We leave the cars beside a hot spring hotel and set off up a steep and muddy path through an unpromising factory forest. Where we take a break, soon before reaching the ridgeline, a more varied woodland seems to be pushing back against the serried cryptomeria.
Sitting on fallen branches and munching on konyaku jelly and the Sensei's homegrown sweet potatoes, we discuss factionalism in mountaineering clubs – a tendency as old as the hoary debates about guided vs guideless climbing in the original Alpine Club a century and more ago.
Speaking of alpine history, it seems that our president is enthusiastically reading the latest book about Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance. The grey ceiling truncates the hills around so that – like those fated climbers on the 1924 Everest expedition – it looks as if we too may soon vanish into the clouds.
Here and there, a camellia bush has scattered its red blooms across the forest floor, rather like the array of lopped heads after one of Toshiro Mifune’s more vigorous swordplays. Apparently, this is why the warriors of old tended to shun the flower. And why you shouldn’t present them to invalids.
We’re now heading along the high spine of the peninsula, towards its tip. High is relatively speaking of course. Unlike Mallory, we’re not going to have trouble with our oxygen supply. Our summit for the day is Taiyō ga Oka (293.7 metres), named for the sun that is now starting to burn through the fog. Good: we aren’t going to vanish into the clouds.
By this point, the camellias have grown up into a mixed forest that they dominate. Some have even managed to keep their blooms aloft. A forest of camellias? Before this morning, I didn’t even know that was a thing.
Yet, to my surprise, the savants report that such forests are found all the way up the Japan Sea coast, even as far as Akita. There’s even a “snow camellia” variety that has learned to hunker down under the heavy winter drifts of Niigata and points north … Naruhodo, I murmur to myself.
I glance across at the Sensei, but she appears quite unfazed by our surroundings: probably she knew about the camellia forests all along …