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Paper short abstract

Polymath Kano Tadao, in his 1920s-1930s Atayal and Bunun peoples-aided mountain fieldwork treks, encountered various ways to categorize and map Taiwan’s two tallest mountains, challenging the dominant Japanese taxonomy of the colonial alpine landscape.

Paper long abstract

In 1925, eighteen-year-old Kano Tadao moved from Tokyo to Taipei to attend the newly established Taipei Higher School, with an ulterior motive to collect insects in the Taiwanese mountains. A childhood hobby that at age twelve led to his first academic publication, Kano by the mid-1920s had scoured to this end the empire’s northern ranges and hills, in Kamikōchi, Hokkaidō, Sakhalin, and more. Kano’s Higher School days found him more in Taiwan’s mountains than in classrooms, and he returned to the ridges annually during his metropolitan university years, by which time the study of these peaks and their inhabitants had become his career. His field writings have been dubbed paean to alpine Taiwan that Kano cherished over the empire’s other peaks, capturing their colorful beauty better than any camera possibly could.

This paper explores Kano’s youthful mountaineering trips to the regions surrounding the two tallest peaks in Taiwan: Tsugitaka (A: Sekuwan, C: Xueshan, E: Sylvia) and Niitaka (B: Tongku Saveq, C: Yushan, E: Morrison/Jade). It argues that Kano, by this time a professional entomologist, geologist, geographer, and ethnographer, sought to identify and add to the multiple ways in which these two regions were categorized and mapped, to imagine alpine Taiwan as a kaleidoscope of overlapping visions. Working closely with Atayal aboriginal guides in his Tsugitaka climbs and Bunun guides in the Niitaka region, Kano learnt of their taxonomies, often linked to their hunting and farming, that were critical to their lives and Kano’s survival during his fieldwork. These categorizations co-existed with the Japanese mapping of the archipelagic spaces, peoples, politics, and resources that began soon after occupation in 1895 and Kano in the mid-1920s to the early 1930s continued to qualify and correct. He added to these taxonomies his own findings reached with indispensable aboriginal aids, including those surrounding altitudinal animal distribution that was the first of its kind and which eventually became his doctoral dissertation. In the process, Kano challenged the Government General’s narrow understanding of the central Taiwanese mountains that claimed authority through science, although fundamentally he remained an apologist for the Japanese occupation of the archipelago.

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Paper short abstract

In the 1930s and 1940s, Japanese university mountaineering clubs conducted overseas mountaineering expeditions for the Japanese empire, which produced new scientific knowledge for territorial control and reinforced landscape hierarchies.

Paper long abstract

Many Japanese university mountaineering clubs were initially established in the early twentieth century for domestic mountain climbing in the Japanese Alps. However, by the mid-1930s and early 1940s, these clubs drastically expanded their activities into overseas mountaineering expeditions aiming for mountains in the Japanese colonies and the empire’s borderlands, reaching Hokkaido, Karafuto, the Kuril Islands, Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, and even the Himalayan mountains.

As argued in this paper, rather than pursuing mountaineering solely for athletic achievement, these student expeditions directly contributed to the interests of the Japanese empire by producing new scientific knowledge and geographic documentation that facilitated territorial control over colonial and disputed areas. The paper demonstrates that these student mountaineering ventures were full-fledged colonial enterprises requiring substantial fundraising, logistical coordination, military approval, and exploitation of colonial infrastructure and local labor. Moreover, these expeditions were extensively documented in mountaineering magazines and mainstream newspapers, sometimes with direct media co-financing, thus also furthering the propaganda goals of the Japanese state.

Through a close reading of primary sources such as travelogues, club archives, and newspaper reporting, this paper shows how these expeditions reinforced imagined geographical hierarchies of Japanese landscape superiority over colonial peripheries through systematic comparison and ranking of mountain landscapes. For example, travelogues repeatedly invoked the Japanese Alps as a frame of reference for audiences unfamiliar with colonial terrain, while simultaneously presenting colonial mountains as primitive landscapes requiring Japanese civilizational intervention. Colonial peaks were portrayed either as inferior to Japanese domestic mountains or, in Taiwan's case, as potentially surpassing them, which caused tension that motivated claims of Japanese technical and cultural supremacy. The expeditions also propagated a totalitarian mountaineering ethos emphasizing collective unity and ego suppression, training cultivated in domestic mountains and transferred to extreme-altitude climbing. Ultimately, these university expeditions reveal how mountaineering became entangled with imperial ideology, transforming athletic pursuit into a mechanism for territorial imagination, knowledge production, and colonial power.

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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Japanese settlers reimagined Mt. Asahidake, a sacred site for the Ainu, into imperial symbols to assert territorial dominance and elevate Hokkaidō’s peripheral status within the Japanese empire between 1900s–1920s.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how Japanese settlers constructed imagined geographies of Mt. Asahidake (also known as Mt. Daisetsu), the highest peak in Hokkaidō, to advance the island’s colonization. These narratives served two purposes: asserting territorial dominance and elevating Hokkaidō’s peripheral status within the Japanese empire. For the Ainu, Mt. Asahidake was a sacred "playground of gods," with its lower slopes providing vital game for hunting and its upper flanks imbued with mythic significance. Following Hokkaidō’s annexation in 1869, official and private expeditions were drawn to the mountain’s abundant rivers and timber. Yet, unlike Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range, Mt. Asahidake did not witness violent indigenous resistance, leaving it largely overlooked for four uneventful decades. This changed in the 1920s, particularly after the 1921 visit of Ōmachi Keigetsu (1869–1925), a renowned travel writer From Tokyo, who praised Asahidake for its unparalleled grandeur despite its modest elevation of 2,291 meters, challenging modern mountaineering’s fixation on height.

Based on archival research of newspapers and travelogues, this paper traces the evolving representations of Mt. Asahidake during the 1900s–1920s, shaped by various settler actors. The Hokkaidō government established the Hokkaidō Alpine Club to promote the mountain’s sublime beauty to lure settler immigration. Local educators and businessmen coined and publicized the “Hokkaidō Alps,” aiming to rival the iconic Japanese Alps. Newspapers and alpine clubs organized mountaineering tours, marketing the mountain as an accessible leisure destination for everyone. Meanwhile, the Imperial Japanese Army stationed there framed their expeditions as arduous journeys to a sacred summit that allegedly embodied the Japanese spirit.

Despite their diversity, these narratives shared two key features. First, they asserted territorial dominance by recasting Mt. Asahidake through modern scientific and romantic notions of sublimity, supplanting Ainu presence and belief. The settlers transformed the mountain into a symbol of Japanese imperial identity. Second, they reflected Hokkaidō’s peripheral position within Japan and sought to elevate its status by equating Mt. Asahidake with the Japanese Alps. This paper argues that under imperial contexts, mountains were not merely spaces of conquest but also footholds for peripheral regions to assert prominence of their place within the empire.