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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.