took the eldworker through a similar progression of climatic and biological zones.82 As a geography major, Shiga would undoubtedly have been familiar with this idea. He did not need to be a mountain climber himself to see the pedagogical value of alpine vistas. In fact, educators at the turn of the century were convinced that observing the landscape from an elevated spot was an indispensable step in geographical education. Physically looking down on their everyday world would allow students to comprehend that world in a more abstract way, thrusting them into the panoramic perspective of a map reader. This in turn could be used to help them apprehend map knowledge in a more immediate, experiential way. Accordingly, eld excursions to a nearby hill were fast becoming a common feature of elementary-school instruction in Japan especially in Nagano Prefecture, where Shiga spent a year as a teacher before his rst overseas voyage.83 Read in this light, Shigas and Kojimas manifestos for mountaineering can be understood as the product of a deeply pedagogical vision. Climbing was a form of eldwork, and the Japanese Alps were a handy place to send students for geographical enlightenment. By traversing the slopes with their eyes open, the youth of Japan would be able to grasp the ever-changing nature of the physical earth. So unlike the original Ruskin, who shuddered at the prospect of carrying . . . a line of trafc through some green place of shepherd solitude, the Japanese Ruskins embraced that prospect. Romanticism 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 rened sensibility, a more informed perspective, and a more exalted status in
82. Margarita Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chapter seven. 83. Kren Wigen, Teaching About Home: Geography at Work in the Prewar Nagano Classroom, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 3 (August 2000), pp. 550 74.

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the hierarchy of nations. In short, the project for which mountains were moved 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 century was a resource for geographical enlightenment. Stanford University