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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.