geography and geology in Honshu and Hokkaido
Hokkaido is famous for its mountains. Before arriving I had pictured the island as a single hulking mass of rock rising abruptly out of the ocean. This was probably partly due to the comments of many Japanese people we met on our way there, who often expressed their surprise that we were planning on sleeping in a van, mentioning the snow and asking whether we would be ok at such high altitudes. I think this is probably because many Japanese associate the island with skiing and winter sports as it turns out the island isn’t entirely snowy, jagged peaks.
Although certain parts of Hokkaido do have the appearance of mountains rising straight from the ocean (see my last entry for photos of the of coastline Shiretoko), topographically the island is more like a single volcano, stretched and flattened: land rising gently and mostly symmetrically from the sea into the central crest of mountains of Daisetsuzan national park (“Daisetsuzan” meaning ‘great snowy mountains’). There are other mountains too, most ranging out radially from the centre, but between these can also be found hills more of ‘rolling’ variety, as well as sweeping planes, farmland, picturesque meadows and of course miles and miles of coastline.
coastal zen
In contrast to the Shiretoko peninsula’s dramatic eruption, the beauty of the island’s north eastern coastline (and its solitary road) lies in the calming expanse of land and sea that expand endlessly in all directions towards the horizon. The beach sand is dark and volcanic and flecked with the white of broken sea shells. We stopped for a break at an isolated cafe that looked like a sort of bunker, its doors and windows reinforced and insulated against extreme winter weather. Inside a photography exhibition showed the same area in an ethereal deep-winter cladding of white ice and snow, the sea awash with spectacular drifts of sea ice. Interestingly, this most northerly and famously frigid part of Japan lies at only 44 degrees north, the same latitude as the northern coast of the mediterranean. The reason the sea here freezes is because of the its proximity to Siberia, from which it receives frozen winds and also large quantities of freshwater from the Amur river, which lower the sea’s salinity, raising its freezing point. This “thermohaline” process actually is the driver of oceanic circulation, meaning that this small corner of sea, sandwiched between the remote edge of Hokkaido and the extremities of Russian Pacific territory, plays a crucial role in the overall global geo-system. We were too late to see the freeze, but those intrepid enough to visit in deep-winter can ride ice-breaking tour boats and spy seals chilling on the frozen drifts.
Although the Okhotsk line and many other parts of Hokkaido feel very empty, the island is far from deserted: it’s dotted with small settlements, and has a total population of five and a half million people, giving it a similar population density to Scotland, roughly six times less than England. Of the island’s urban centres, we bypassed Sapporo, the only city (and prefectural capital), but did pass through Hakodate, the island’s point of access by ferry and its largest town. We spent our first night at the top of Mount Hakodate which, although only stands at 344 metres and is accessible by car, rises straight up out of the sea and provides a spectacular view over city and the island beyond. Hakodate it built on a peninsula that locals claim is shaped as a fractal miniature of the whole island, and if this is true you could also argue that the small but shapely mount Hakodate is also a miniature taster of its taller sistren residing further inland.
a fountain of mountain
Whilst they don’t constitute the whole island, mountainous national parks really are Hokkaido’s main event. Visiting out of season, there was still a lot of snow and so some of the smaller roads were still shut, but by luck we arrived just as the main, scenic high passes began to open. With a bit of careful planning, a lot of making it up on the fly and a bit of looping back on ourselves we were able to pass through all of major national parks, linking them into a splendid daisy chain of elemental beauty.
I’ve never driven so extensively in such a mountainous area. Doing so for days on end, one of the things I came to start to appreciate and enjoy was the way the roads themselves interact with the landscape. At times gently following contours, at others plunging right through cliff faces and popping out of the other side, stacks of hairpins climbing mountain sides, even a viaduct running above the forest canopy. Japanese infrastructure is in general fairly unapologetic: rivers and shorelines are banked with concrete and telephone wire and electricity pylons intrude on almost every view. I don’t think there has necessarily been a different approach in Hokkaido, it’s just that the landscape is so massive and unconquerable that where the same ugly concrete features have been deployed, whilst still unwelcome, they are often lost against the huge bodies of rocks and amongst the innumerable trees.
