The Japanese Never Used to Climb Mountains｜Mount Miwa as Kannabi, and Walter Weston

All across Japan there are places known as Kannabi, the dwelling places of the gods. When we try to rethink this old concept, read as kannabi or kamunabi, we run up against a fault line, and that fault line is the “mountain” as it was distorted from the Meiji era onward.

The word Kannabi itself already appears in texts of the Nara period. The Izumo Fudoki, for example, records four Kannabi mountains, among them Kannabiyama in Tatenui District, now called Mount Ofune, and Kannabino in Ou District, which is identified with Mount Chausu in present-day Matsue. The Manyoshu, too, uses the word several times, written with different characters. This suggests that at least by around the Nara period, people had begun to sense Kannabi in mountains.

The “mountain” of that age, however, was not the mountain of earlier times, nor the mountain of today. For people now, a mountain means a peak, Mount Fuji or the Japanese Alps, something plainly understood as a natural object. That sensibility did not originally exist in Japan.

What I want to draw attention to here is Mount Mimoro, sung of in a Manyoshu poem that begins “when spring comes to the Kannabi, the hill of Mimoro.” Mountains bearing the name Mimoro are said to have their origin in Yamato Province, the central and southern part of present-day Nara Prefecture, and that mountain is Mount Miwa. The Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, both completed in the early eighth century, describe Mount Mimoro, also written with other characters, as the place where the god Omononushi dwells. In the Izumo no Kuni no Miyatsuko no Kamuyogoto, the congratulatory words that the governor of Izumo offered to the court, Omononushi is likewise told to “dwell in the Kannabi of Omiwa.” This is evidence that since very early times, Mount Miwa in Sakurai, Nara Prefecture, was regarded as the Kannabi of Yamato.

Against this background, Omiwa Shrine, whose sacred body is Mount Miwa itself, is often described as the oldest shrine in Japan. Even now, Omiwa Shrine has no main sanctuary. Its chief deity, Omononushi, dwells in the mountain itself, and worship is offered to the mountain from the hall of worship. In present-day Shinto, this form of worship is considered unusual, but because a small number of shrines with the same form still survive in various parts of Japan, the faith of Omiwa Shrine is better understood as a trace of the rifts and the points of mingling between different eras. What I especially want to look at is the custom of calling the ascent of Mount Miwa not tozan, mountain climbing, but Tohai, climbing in worship.

Tohai is tozan with the “mountain” taken out. Within this idea lies the decisive fault line between the Edo period and everything after Meiji.

Many people today enjoy mountain climbing as a hobby, but originally the Japanese did not climb mountains at all.

Mountain climbing in Japan began with Walter Weston, a missionary of the Church of England who came to Japan in 1888, the twenty-first year of Meiji. Behind him stood William Gowland, an English metallurgical engineer who surveyed the mountains of Shinshu in 1881. The point to focus on is that both men involved in the dawn of Japanese mountaineering were Englishmen, symbols of modern Anglo-Saxon culture. In other words, the leaders of a dualistic world that sharply separates “human beings” from “nature” discarded the sensibility the Japanese had nurtured until then, and set off the overturning that turned the mountains into a world without gods. I regard this overturning of the mountains in the 1880s as a wellspring of the destruction of nature in modern Japan, and I think it is a history we cannot overlook. For the Japanese, the destruction of nature means the destruction of every realm of life, of faith, custom, practice, ritual, and spirituality. And in fact, in only about 160 years since the Meiji Restoration, Japan has brought this disaster to pass.

Strangely, though, the achievements of Gowland, who named the “Japanese Alps,” and of Weston, who is revered as “the father of Japanese mountaineering,” are spoken of only in positive terms. Now, as Japan approaches 160 years of modernization, we surely need to look at them again in earnest. What kind of sensibility ran through their roots? Knowing this bears on rediscovering the Japanese view of nature, and even on the restoration of faith.

The fundamental premise is that Christian teaching, in general, strictly separates the Creator from the created. For Christianity, God is a Creator who transcends nature. He is not nature itself, much less a presence dwelling within nature, as in animism. This is clear from the Book of Genesis, in which God creates the natural world. Mountains, rivers, and trees are therefore things made by God, and they are not thought of as gods. Worshipping a mountain, river, tree, or rock as a god, as the Japanese do, is idolatry in strict Christianity, and in the biblical tradition a grave sin.

With this foundation in mind, the key is to read Weston, “the father of Japanese mountaineering,” in his own context, because he valued the post-Romantic sensibility that had spread among the English in the nineteenth century. The sources of that context are William Wordsworth, the poet who stands for English Romanticism, John Ruskin, the art critic, and Leslie Stephen, the thinker and mountaineer.

Wordsworth (1770–1850), who was born and raised in the Lake District of England, opened the wellspring of a Romantic sensibility filled with awe toward mountains. It began by understanding mountains not as something to climb, but as something to look up to.

And there is one presence this story cannot do without, the Alpine Club. Founded in London in 1857, after Wordsworth’s death, it was the first mountaineering club in the world, and in fact the ideas and attitudes of this English club gave rise to the source of a way of thinking and acting that leads straight to many problems of our own day. The pollution of Mount Fuji and the Japanese Alps by overtourism, for instance, cannot truly be solved by tightening the laws while failing to see the thought that lies at its source. What we cannot leave out, in looking at this movement, is the history of how an heir to the Romantic sensibility launched a fierce attack on the Alpine Club.

Why, then, does the Alpine Club matter? Because Weston, later called “the father of Japanese mountaineering,” was a member of it, and because Usui Kojima, who visited him, acting on Weston’s advice, founded the Sangakukai in 1905, the club that later became the Japanese Alpine Club. There is, in other words, a lineage of thought that flows from the Alpine Club in England to the Japanese Alpine Club. Unless we treat this as a problem, we will never be able to discuss the relationship between the Japanese and nature in any serious way.

