Photo by Masa Abe

We never did climb Mount Fuji, the volcanic mountain that could be seen in the background if you knew which street to stand on; Aoyama Dori, for example, afforded a glimpse of it, but we never aspired to climb it.  We did, though, climb other mountains surrounding Tokyo.  We had joined the Tokyo chapter of Friends of the Earth, and they made arrangements for their members to meet at gathering points and then proceed to a point where we could embark on a day-ascent of a mountain.

We would excitedly await the arrival of Saturday morning and set off around seven to catch a succession of buses, trains, subways to take us to the gathering point.  There another, chartered bus awaited us to drive us out of the sprawling suburbs of that giant city to small surrounding towns where our chosen trailhead was located and we would set off on an ascent of a half-day's duration.

We were fifty years old at that time, and my enthusiasm often led me to spontaneous bursts of energy, and even though I was the oldest person in the group comprised of foreigners from Germany, Canada (us), Australia along with an ebullient group of local Japanese, I would tend to lead the pack.  And then, unable to sustain the pace, I would begin to fall back, exhausted, grateful for a rest when everyone would position themselves within the forest on the mountain we were ascending, to take a break and enjoy a snack.

Once we climbed through a bamboo forest and it was beautifully ephemeral and otherworldly seeming, with the placement of Japanese stone lanterns here and there among the bamboo trees.  Sometimes our climb would be interrupted by a visit to a traditional tea house and we would experience another kind of serenity; the tea ceremony.  We would sometimes see signage warning to look out for monkeys, though we never did catch a glimpse of any. Sometimes there would be signage that the trees we were passing near the summit were thousand-year-old Ginkgos.  Once, there was a temple atop a mountain, with a pair of giant sandals hung on display, said to have been worn by a Buddha who had passed that way on his journey from India to China.

Twenty six years later, I still find it difficult to restrain myself, wanting to forge ahead faster than is intelligent, rather than conserving strength in a more moderate way that would not end up in physical exhaustion of near collapse.