During our first full day’s journey in Hokkaido, I was just starting to relax into the drive, climbing a steep ascent into forest hillside, and felt a flare of excitement as it occurred to me that we hadn’t seen another vehicle or sign of human habitation for a good while. My phone (running GPS) had no reception — we were getting properly out there. As if by the design of a mischievous woodland Kami, moments later a loud, ominous vibrating rumble began emanating from the car. Mattie looked as alarmed as I did, and I pulled into a lay-by with a sinking heart — our first mechanical problem, and the furthest from civilisation we had yet ventured.
The fault eluded my rigorous diagnostic assessment (tyres ok, nothing on fire, nothing hanging off the bottom) and there was no evidence of anything on the road that we had run over. We were wondering how we would contact roadside assistance when a lorry rounded the corner coming for the other direction, making a very similar sound. Walking right up to the edge of the road, I was surprised to see that a small section the asphalt was lined with wide horizontal grooves. This didn’t fully explain things, as we had heard the noise for a while, and the lorry seemed to be producing it constantly too. Walking a little further along I was astonished to see identical grooves magically appear on the road where a moment before there had been none. It became apparent that, viewed from a distance of a metre or more these grooves are totally invisible — it just looks like normal road, which is why we couldn’t see them from the car. Quite the illusion of a mischievous spirit!
What these grooves are for I am not sure, perhaps as an ice safety feature, but we later found them in other parts of Hokkaido. Often they provided a similar monotonic buzz, but in a few locations they have been deployed for a more charming purpose — musical roads! The grooves vary in width and are arranged to render little ditties as you cruise over them. Apparently the musical potential of this phenomenon was discovered accidentally by a construction team in Hokkaido, who decided that they should put it to good use. How wonderfully Japanese!
We didn’t, of course, want to see this magnificent landscape exclusively from the roadside. This early in the season most of the the more serious hiking routes were still officially closed — we would see the odd person setting off at 6am to attempt them but usually equipped with snowshoes or ice axes — so we stuck to easier, lower altitude walks. Even so we ended up hiking over some snow that was over a metre thick, but thankfully old and firm enough in most places to walk on top of, rather than through.
Hokkadio’s national parks are also scattered with a number of beautiful lakes, which often form the hub for networks of local trails, and can also be wonderful places to spend the night. We spent our second evening on the sandy beach of Shikotsu-ko (lake Shikotsu), mounts Tarumae and Fuppushi rising on the far side, and later on camped by Onneto-ko in Akan national park, still littered with winter ice, also reflecting the nearby volcanic peaks. The much larger lake Akan is particularly special as it is breeding ground for marimo, mysterious balls of algae that only grow in a few select places world wide, Akan being the foremost, in part due to conservation efforts of the local community who run a yearly festival in which marimo that have been removed are returned to the lake.
The national parks have excellent visitors’ centres that provide a wealth of information about local biology, geology and history, as well as practical safety and conservation guidance. My favourite of these was one in Akan national park. In addition to living marimo, the central, expansive room (it must have been at least fifteen by thirty metres) printed onto the floor is amazingly detailed, complete and uninterrupted aerial photography of the entire national park. Tracing out the route of the past couple of days by walking over this massive photo-map was far more exciting than doing the same thing on a smartphone, and really gave a sense of the park’s scale. Many centres also had large relief models which also allow you to get a feel for the lay of the land.
treedom
The massive map of Akan also brought home just how much of the surrounding area was forest — when I first walked in I didn’t even realise I was standing on a giant photograph, I just thought the floor was patterned green. The roads we had been driving along were just traces of brown laced through the sea of green; the lakes that had seemed to form a huge part of the landscape when standing on their shores now looked like insignificant puddles in the kingdom of the trees. Forests are what really get me excited, particularly forested mountains, probably because these are essentially non-existent in the UK. Hokkaido has an abundance of virgin forest, a melange of evergreen and of deciduous trees. The latter were bare during our visit, the combination of furry alpine conifers and woody skeletons mixed in random patterns like a brown and green rorschach test.
