登山によって喪失した心: 日本で登山が生まれた時The Heart Lost Through Mountaineering: When Mountaineering Was Born in Japan

Today: what was lost in Japan when mountaineering arrived.

As the year comes to a close, announcements of 2024 tourist numbers are pouring in. Among the most prominent destinations, Mt. Fuji saw around 204,000 climbers from around the world, while the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route drew 824,000 visitors.

The culture of enjoying mountain climbing has taken root in Japan too, but it is a new movement that began only about a hundred years ago.

In Japan, an island country where ranges run one into another on narrow land, mountains themselves have been worshipped as gods since ancient times, and people offered rituals and prayers under a concept of their own, kannabi (神奈備).

The situation drastically changed in the 1890s. In 1894 the geographer Shigetaka Shiga published Nihon Fukeiron (On Japanese Landscapes). It became a bestseller and the popularity of mountaineering rose. But its illustrations were paintings.

Two years later, in 1896, the English missionary and mountaineer Walter Weston published Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps, which created a stir in Britain. Its great distinction was that it was bound with photographs taken by various photographers, rather than paintings. But though it was published in London, the Japanese edition came much later, in 1933.

Mountaineering was born of reinterpreting natural scenery through science, removing non-scientific elements such as faith, and pushing a new way of seeing. It changed the village community’s idea of natural scenery, and at the same time opened a new world in the hearts of people of that time, for whom one mountain over lay a different cultural sphere.

As photographs also gave more chances to see the old customs of villages, urban intellectuals who rejected old customs seized on them.

In 1905 an alpine club was formed and the work of spreading mountaineering began in earnest, and climbing steadily spread. Photographers played a part in this rise too.

In the West, photograph was defined from the Greek photós and grápho, but when it came to Japan, the translated word was read as “the technique of copying the true form.” This was gradually misread as “copying the truth,” and a fixed idea arose that a photograph is the truth.

By the time Weston’s book was translated and published in Japan, nationalism was unfortunately rising there and mountaineering was already widespread, so it did not draw much response. At the same time, academic scholars began to use photographs actively as material for natural history, botany, and other studies. Among them, Urei Shimura, a photographer who belonged to the alpine club, was captivated by the mountain scenery and flowers of the Northern Alps and kept photographing on his own.

The first photographs of the Japanese Alps introduced to the West were Shimura's, which Weston received and published in The Alpine Journal, Vol. 23 (1906–1907) (https://archive.org/details/the-alpine-journal-vol-23-1906-1907/mode/2up?q=japan).

In 1909 Shimura published Sangaku Bikan (Beautiful Views of the Mountains), the first book of mountain photographs in Japan. In 1912 came Senzan Bangaku (A Thousand Peaks and Ten Thousand Mountains), the decisive work that made mountaineering flourish.

However, throughout this process, the concept of mountains underwent a profound shift. Looking at natural scenery anew through photographs led to the appearance of one natural scientist after another, and the movement to reinterpret the mountains scientifically, or in the humanities, quickly grew. In the process, the historical faith born of daily life and the people's relation to the mountains were ignored as unscientific, which changed people's hearts greatly.

Today, mountaineering is booming, and anyone can climb a mountain whenever they please. But the faith once held toward the mountains has vanished, and the heart of living with them has been lost. In the face of growing overtourism, it is clear that we must rethink our attitudes not just toward mountains, but also toward nature, scenery, and landscapes in general.

Even now, images posted on social media spur masses of tourists to flock to remaining pockets of natural beauty. Seeing this, one can’t help but feel that little has changed in the past hundred years—aside from the unbounded growth of human desire.

This is a new age in which great numbers of people go into the mountains with neither faith nor the will to learn. Looking at the reality that something important has already been lost beyond recovery, I cannot help feeling it is no coincidence that Japan's extreme decline is linked to the process of losing the faith once held toward the mountains.