Caves are Japan's last unexplored frontiers

Japan Today

6 days ago

By Michael Hoffman
For all the good that can be said of modern life – and much good can be said of it: it's fast, efficient convenient, stimulating, automated, virtual, comfortable, healthy, materially abundant if you've money (and money is to be had if you work hard, play your cards right, resist extravagant temptation and aren't uncommonly unlucky) – there is something, and very few fail to feel this at one time or another, missing at the core of it. What? Easier to feel it than name it.
Brutus magazine (July 15) asks a pertinent question: 'Why do people still long for adventure?' Because, the short answer would go, we are adventurers at heart: hunters, warriors, explorers. We evolved that way. Then we evolved farther. Too far? Not far enough? Or in the wrong direction? Away, in any event, from adventure. Hunting even as a sport is in decline, with a resulting surge in wildlife and the threats it poses. War is still with us but not its glory; it's an evil, murderous, soulless business, a sinister survival of darker times, the sooner transcended the better.
Exploring? The world is mapped, packaged, the wilderness suburbanized, the frontiers become tourist resorts. What's left to explore?
You'd be surprised, is Brutus' reply in effect. Terra incognita is not extinct, just hard to get to. Very hard. A sign at the metaphorical entrance might read: For adventurers only.
Adventurers – not all but most – are marked from birth. As kids they're not like other kids. Kids' stuff bores them. They bide their time. They don't know what they want. They may despair of ever finding it. Yusuke Kakuhata, growing up in rural Hokkaido in the 1970s, was like that. Later, as a student at Waseda University, he joined the exploration club and discovered the lure of remote regions.
Not remote enough. He graduated and went farther.
First, the Tsangpo Grand Canyon in Tibet, in 2002-3. Alone. That's the point. Solitude: a common thread linking all Brutus' adventurers. Adventure with friends is fun. Adventure alone is self-discovery. Even with friends – in extreme moments, we're alone.
Tsangpo is the world's deepest canyon. The river flowing through it, the Yarlung Tsangpo, is known as the 'Everest of rivers.' You must earn your passage through an environment like this. Of his experiences there Kakuhata says, 'Tsangpo for me was simply a geographical exploration, filling in empty spaces on a map.' 'Simply.' At times he was hopelessly lost, at times face to face, he thought, with death. It's good material for a book, and he wrote one. But there's more, there's better, meaning worse, more dangerous, more extreme. And he needed it, something in him needed it.
He found it. In 'polar night.'
Night doesn't get blacker than at the poles in winter. 2012 found him in far northern Greenland and Canada – alone again, unless the dogs pulling his sled count as company. He came prepared, a conscientious student of Eskimo ways and Eskimo survival skills. He knew how to hunt Eskimo fashion, how to train dogs, how to live in an environment you almost have to have been born into to tolerate. Perhaps he'd been there in a previous life.
For four months he trekked, on and on into the endless night. He felt at times his spiritual inadequacy. 'If my supplies ran low I'd think to myself, 'If I don't find prey I'll starve.' The Eskimo doesn't think like that. He knows he'll find prey – and so always does.'
Kakuhata did too, evidently, since he lived to tell the tale – another book in embryo – the nub of which he expresses for Brutus this way: 'We who never leave daylight behind can scarcely imagine the grandeur of unending night. I kept thinking to myself, 'What will I feel when at last I see the sun coming up?''
The months passed, the sun rose – 'that feeling' – there's no putting it into words. Maybe no need to put it into words. The point is: extreme exploration is self-exploration. It's yourself you're discovering.
Where are Japan's unexplored regions, where is its endless night? A narrow, crowded island country in the temperate latitudes suggests dim prospects for either – but have you considered caves? What made Katsuji Yoshida consider them? 'I don't even like caves,' he says. No wonder: 'I'm afraid of the dark.' How to explain, then, his commitment to cave exploration over the past 30 years? Fate? Destiny? The mysterious warps in the human psyche that lead us where they lead us? – not irresistibly maybe but the price of resistance is the incomplete life, the feeling at the end of it that you had something really special within reach and didn't reach.
Caves are Japan's last unexplored frontiers. No one knows how many there are. You're climbing rocks, or kayaking down a river, you see an opening, maybe it's a cave; you venture inside; maybe it's a dead end; you're blocked, stymied; maybe, on the other hand, it opens before your very eyes, a world hitherto unknown, blacker than any polar night, its ground never trodden by human feet – probably by few enough animal feet – yours to discover. That's what Katsuji lives for.
Born in Osaka in 1966, he knew as a child those energy surges, he tells Brutus, that lead one to pick fights for no reason and get into all kinds of trouble with the forces of law, order, convention and authority. He left high school without graduating, worked in construction, on a whim took up mountain-climbing, didn't like it, tried scuba diving, didn't like that either, and if not for caves – but how did he get into caving? He doesn't say – maybe his fear of the dark suggested an enemy within to conquer. Whatever it was, he found himself one day or night in a nameless cave somewhere in Aichi Prefecture, some four and a half tatami mats wide, and 'I'll never forget the feeling' – best not described because the reach of words, though vast, is not unlimited. Suffice it to say, as he does: 'This is what I'd been searching for!'
A find that perpetuates the search, and so it remains 30 years later. Imagine this, he says: lowering yourself by rope deeper into a cave than Tokyo Tower is high, or entering a river cave on a raft; if it rains the cave fills with water, to say nothing of the danger of falling rocks or getting hopelessly lost, 'you've 30 minutes' worth of air in your tank' and a miserable end stares you straight in the face. 'Well, you have a choice: panic or stay calm.'
Why force such a choice on yourself, when you could be doing a comfortable office job, drawing regular pay, living quietly at home, watching your kids grow up, looking forward to your next paid vacation and telling yourself the cost of living won't rise forever? Suffice it to say it's just what some people do in answer to some inexplicable need in them.
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