By the time of writing, however, the leafless bows will now also be turning luscious green and later in the year will put on a brief, fiery (and much photographed) autumnal display. Whilst I’d love to have seen Hokkaido at its most foliage-rich, coming in spring meant that the island was quiet, and we often had the stunning mountain roads all to ourselves, a nice change from Tokyo and Kyoto which were jam packed with foliage peepers (in search of sakura — cherry blossom). Although we were too early to see Hokkaido in summer livery, we did get to see mountain forests in full bloom on Honshu, Japan’s main island. Our journeys to and from Hokkaido followed Honshu’s central spine of mountains, and the return leg back towards Tokyo was a journey through the seasons. Over the course of a couple of days we left behind still-wintery Hokkadio, passed through the band of cherry blossom (now much further north than we had left it) and descended the latitudes into summer.
On the outward bound journey, our first port of call north of Tokyo had been Nikko national park, which we liked so much that we returned three weeks later on the way back. As we ascended into Nikko for the second time, the trees that had three weeks previously been bare, a mountainside carpet of parched bracken, were now thick with green summer leaves. Similarly, the road up that first time round had been mostly empty, shared with only a few hardcore cyclists, was now thick with cars.
conservation
Being further south, Nikko was more suitable than Hokkaido for hiking and on our first visit we had a ramble up Takayama-san and the surrounding Senjo-ga-hara plains, which are a rich ecosystem of meadows and marshes alive with wildflowers, creeping critters and birdsong. It was really great to see some of the conservation measures taken in this area — boardwalks erected over the most popular meadows, and special fencing with one way gates that control the numbers of deer in particular zones but allow other animals to pass.
These were established because uncontrolled growth of the deer population was impacting detrimentally to the area’s flora and gradually turning meadow to desert. This problem was noticed early in Nikko because of the very visible effect it was having on the area’s prized wildflowers, but Britain has been suffering from the same problem for centuries, new trees unable to replace their ancient and felled forebears, partly a result of centuries of sheep and deer nibbling away at new saplings.
Whilst there is evidence of serious conservation work underway in Nikko and other national parks, it would be inaccurate to suggest that Japan is untroubled by development or deforestation. Lost Japan suggests that historically the situation has been very poor:
“With its abundant ‘rainforest’ vegetation, volcanic mountains and the delicate leafage of its native flora, Japan was perhaps one of the most beautiful countries in the world. During the ensuing twenty-odd years, the country’s natural environment has changed completely. The old-growth forests have been logged and replanted with neat rows of cedar trees, and within these cedar groves it is deathly silent. They have become deserts in which the living, breathing presence of plants and animals cannot be sensed.”
That was written in the early 90s. Looking at the Japanese government’s Ministry of the Environment’s (english) website it appears that their last dedicated report on wildlife conservation in Japan was released in 1997. However, their 2017 annual report’s chapter on “biodiversity and environmental services”, whilst not really addressing the issues of the detrimental effects of deforestation on biodiversity in any real detail, does recognise the importance of the preservation of “nature” within national parks as important for economic purposes and outlines a plan to conserve national park areas and support their tourist industries. This certainly fits with the impression I got from the shiny new new visitors centres and suggests that national parks, at least, have become subject to some sort of more thoughtful conservation regulation, even if they are the last remaining pockets of a rich ecosystem that relatively recently covered much of the nation.
