Karen Wigen, a scholar of historical geography at Stanford, gave a fascinating talk last night at Keio University on “Moving Mountains: Creating the Modern Japanese Alps” She looked at the “discovery” of the Japanese Alps (a term given to three chains of mountains in Japan by an Englishman) in the Meiji period by metropolitan and usually elite alpinists (Japanese and foreigners). She describes the new sense of place that resulted, how this got embedded in local/regional conceptions of space, and the transition from the traditional Japanese worship of famous places (名所, places which get their fame from a literary or religious connection）to a more modern appreciation of scenery and landscapes for their beauty and remoteness (風景）in the practice of mountaineering. She at modern mountaineering and nature tourism (as distinct from traditional religious pilgrimages and pre-modern travel), which is a fusion of romanticism and science that often had the (ironic) goal of escaping the modern. She locates the roots of Japanese alpinism both in European Romanticism and East Asian landscape painting. I record just a few of her ideas here that I found interesting.
She looked primarily at travel literature and tour guides from the pre-war period and in particular works by Kojima Usui and Shiga Shigetaka. While Professor Wigen’s points were many, she notes some interesting aspects of Japanese alpinism which is different that its modern European and American equivalents. One was that, whereas Western alpinism was not conscious of the uniquely modern element and modernizing effects of its success (demonstrated, for example by the fact that mountain paintings or photographs often painstakingly exclude any part of the scenery which reveals the presence of the infrastructure of mountaineering such as inns, towns, paths, guides, humans, etc.) Japanese alpinists were aware of this and made it explicit in their discourse. They lamented how their own alpinism was so far behind that of the Europeans and used this sense of crisis when they formed mountaineering clubs, etc. She argues that romanticism and developmentalism went hand in hand in the Japanese case. I felt she was a little weak on the examples on this point but it is an interesting claim.
Also unlike much of the alpinist culture in the west (and surely, I can say, Scandinavian), the macho element and physical rustic aspects were downplayed by Japanese alpinists, emphasizing that this was something anyone could and should do. the Japanese Alps were a place to get a sense of scale, a look down upon Japan, and a way to realize how amazing Japan was as a geographical masterpiece. The mountains were, as Wigen, argues, a place for geographic enlightenment. She notes the irony that after this new appreciation for nature was found, the very 風景 themselves, an especially those mountains a famous western alpinist Walter Westin visited, become “famous places” or 名所, completing the circle as it were.
I would love to read more about the history of alpinism and Norway’s connection to it through its national identity. I suspect that Norwegian alpinism is more conspicuously a site in which to locate the ideal reflection of a national “rustic” national culture. Rather than as “a place to go to”, as in the Japanese case, I suspect that a look into the Norwegian case you would find that mountains described and admired as “a place we come from” or at least “are of”. The ocean, with Norwegian self-perception as a sea-faring people, is more of the place to go to, but not in the same way that Wigen speaks of the modern metropolitan Japanese elite going to the mountains. I suspect alpinism amongst Norwegians is more about a “return” than in the Japanese case.