Friday, July 10, 2009

Seasons of a stratovolcano

A long-lost eyewitness account of a volcanic eruption reveals the violent past behind Kami-kōchi's idyllic landscapes

As the bus comes out of the Kama tunnel between Shima-jima and Kami-kōchi, writes Fukada Kyuya in Nihon Hyakumeizan, Yake-dake suddenly confronts you, as if the volcano stands guard before the mighty host of peaks beyond. The scene is well known, yet every time I see it afresh, as if for the first time.
On this crisp November morning, though, we couldn’t see Yake-dake at all. The last night bus of the year arrived so early that the little volcano still lurked in the pre-dawn shadows of the higher mountains. As it was too dark to start walking, I joined the group of photographers lined up like militiamen by the banks of Taishō pond. In few minutes, a fusillade of camera shutters would greet the first rays of the sun as it gilded the tips of the Hodaka range.

Taishō Pond was created in 1915 (Taishō 4) when Yake-dake erupted and sent mudflows cascading down into the Azusa river. While shivering in the gloaming, I wondered how this cataclysm might have appeared to an eyewitness. Now, thanks to the assiduous researches of Iain Williams of the Toyohashi Alpine Club, my curiosity has been more than satisfied. He has discovered an account by J Merle Davis, a missionary and associate of the Mountain Goats of Kobe, who happened to be the only guest at a local onsen when the volcano exploded. Here is Davis’s story:-

Sunday morning, June 6, I was awakened at seven by a series of earthquake shocks, which grew in intensity until it seemed as if the house would fall to pieces before we could get out of it. As I reached the door, half dressed, with an ear-rending concussion the big mountain, whose base is only two miles from the hotel, begun to get busy. From its eastern slope, a mile below the old craters at the summit, it blew out a volume of rocks, mud, and steam, smoke and ashes in a vast column, while the roar of Vulcan's forge mingled with the smiting of his sledge upon the anvil, filled the whole valley with a pandemonium of sound as the granite cliffs hurled the echoes back and forth at one another.

A heavy cloud of smoke rolling in huge puffs and waves, spread over the whole valley, turning bright sunshine into twilight. Soon ashes began to fall, but I must confess I did not wait to measure them for I was already making good time up the river path toward Shima-shima. At the bridge, a mile above the hotel, by the way a splendid viewpoint, I began to get ashamed of myself, and as nothing worse than a shower of light ashes had happened and since breakfast was waiting down the river, I returned. All day long the mountain roared in heavy pulsations, as the wind brought the sound of the crashing rocks and trees and escaping steam.

Four new craters had opened on the volcano, about half way between base and summit. From one of these, a stream of mud and rock was pouring out and slipping down the slope to the river, a thousand feet below. Toward night, a heavy rain began to fall, and after a second day of torrential rain and constant volcanic activity, this morning dawned upon as strange a world as the imagination could possibly picture.


A glorious alpine valley, with splendid fir and beech forests as fine as grow anywhere in Japan, but a valley from mountain top to river bottom sprayed, dripping, and drowned with mud. An area of forest, mountain, and valley fully ten square miles in extent is covered with a coating of volcanic slime from half an inch to four feet in depth.

The hardy bamboo grass, the terror of the climber, is beaten prone in the mud, mile upon mile of magnificent timber, the pride of the Imperial Forestry Reserve, is groaning, bending and breaking under literally tons of mud to the tree. Sharp reports and rending crashes fairly filled the air all day, as the great firs one after another refused longer to bear the strain of their load.

We have all seen a great forest with tree limbs drooping to the very ground under a fresh fall of heavy wet snow, but in place of the spotless winter covering, picture if you can, a clinging, sticky, slate-coloured mud, a mud that covers everything and oozes off the tree limbs upon you as you slip and stumble in the slime. A mud world; and but two days ago the fairest valley in Japan!


Yet even in the wanton destruction of the volcano, a feature of real beauty has been added to Kami Kochi, for it now boasts a blue alpine lake, a mile and a half in extent, filling the lower end of the valley, a sheet of water in which the snowy crags and pinnacles of Hodaka yama are mirrored. The same mud that was blown over the landscape like escaping steam, flowed for twenty-four hours down the mountain side, carrying huge rocks and trees and, in an ever widening stream, stripped a clean path through the forest, a path a mile long and four hundred yards wide in its lower reaches.

