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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.