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Paper short abstract

Through the analysis of photographic and travel accounts of the Japanese earliest explorations of the Himalayas and Tian Shan, this presentation shows that modern mountaineering tools and experiences were deployed within Buddhist imaginaries of pilgrimage and the construction of a Buddhist world.

Paper long abstract

Historiography on Japanese modern mountaineering takes an ambiguous stance toward religious approaches to mountains. It acknowledges mountain worship and pilgrimage as a precedent to the development of modern mountaineering on the model of European alpinism, while stressing an opposition between the two approaches. For example, scholars often identify the famous Buddhist monk Kawaguchi Ekai’s Meiji-period travel to Nepal and Tibet as presaging the later Japanese mountaineers’ interest in the Himalayas, even though Kawaguchi’s primary aim was to study Tibetan Buddhism. This presentation will show a compresence, rather than a progressive replacement, of pilgrim and modern mountaineer identities in the earliest Japanese exploration of Central Asian mountain ranges. I will particularly focus on two photographic collections of the Himalayas and Tian Shan ranges that were produced through Buddhist pilgrimage to India and exploration of Buddhist sites in Central Asia. The first collection focuses on the Tian Shan mountains and was taken by Yoshikawa Koichirō, leader of one of the Otani expeditions to Buddhist sites of Central Asia funded by the Nishi Honganji sect in the last decade of the Meiji period. The second is a collection by the photographer-mountaineer Hasegawa Denjirō during his travels in the Himalayas in the 1920s and 1930s, which also includes photos taken during a Buddhist pilgrimage to India. These photos of the Himalayas were reproduced in both Buddhist and mountaineering magazines in Japan. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines religious studies, history, and media theory on photography, I will argue that the combination of photography and embodied experience of mountain climbing did not simply equate to a disenchanting gaze onto the peaks. It could also be deployed within Buddhist discourse that linked together civilization, religion, and the environment. The modern lens of the explorer and the photographer, combined with the embodied experience of standing on the peaks of the Himalayas, informed a reimagination of the Buddhist world that stressed the connection between Japan and the rest of Asia, indirectly supporting pan-Asian ideology. Key to this discourse was the link between environment and religion in the idea of an Asian civilization rooted in ancient India.

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Paper short abstract

This paper discusses how Japanese visual media (guidebooks and prints) produced in the Meiji period as tools for virtual round-the-world-tourism translated the environmental imaginaries of nineteenth-century globetrotters (and their orientalist attitudes), simultaneously invoking and reshaping them.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses visual media produced in Meiji Japan and related to a novel form of travel - globetrotting - that grew popular in Europe and North America in the 1870s. Taking an interdisciplinary approach combining history, media theory and tourism studies, I discuss how this media translated and adapted ‘Western’ environmental imaginaries connected to this new tourist fad and reshaped them through a Japanese gaze.

After the Meiji Restoration, globetrotters reached Japan in growing numbers, generating curiosity in Japanese observers. Up to 1908 (when the first group of Japanese travellers took part in a touristic world tour organized by the Asahi Shinbun) round-the-world tourism remained essentially a ‘Western’ practice, but already from the late 1870s, a growing sector of the Japanese public came to be enamoured with and invested in the culture of globetrotting. This public curiosity towards the world as seen through the tourist gaze led to the publication of numerous works, including visual (or visually heavy) materials such as the illustrated guidebook "Sekai ryokō bankoku meisho zue" (Aoki Tsunesaburō, 7 vols., 1885-1886), the homonymous woodblock-print collection by Inoue Yasuji (1887), and several immersive maps, particularly in the form of sugoroku board games. These materials drew from the embodied experience of real globetrotters, and turned it into a virtual one, making it easily available to Japanese consumers. Some of them also played with the fantasy of a Japan that was advanced enough to compete with the ‘West’ in the touristic exploration of the world.

Tools for virtual globetrotting, such as panoramas and stereoscopic photography, were commonly produced also in Europe and in the United States, as a way to make a very expensive travel experience ‘affordable’ to the mass public. Both the travel accounts of real globetrotters and these materials contributed to the construction of an environmental imaginary that was rooted in orientalist stances. Focusing both on representations of foreign (including ‘exotic’) nature and landscapes, and on representations of the Japanese landscape, my paper will discuss how the above-listed Japanese visual materials engaged with this imaginary, simultaneously invoking and reshaping it - alongside developing notions of Japanese exceptionalism.

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Paper short abstract

Taking literary and photographic evidence from early twentieth-century Japanese alpinism, this presentation explores negotiations—foreign and domestic, intellectual and embodied, religious and secular—in the modern mountain ascent and its implications for lasting views about the natural world.

Paper long abstract

Nature and the physical environment got a major conceptual revamp in Japan’s early twentieth century. Romantic and Protestant influences intermingled with domestic strands of thought, subjectivity and the individual’s relationship to the natural world took new dimensions, and direct exposure to the elements were interwoven with ideas. This transformation occurred within a new sport—alpinism—as an adventurous band of young elites from Tokyo and Yokohama began pursuing big ascents in the newly minted ‘Japanese Alps’ and elsewhere. They read about mountaineering from English works, tested themselves on hazardous climbs, and wrote voluminous accounts chronicling and reflecting on their experiences in the mountains. Through all of this, the pioneers of Japanese alpinism thought deeply about their own relationship to the mountains, the natural world, and nature as an abstract concept.

Early twentieth-century mountaineering literature and photography reveal a range of ways in which alpinists approached ideas about mountains and the natural environment. Some embraced voices from Europe and the US—Wordsworth, Emerson, Ruskin, Schopenhauer, and others—likewise positioning the mountain climb as an act of harmonization between man and nature. Others adopted some aspects of the imported sport, while rejecting vocabulary like “mountain conquest” as incongruent with their own sentiments. For some, valorizing Japan’s mountains and alleged cultural affinities toward the natural environment channeled into broader national agendas.

Despite these different paths of thought, two throughlines are notable. First, all were negotiating foreign and domestic concepts in advancing a new conceptualization of nature. Second, there was a conscious distancing from the traditional mountain-climbing forms of pilgrimage that continued in their midst. Gone was an enchanted landscape teeming with gods, spirits, dragons, and demons. In its place, a generalized spirituality saturated the natural world. These common threads contributed to the making of a modern secular sphere—one explicitly distinct from religion and folk practices, while informed by Romantic and Protestant orientations toward the physical environment. This presentation maps out those negotiations—between foreign and domestic, intellectual and embodied, and religious versus secular—in the modern mountain ascent and its implications for lasting views about the natural world.