The Alpine Club’s greatest critic was Ruskin (1819–1900). In 1865, when the club was in its seventh year, Ruskin was invited to give a lecture, and he used the occasion to condemn the club bitterly for turning mountains into a place of entertainment and consumption called mountaineering. He denounced its members as greedy philistines. With the sharp eye of a critic and the sensibility of a patron of artists, above all the painter J. M. W. Turner, Ruskin saw that mountaineering existed for the climber’s pleasure and vanity, and that it had its roots in a colonial sensibility. Since the Age of Discovery, Europeans had taken pleasure in belittling the peoples they conquered through colonization as primitive and inferior, while casting themselves as saviors, as progress, as light. Mountaineering, Ruskin saw, was that same lineage with the object simply switched from human beings to nature.

So, standing before the members, Ruskin dismissed mountaineering as a desecration of the sacred and an expression of the lust for conquest. Ruskin himself was not a Romantic, but he was a man who inherited the Romantic spirit. He did not go so far as to believe that a god dwelled in the mountains, but he held them in awe as sacred places.

The one who reacted most fiercely against Ruskin’s criticism was Stephen, a leading rationalist and agnostic who emerged as a reaction within the post-Romantic context and who was the third president of the Alpine Club. Stephen (1832–1904) had been shaped by the Western Enlightenment, which valued human reason over God, and he gave up holy orders and abandoned his faith. He did not share, in other words, the feeling that Wordsworth and Ruskin spoke of, that the sublime spirit of God pervades the depths of nature, nor their way of seeing mountains as cathedrals built by the hand of God.

Stephen drew on Romanticism, but he set aside the Wordsworthian mystery of becoming one with nature and extracted only the moral element, the idea of how nature makes human beings good, inheriting the ethical side alone. Then, in his major work The Playground of Europe (1871), he defined the mountains as a “playground” and stripped them of religious sanctity and faith.

The man who revered Stephen was Weston, “the father of Japanese mountaineering.” Weston published his major work in 1918, and its title was The Playground of the Far East. By way of Stephen’s The Playground of Europe, then, Weston redefined the mountains of Japan as a playground in The Playground of the Far East. In it, there is neither understanding of nor respect for the historical context of Japan and the Japanese.

Usui Kojima (1873–1948), who idolized Weston, took over this English way of thinking blindly and crudely, and as a result he came to stand at the starting point of the ruin of Japan’s mountains. At the same time, Japanese mountaineering cannot be reduced to so simple a story, because at Kojima’s roots there was also a thinker who stood against this Westernization. That was Shigetaka Shiga, whose Nihon Fukeiron, an essay on the Japanese landscape, was published in 1894.

Shiga, a geographer, critic, and educator who also became a member of the House of Representatives, sounded the alarm against politicians, university professors, and bureaucrats who were devoted wholly to Westernization, and he argued that one must begin by looking again at Japan. His thinking appears in a passage from the second issue of Nihonjin (The Japanese), the magazine of the Seikyosha, the society he himself founded in 1888, the twenty-first year of Meiji.

“Our systems of religion, morality, art, politics, and production must be protected through the preservation of the national essence, yet I do not say that Japan should hold on to its old ways forever. Western civilization, however, should be taken in only after it has been chewed and digested.”

His criticism, in other words, was that while rejecting Western civilization entirely would also be wrong, it was a mistake to praise it blindly and put it into practice without a thought, never looking at Japan, the place that was receiving it. When we take anything in, the first thing to look at is ourselves. Only then do we consider which foreign elements to accept, and how to accept them in a form that suits us. This is the sound way, but the Westernizers who held power in the Meiji era, without understanding Japan and with no regard for context, simply revered the West and put one thing after another into practice. This problem was built into the very source of Japanese mountaineering, yet for some reason it is never treated as a problem. And it is not confined to mountaineering. It is a pathology that still pervades Japanese society today.

Astonishingly, the English-speaking world still drags this sensibility along quite openly. When the young Australian Bianca Adler recently reached the summit of Everest, many English-language news outlets described her achievement as having “conquered” Everest. The word conquer is rooted in the idea of victory, and it evokes a battle, or a race, between the climber and the mountain. Indeed, what Adler was praised for was setting the record for the fastest ascent of Everest from sea to summit, completing the climb only fifty days after setting out from India. She herself, along with everyone else, has yet to escape that wretched set of values. The same is true when she is described as a climber who reached the top of Mont Blanc at twelve, took on Aconcagua two years later, and became one of the youngest record holders.

Are these truly “great feats” that deserve praise? Why must we compete with nature and conquer it?

On one side is Bianca Adler, who learned in her teens the pleasure of conquering nature and consumes the mountains of other countries for her own greed. On the other is Greta Thunberg, who resolved in her teens to face the real problems of the world, and who still stands on the front line as a critic of the destruction of nature, of climate change, of industrial society, and of the war in Gaza. Where does this gap, this difference in depth, come from?

When we look at this lineage, the mountaineering that Weston brought to Japan cannot, by any reasoning, fit the Japanese view of the world. What we need, then, is not to reject mountaineering, but to deepen our dialogue with what we have lost and to find an answer of Japan’s own.

A quiet question is now rising before us. Can we face it in earnest and look toward what comes next? Or will we ignore it once again and indulge our greed to the very end?

Now that America, Europe, and Britain have been shaken, there should no longer be any need for us to go on following the West.

If human beings can conquer nature, the reverse is also true. A sharp blade may already be pressed against the throat of humankind.