5) THE HAKKODA MOUNTAINS 八甲田山系 – The Wind Rages

A Voyage to Aomori, Part 5 of 5

  
There are those who claim that happiness has nothing to do with your circumstances, and everything to do with how you choose to respond to them. Such people seem quite numerous nowadays; whether more so than in the past I cannot say.

They are fools.

One does not simply choose to be happy. External circumstances matter. We have created societies that systematically break people. How callous, or plain ignorant, does a person have to be to expect anyone to accept and adapt to a world like that?

And yet, there are places our madness has not yet reached. Places free of arrogance, cruelty, poverty, gender or greed. Places that were there before us and will be there long after us. Places beautiful before anyone was around to corrupt the concept of beauty – a primordial beauty, one we cannot define but know at once when we see it, as though by an instinct as old as love itself.

It was a pain that should not have existed, brought on by the failure of human society, that drove me to Aomori in the distant north of Japan in search of respite. And on my final day there, I found one of the most formidable such places of beauty that I have ever known. It was unexpected – not part of the original plan. And it was guarded by some of the toughest combinations of weather and terrain I have yet encountered.

A location where big explosions once happened bigly.

But it was necessary. It was right. For the winds, the rocks, the trees, the skies, no matter how fierce, how rugged, how sharp, how cold, are not mad. Never have they hurt out of malice. They exclude and alienate no-one; all are welcome in their realm. Unlike society's, their conditions are fair. I could accept them with no hesitation. And in return for what they take, they give a thousandfold.

They give better external circumstances. Beautiful circumstances. Circumstances, if not for happiness, then at least for something magical and profound; something which speaks to your humanity at a level our shallow materialist individualisms no longer bother with.

The Hakkōda Snow March Disaster

Make no mistake, that does not mean the Hakkoda Mountains will not kill you if you do not approach them with care. The Aomori Fifth Infantry Regiment, a unit of the Eighth Division of the Imperial Japanese Army, learnt this in supremely miserable fashion back in the New Year of 1902.

4) OIRASE GORGE 奥入瀬渓流 and LAKE TOWADA 十和田湖 – Colourfully Lurking

A Voyage to Aomori, Part 4 of 5

The Oirase River.

Lake Towada.

Many of Japan's most popular sites of nautral beauty are also immensely destructive volcanoes. Indeed, that volcanism tends to be precisely what made them so beautiful. This is something the millions of people who flock there to take selfies and soak in hot springs might do well to consider.

Hakone is perhaps the best example, but another may be found in the mountainous heart of Aomori Prefecture. At the centre of its southern border, Lake Towada (十和田湖) is a bright blue lake 11km across and almost perfectly circular. The lake, along with the upper course of the Oirase River (奥入瀬川) that flows from it, is now one of the major natural attractions of the Tohoku region, above all in the autumn when its crystalline blue and white currents are wreathed in flaming yellows and reds.

Aomori Prefecture, with Lake Towada at bottom centre.

In fact Lake Towada is a massive volcanic caldera, formed by six major eruptions over the millennia. It is considered active to this day, and though its eruptions are not frequent, those that have happened have been spectacularly violent. The most recent, in 915 CE (when it was still not really part of Japan), was one of the largest volcanic eruptions in Japan's recorded history and smothered the entire region in ashfalls and pyroclastic flows.

Remarkable rock formations and colours, many more spectacular than this, can be found around the rim of the lake and attest to the dramatic processes that created it.

The photos that follow come from a walk along the upper Oirase River, followed by a boat crossing of Lake Towada to the little town of Yasumiya (休屋), the lake's only settlement. The area can be reached in two to three hours by a regular bus service from Aomori City or Hachinohe, and with good planning can be explored as a day visit. Note again that winter in this region is rough and sees both the bus and ferry service suspended – check before you go.

3) AOMORI CITY 青森市 – Rassera, Rassera: The Story of the North

A voyage to Aomori, Part 3 of 5

From the sanctuary of Osorezan I crossed back to this world of artifice and illusions. A two-hour descent from the Shimokita Peninsula by train brought me to Aomori City (青森市), the capital of Aomori Prefecture and my base for a few more days of northern exploration.

Aomori. It is a name synonymous in the Japanese imagination with scallop-fishing, apple-growing, and above all the Nebuta Festival.

The city perches at the south end of Mutsu Bay, at almost the geographic centre of the prefecture, where it brings together the diverse cultures, histories, trades and forces of nature of a land whose present form is of very recent construction. Most of Aomori City as we know it today was built upon the wreckage of World War II, while the concept of Aomori Prefecture as a coherent unit is scarcely a century old. Let's take a look at the story of the north end of Japan.


The First Peoples and the Japanese Conquest 

If we speak of illusions, we should do away with one of this country's most popular: that is, the myth of the homogenous nation. The closer you actually look at Japan, the less escape there is from the hollowness of those claims that this is a land of one people, one ethnicity and one culture.

Get on a bus at Aomori Station and within twenty minutes you come to one of Japan's most interesting archaeological excavations, right there in the suburbs of Aomori City. The oldest finds at the Sannai-Maruyama site (English website here) date back almost 6,000 years, to the world of the earliest known inhabitants of this region.

2) OSOREZAN 恐山 – Mount Fear

A Voyage to Aomori, Part 2 of 5

Eight mountains surround a lake at the centre of the Shimokita axe-blade. The wind ripples its surface, creating gentle waves which caress its sandy shore. It is a serene and separate space, suspended from the mortal realm. The top of the world. A paradise. A place of peace.

