Vision or Creation? Kojima Usui and the Literary Landscape of the Japanese Alps

Abstract

An English mineralogist William Gowland (1842-1922) of the Imperial Japanese Mint, in his pioneer account of the "Mountains of Hida and Etchu" in the Handbook for Travellers in Central and Northern Japan, described the pinnacled ridges as something that "might perhaps be termed the Japanese Alps" (Handbook 265). 1 Gowland explored the hidden mountains in the remote corners of central Japan in the late 1870s, when modern maps of the region were still in the making. What he saw in these utterly foreign mountains in the Far East was probably nothing but a diminutive shadow of the glorified Alps whose beauty and sublimity his compatriots had played the greatest part in exploring in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The mountain ranges in front of his eyes were not yet the "Japanese Alps," one of the sights in modern Japan renowned for its scenic beauty.

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