Even so, serious logging definitely still takes place in and around some of the national parks. In Hakodate I saw piles and piles of trunks in yards and on lorries awaiting shipment, and in Nikko saw logging lorries working not far from the meadows with anti-deer sapling-protection technology. Wherever and however this work is being carried out, I hope that it is being done responsibly, with measures being taken not only to maintain the numbers of trees but also to protect the associated ecosystems, as otherwise the country risks damaging one of its greatest assets even further.
a walk in the park
Nikko National Park is dominated by the imposing volcano Nantai-san (mount Nantai) with a peak of 2500m and 1300m of ascent it looked like a decent challenge and probably the most serious day hike we could realistically attempt at this time of year without winter mountaineering equipment. It was officially closed when we first visited but opened just a couple of days before we were due to leave for Russia. We decided that it would be a great way to finish our time in Japan and worth the logistical acrobatics needed to make our departure flight. It turned out to be a glorious day, and as Nikko is accessible from Tokyo by Shinkansen (bullet train) many Japanese hikers were also there celebrating the start of the season.
Like Fuji-san, Nantai-san is revered as a holy mountain in Japanese shintoism. According to Wikipedia the name Nantai means ‘man’s body’ — thought to be a reference to its phallic shape, as well as its provision of water and fertility to surrounding rice paddies. A monastery at the base collects fees, and it’s clearly also considered wise to take this opportunity to pay spiritual tribute at the monastery’s shrine with the shinto ritual of claps and bows before passing through the gate onto the trail. It’s a steep climb, the 1300m of ascent over only four and half kilometres of horizontal distance. A soft, earth trail through wooodland, quickly becomes a ladder of huge rooty steps, and the second half of the hike was a combination of boulders and loose scree requiring a fair amount of scrambling. As we emerged from the tree-line, the rock underfoot changed to red volcanic pumice with patches of ice and snow, and we were rewarded with a view of Chuzenji-ko (lake Chuzenji), over a kilometre below us.
The summit is crowned with a shrine that includes an impressive statue and an unusual sword sculpture. The presence of these man-made features may seem to make the mountain feel less wild and pristine, but they are in fact an expression of Shintoism’s honouring and reverence of the nature. To quote for a second time from Lost Japan, in traditional Shintoism the natural world, and in particular forests and mountains are, or at least were, considered “mysterious and fantastic, a sacred area that seemed surely inhabited by gods”. Given this, it seems a shame that Japan’s national parks are evaluated by the environmental ministry for their economic value but not also as cultural and spiritual assets.
volcanic activity
Like many of the mountains we saw in Japan, Nantai-san has the unmistakable form of the volcanic cone. It is considered an ‘active’ volcano, thought to have erupted around 7000 years ago. By comparison, at the start of our van journey we tried to hike around Owakudani valley in the Hakone area, but we found the trails closed due to large quantities of sulphur and other poisonous gases spewing out of the mountainside, and the last eruption here was 3000 years ago. Most threatening of all is Sakurajima, at the other end of the country, nestled within an inlet beside the populous rainforest island of Kagoshima — it last had a serious eruption 100 years ago and geologists (incidentally from my own alma mater of Bristol University) predict that it could have another within the next 30 years.
Standing in the Owakudani valley, watching the plume of volcanic fume belch out of the mountain above, only 40km from the edge of the Tokyo urban sprawl, we were reminded of Japan’s geological heritage and what this could, one day, mean for people living there.
I had originally written a somewhat light-hearted, volcanically themed end to this blog post, but within the last few days there has been a volcanic eruption in Guatemala, the deadly consequences of which are still unfolding in the news. Instead I’d rather take this opportunity to reflect on my reaction to hearing this news. My first thought was ‘that could have been Japan’, immediately exposing my own bias — bias towards places I have visited, certainly, but also most probably bias towards so-called developed nations too. I think making attempts to recognise these sort of default assumptions can only be a good thing. A list of fundraising initiatives to support those affected by the situation in Guatemala is available here.
