Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This talk shows how the modern constructs of nature, religion, and spirituality were both interwoven and under construction in the realm of mountaineering through literary evidence from three influential thinkers and climbers at the turn of Japan's twentieth century.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars and the general public tend to draw clear lines between mountain worship and modern mountaineering. In the Japanese humanities, these lines run deep. Mountain worship has been largely studied from a folk studies perspective (minzokugaku), aligned with tradition, austerity, piety, and cultural essentialism. In contrast, mountaineering and related activities (rock climbing, hiking, etc.) have been seen as modern, secular, recreational, and international. These assumptions are ripe for reappraisal. They misleadingly place either realm of activity into disassociation and competition, negate the possibility of historical intersections, and rely on a shaky foundation of a priori binaries and categories (traditional/modern, religion/sport, sacred/secular, spirituality, and nature). Indeed, a closer look at various types of evidence from the late Meiji and Taisho eras blurs those lines: networks comprising alpinists and communities devoted to mountain worship; a deep interest in Japan's history of worship of sacred peaks, as reflected in mountaineering literature by Japanese and foreign alpinists; and the active assemblage of novel intellectual categories (tradition, sport, religion, the secular, and nature) that we now take as given.

Within this variegated topography of mountaineering and mountain worship at the turn of Japan's twentieth century, this talk will explore evolving ideas about religion, spirituality, and the natural world that seem to have emerged out of incoming British (Anglican-infused) nineteenth-century concepts in tandem with changing domestic engagement and sentiments. As evidence, it will take up the writings of Walter Weston (1861-1940), Anglican missionary and celebrated forefather of modern Japanese alpinism, Shiga Shigetaka (1863-1927) on his theory of the Japanese landscape (Nihon fūkeiron, the title of his book, published in 1894), and alpinist/author Tanabe Jūji (1884-1972), who wrote about his relationship to the mountains in ways that interlaced 'nature' with the numen. As this talk will show, the writings of these figures demonstrate the need to fundamentally rethink the modern history of alpinism and mountain worship in ways that carry implications for our understanding of nature, religion, and spirituality in the modern era down to the present.