100th Post; a word on Japanese Mountain Climbing

So a few weeks ago, I took a solo trip up Mt. Hiei, the holy mountain northwest of Kyoto. It's 848 vertical meters of rocky riverbed trail... the climb up takes a meager two hours, or you can ride a ropeway most of the way up- excellent for the physically or spiritually handicapped, but anyone else caught riding that thing should be shot. (Subnote: I wholly endorse handicap-accessible mountains, provided that those who lack an actual handicap are given one if they wish to use the amenities.) I saw one person on the entire climb up- about fifteen minutes in, an old man decked out in full pilgrim gear traipsed down the mountain and bellowed a hearty Konnichiwa that belied the fact that he looked like he could easily have been pushing ninety. Mt. Hiei is famous for the temple complex sprawled out across most of its upper reaches- Enryaku-ji, the home of the famous Tendai warrior-monks and keepers of an eternal oil flame, tended by the priests, that they've managed to keep burning for 1200 years. That's right, kids- since 806 AD, some poor monk has had to schlep oil into a little lantern every day, and make sure he doesn't sneeze while he's at it.

That, however, is not the story. The story is thus: I climbed the mountain, and in my quest to actually say I CLIMBED the thing I forsook the ropeway, skipped the stairs and scrambled up a dry riverbed to the temple complex, some hundred meters below the top. The temple itself is pretty cool- one of the nicer ones I've seen, and I FINALLY got to clamber up into the insides of a big ol' temple gate (usually closed, as it's believed they're demon-haunted; for the most famous gate of this kind, read Rashomon- the actual Rasho Gate no longer exists, but they've got a little marker in south Kyoto to tell you where it was)- but the road to the summit was nigh-impossible to find. Feeling like a thief, I traipsed through a graveyard and up an old trail that wound me past ancient gravestones and up to the final approach- where I found an ABC Broadcasting Tower sitting on the broad expanse just below the true peak. After a bit of searching, I found the false peak- 830 meters.

It was covered in concrete. There's a road that leads all the way up, and buses that run every half hour. There's a garden museum, some udon shops, and a gift stall. My heart broke, but the land was higher a little further away, so I kept climbing.

In a grove of cedars, a tiny marker indicated that I was standing on the tallest point of the mountain- 848 meters- and all around the little marker were wooden votive tablets with names of climbing clubs on them. The Kyoto Climbing Society, Otsu, Osaka- almost all the towns large enough to have a climbing club had made the effort and found the tiny-stupid-out-of-the-way trail to claw up the last muddy eighteen meters and stand in a viewless grove of cedars for a few moments.

I had a seat and wolfed a chocolate bar, listened to the engines of the buses groaning in the valley below, and silently thanked the mountain gods that no entrepreneur had decided to build an escalator to the peak.

pax yorochikubo