Into the river bed, at its narrowest point, the very portal of the valley, slipped this stream of mud, building a dam of mighty forest trees and rocks and filling the interstices with sticky mud. The Azusagawa, the chief affluent of the Shinanogawa, the largest river of the main island, was squarely stopped by this stone and timber barrier which must be full 60 feet in height. The waters of the river backed up to form the lake and are now running over the top of the dam, down a spill-way in a wild cataract, a full quarter of a mile in extent …..



The musketry of camera shutters interrupted my reverie – the sun had touched the top of the Hodakas, and it was time to be moving. I crossed the river at Tashiro Bridge, where another battalion of photographers was straining to capture the frosted trees by a smaller pond. Behind their backs, Yake-dake’s reflection floated luminously in the still waters. One fine autumn day, wrote Fukada Kyuya, it seemed as if Yake-dake had donned a coat of many colours. And so it seemed to me too.


But today, continued the Hyakumeizan author (in 1964), Kami-kōchi is a seething hive of activity that centres more on tourism than alpinism. Such mountaineers as there are shoulder their packs and vanish swiftly in the direction of the mountains, leaving the environs of Kappa-bashi and Taishō Pond to the day-trippers with their raincoats and sports shoes. Above them looms Yake-dake, a simple, half-day climb. The tourists would gain much if they added it to their list of sights to see.

Taking Fukada’s advice, I headed uphill through stands of larch trees flaming in their autumn yellow. The path flirted with the edge of an erosion gully, then led me to the hut on the volcano’s northern shoulder. By now, my boots were crunching through the season’s first light snows. The hut warden had long since packed up and gone down. I wandered on up to the summit, which was occupied by a group of lively pensioners, fresh from the previous day's conquest of the highest peak in the Central Alps.


Yake is a convincing if compact volcano: steam vents from a large fumarole and sulphur encrusts the frozen earth around several other vents. In the centre of the crater, there is a straight-sided shaft, just large enough for an Empedoclean leap, that plummets to dark and unfathomable depths. As Fukada Kyuya observes, this is a summit that leaves you in no doubt that you are standing on top of an active volcano.


The mountain can be descended to the south, by a path down to Naka-no-yu, where an onsen used to ply its trade before the Abo tunnel was built. In 1995, a steam explosion killed four construction workers there, showing that titanic forces still lurk beneath the tranquil scenery. As I walked down through the beech woods, the autumn wind wrested the last leaves from the trees.

References

Eyewitness account of Yake-dake eruption by J Merle Davis, from “Inaka” (Vol II, 1915), the newsletter of the Mountain Goats of Kobe (see previous posting) - many thanks to Iain Williams of the Toyohashi Alpine Club for rediscovering "Inaka" and for generously sending me this extract!

Yake-dake chapter of Nihon Hyakumeizan by Fukada Kyūya in a forthcoming translation as One Hundred Mountains of Japan

Black-and-white photo of Yake-dake in 1925 by Hokari Misuo, a pioneer mountain photographer, from 人はなぜ山に登るか, volume 103 in the Taiyo Bessatsu: Nihon no Kokoro series (Heibonsha, 1998)

17 comments:

owenandbenjamin said...

Incredible pictures.

wes said...

another brilliant account of a spectacular volcano. looks like the weather gods were very kind to you.

you've convinced me to have another go at Mt. Yake, since my first ascent through torrential rain was a bit disappointing.

Peter Skov said...

You've got me dreaming of Yake now. I should really add it to my list of targets in the Alps. The account of the eruption was interesting. You really worked hard to find it. When your book comes out, be sure to let me know. Your blog is providing me with lots of precious resource material but I prefer to have a paper version on my shelf that I can read at leisure anywhere, anytime.

Project Hyakumeizan said...

Tornadoes: thanks for stopping by

Wes: Yake is a stratovolcano for all seasons - definitely worth another visit. Winter on skis is good, but autumn is more colourful....

Peter: many thanks for your kind words, but it was Iain Williams who did the most research work for this post - by rediscovering the long-lost eyewitness account of the 1915 eruption. As Kami-kochi was quite remote in those days, I imagine rather few people saw the eruption from close up...

hanameizan said...

Fascinating as always. Your blog is my only source of historical reading on the mountains in Japan. I couldn't help smile at the thought that breakfast outweighed the risk of being engulfed in further eruptions.

BTW, the Naka-no-yu onsen was still open last year. I down came past it around midnight after going up Yakedake, and the many lit lanterns and cosy glow radiating from within were most inviting. And although the Abo tunnel has cut most of the traffic, big trucks still haul up the old mountain road to avoid the toll fee.