And a place of dread. There are no other sounds, because the lake has a pH of about 3.5, too acidic to support much animal life. Beyond the shore unfolds a charred and rugged hellscape of blasted rock piles, steaming fumaroles and brooks of bubbling yellow water. The earth looks either soon to crumble or freshly made anew, and the scent of sulphur hangs everywhere. Listen close and stranger sounds emerge: from below there wells the gurgle of the underworld, so close to the surface, and the caws of crows pierce the wind. A thousand pinwheels spin, their whirls converging into a singular neverending rattle. It is eerie – like you stand between the realms of the living and the dead but cannot tell which way is which.

This is Osorezan (恐山), an ancient volcanic caldera. Its landscape and soundscape is like no other, and the feelings it evokes defy description. 

Osore (恐れ) in Japanese translates broadly as 'fear', 'dread', 'horror', 'concern', or 'unease'. This gives the place's name various renderings in English, complicated by it being actually more than one mountain. My choice of 'Mount Fear' here reflects my first encounter with it – many ages ago, before I even knew it existed, in the days of the now rather venerable Nintendo 64 games console.

In the video game Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, the heroic party must ascend this Mount Fear late in the story. It is presented as a desolate if tranquil mountain wasteland, buried in snow and haunted by papery ghosts. At the top lives a witch who can summon the spirits of the dead. The party seeks her in order to consult with the spirit of a certain Wise Old Man, whom they believe to have died when his house was blown up by the bad guys, and who, being the Wise Old Man, is the only one who can tell them what to do next.

The witch was an itako – a traditional shaman, usually blind and female, now closely associated with Osorezan and one of the main things for which the place is known. During festivals in July and October people come and pay for the itako to summon the spirits of their deceased relatives or ancestors for conversation. It is a declining practice: today only a few very elderly itako remain, and their work has been called a sham and met with official disapproval. We may note in this connection that in Mystical Ninja, the party later run into the wise old man whose “spirit” they had got the itako to summon; he had not been at home when his house was destroyed and was still in fact quite alive. 

As I was there outside the festival season I did not come across any itako, and so have no more to say on that subject. I sought this place for reasons of my own. Amidst this hub of the heavens and hells stands Bodai-ji temple (菩提寺), one of the three most sacred sites in Japan and a place of respite, reflection and spiritual training for over one thousand years. It is one of the principal seats of the Bodhisattva Jizō (地蔵) whose red-garbed likeness is familiar all over Japan, especially where he watches over travellers on the country's mountain trails.

Bodai-ji (菩提寺).

I am not a religious person. Nonetheless, Osorezan beckoned as a place of natural and spiritual power that deeply precedes, and transcends, the frustrating politics and dogmas of human religion. Nor does the realm of the dead perturb me – I have approached its boundary before, and found nothing to fear in what I saw across it. And so I, too, decided to make the journey to the burning mountain, in hope of surfacing from the nightmare bubble-worlds our societies have become and their soul-devouring broken frameworks of thought and practice. It was my intent to pass a night in the temple, cleanse my spirit in ancient sulphur, and perhaps, just perhaps, like Goemon's party, to find a way to go.

1) THE SHIMOKITA PENINSULA 下北半島 – A Bridge Between Worlds

A Voyage to Aomori, Part 1 of 5

It beckoned. Cold, remote and foreboding at the edge of Japan, an axe-shaped wildnerness unknown in the English-speaking world and far from everything.

The Shimokita Peninsula (下北半島) marks the northernmost frontier of Japan proper. It was one of the final territories to be reached and incorporated into the Japanese nation (apart from Hokkaido in the north and the Ryukyu Islands in the south, which are in essence different countries, though that is another story.) 

Long had I felt the call to explore these reaches. However, four years into my residence in Japan an impossible set of circumstances emerged in the face of which a retreat was the only option. Shimokita become the inevitable destination.

North, just as before – as on that voyage to that other world, Hokkaido, and those explorations of Tohoku around that time or since. But this time was different. This was a necessary flight to the fringes of this land, in search of a crossing to a very different kind of realm. 

Osorezan (恐山). The so-called mountains of fear, a mysterious beacon at the centre of Shimokita. Its name is well-known throughout Japan, for Buddhist mythology has it that it is the entrance to hell, and a place through which everyone must transit after they die. Its landscape is volcanic, sulphurous, bizarre, and charged with a strange spiritual energy: a place of dread to some, of peace to others, for it seems all react to it differently. This was the place I sought, though I cannot entirely say why. 

On the way I found there is more to Shimokita than its image suggests. Like most places considered remote, peripheral and empty, it seems Shimokita has long been exactly the opposite. For it guards the Tsugaru Strait (津軽海峡), a crossroads of history which has brought together people, information, cultures and goods from different lands over hundreds of years. Cold it certainly is, and out of the way to most of us it may be, but Shimokita reaches out for the worlds of the northern seas, on top of connecting those of the living and the dead, and has a beauty of its own that is one of a kind yet varied, subtle yet full of character.

Aomori Prefecture, in red, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Shimokita is its eastern peninsula. Together with the Tsugaru Peninsula (the western one) it encloses Mutsu Bay. To their north the deep Tsugaru Strait separates Japan's main island of Honshu from Hokkaido.

Shimokita.

It is here that we shall open this five-article series. It covers a journey that would continue on to Aomori city (bottom-left on the map above), and from there into the mountains and forests that stretch down this prefecture's centre. But let us start where that journey began: on a train that rocketed out of Tokyo one bleak end-of-summer morning. By the afternoon it had reached Aomori Prefecture, where I changed at Hachinohe then Noheji onto ever smaller trains, which finally trundled, as evening fell, up the windswept axe-handle of the Shimokita Peninsula.