Project Hyakumeizan said...

Julian: well, I heartily endorse the importance of breakfast, even - no, especially - in the face of volcanic eruptions. And it's very good to hear that Naka-no-yu onsen is still in business, although they must have rebuilt the buildings - the original one was razed to make way for the Hyperspace Bypass of the new Abo tunnel. That was a sad day - "Goodbye, and thanks for all the hot water," I felt like saying ....

hanameizan said...

My memory is vague, but I wonder whether a different building was razed. I seem to remember that there used to be a primitive shack just a couple of hundred metres to the left of the Kamikochi gate and sentry post, where one could bathe for free. Did you ever soak your limbs in there? Sadly, that shack has gone.

Project Hyakumeizan said...

Julian: yes, I believe you are right - I remember an old onsen right in the bend of the old road - hardly more than a shack. But I may be mistaken.... As Mark Twain said, "When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it. "

TPB said...

That is a mighty lahar disaster described right there. In these days of sabo dams it's difficult to see such an event occurring again but we never know... Reminiscent of scenes at Nevado del Ruiz or Mayon.
Thanks for sharing!

Project Hyakumeizan said...

Although, from the Inaka account, it's difficult to see any reasonably sized sabo (erosion control dam) stopping a mudslide on the scale of the 1915 one .... Yake is a compact but powerful volcano.

jwatkins said...

I happened on this post by purest chance, and am cheering. J. Merle Davis was my grandfather; he witnessed this eruption three years before my mother was born in Kyoto. I remember many of his stories, and have read his autobiography, but this story is new to me. He was like one of the English Victorians who walked 30 or 40 miles a day all through Europe and scaled every peak with an energy that still astonishes us. Even in his eighties, he explored the Sierra Nevada unaccompanied and came back to report his adventures. I had never heard of the Kobe Mountain Goats, but he was a natural member. And his sense of humor, generally directed at himself, shows up in the story too. Thank you for this gift!

Project Hyakumeizan said...

JWatkins: many thanks for stopping by and I'm delighted that One Hundred Mountains has been of service in bringing your grandfather's account of the Yake-dake eruption to your attention. Actually, the thanks are due to Iain Williams of the Toyohashi Alpine Club, who discovered a run of the Kobe Mountain Goats' journals at the Royal Geographical Society and kindly made them available to me. But now you've made me keen to get hold of your grandfather's book - his mountain explorations clearly extended far and wide, both in Japan and elsewhere. Would you object if we wrote a post on him here?

Iainhw said...

jwatkins: I echo Project Hyakumeizan's comments, your grandfather certainly sounds like an interesting fellow and I too would now like to read his autobiography.
In case you want to go hunting for the Inaka journals of the Kobe mt goats, I actually found them in the Alpine Club library in London, not the RGS.

Iainhw said...

I was wearily hiking back towards kamikochi yesterday and was thinking about Yake dake and mr Merle Davis' account of the eruption. In the visitor centre by the bus terminus I picked up a copy of the "Kamikochi Onsenba Climbers' Book". In the book there is the account of the eruption plus another account by Mr Merle Davis of an ascent of Hodaka on snow from the week before the eruption.

Project Hyakumeizan said...

Iaiin - great to hear from you, and I trust both you and Kamikochi are in fine fettle. As for the Reverend Merle Davis, I'm glad he is finding a wider audience. The ascent of Hodaka sounds intriguing. Were they guided, I wonder, in those days....?

Iainhw said...

Yes, both in fine fettle. In short the Hodaka ascent was done on the last day of May. They ascended straight out of Kamikochi and actually summited on Mae Hodaka. Elsewhere in the book it's mentioned that in the early days it wasn't clear what the highest point of the Hodaka massif was. Descending the way they came they narrowly avoided an avalanche (2 of the party knocked over but not swept away).
They were indeed guided, by the son of the renowned Kamonji, Kaokichi Kamijo (strongly recommended by JMD). The other member of the party was Nagai Isaburo.

Project Hyakumeizan said...

Iain - thanks for the details of the Merle Davis ascent - sounds as if they went straight up Dakesawa, still the most popular way up in Golden Week. I remember the alpine swifts zipping to and fro in its upper reaches as we made our own ascent in May. In our case, however, the avalanche happened in Karesawa on the other side of the traverse... Perhaps we should have signed up some later scion of the Kamonji family to keep us out of trouble. No damage done, though ...