A Visit to the Iwaya Caves of Enoshima

Or, A Conradian Reflection Upon the Phenomena of Modern Travel.

 

A View of Enoshima, by Yuichi Takahashi (c.1876-1877)

In his ‘Preface’ to Richard Curle’s Into the East (1923), an account of Curle’s travels in Burma and British Malaya, Joseph Conrad lamented the transition of travel writing from an era of intrepid voyaging, adventuring curiosity, and philanthropical reportage to a new and stupefying age of mass tourism: ‘… those things, which stand as if imperishable in the pages of old books of travel, are all blown away, have vanished utterly as the smoke of the travellers’ camp fires in the icy night air of the Gobi Desert, as the smell of incense burned in the temples of strange gods, as the voices of Asiatic statesmen speculating with the cruel wisdom of past ages on matters of peace and war.

Nothing obviously strange remains for our eyes now.’ (p. 90)

Enoshima, by Ogata Gekko (c.1895-1905)

Conrad wrote these orientalising, elegiac words late in his life. This particular ‘Preface,’ along with another essay which was published the following year in the National Geographic Magazine, show Conrad looking back on the events of his own life and career, prompting him to reflect upon his place in this changing tradition. A tradition which he believed was characterised by a clear sense of cultural evolution in terms of human exploration from ancient to modern times. In this essay, entitled ‘Geography and Some Explorers,’ he famously distilled this peculiarly inquisitive, globetrotting endeavour into three developmental phases: first, Geography fabulous; second, Geography militant; third, and finally, Geography triumphant.

 

Joseph Conrad (1923)

Geography fabulous was graphically represented by medieval maps crowded ‘with pictures of strange pageants, strange trees, strange beasts, drawn with amazing precision in the midst of theoretically conceived continents. […] regions infested by lions or haunted by unicorns, inhabited by men with reversed feet, or eyes in the middle of their breasts.’ (p. 2) A Mappa Mundi-like world of awful mystery and extravagant speculation, but, nevertheless, a world of gradually expanding horizons, best characterised by the early wanderings of Prince Henry the Navigator’s Portuguese caravels skirting along newly-seen African coastlines, venturing into these ‘blank’ (or hitherto unknown) spaces, progressively advancing the boundaries of portolan charts dotted with compass roses from which radiated the rhumb lines upon which mariners set their courses. The Old World’s ‘discovery’ of the New precipitated an epochal shift that permanently altered both European and non-European planetary consciousness in different ways. Conrad’s view of Christopher Columbus is interesting when read in the context of recent and somewhat controversial claims concerning Columbus’s ancestry (Genoese Christian, or secretly Jewish Spaniard?), as well as on-going de-colonial debates about how Columbus’s legacy should or shouldn’t be remembered in our own times. Conrad opines that: ‘Columbus remains a pathetic figure, not a sufferer in the cause of geography, but a victim of the imperfections of jealous human hearts, accepting his fate with resignation. Among explorers he appears lofty in his troubles and like a man of a kingly nature. His contribution to the knowledge of the earth was certainly royal. And if the discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of reckless cruelty and greed known to history we may say this at least for it, that the gold of Mexico and Peru, unlike the gold of alchemists, was really there, palpable, yet, as ever, the most elusive of the Fata Morgana that lure men away from their homes, as a moment of reflection will convince any one. For nothing is more certain than that there will never be enough gold to go round, as the Conquistadores found out by experience.’ (p. 3)

European-led exploration opened up routes for exploitation and the succeeding phase of Geography militant became a defining aspect of the early modern period (previously referred to as ‘the Enlightenment’) of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From the personal point of view of individual explorers, it was characterised by an arduous seeking for the confirmation of certain theories proffered and stubbornly maintained by learned armchair geographers, as Conrad characterised them, who ‘did not seem able to accept the idea that there was much more water than land on this globe.’ (p. 6) Thus the most renowned navigators of this era, men such as Amerigo Vespucci, Ferdinand Magellan, and Abel Tasman, roamed the oceans, circumnavigating the globe, searching its southernmost latitudes in pursuit of an elusive ‘Terra Australis Incognita’; until the more refined scientific exploits of this long tradition of great men, running through the efforts of Captain James Cook and Sir John Franklin at sea, and, on land, the endeavours of Messrs Burton and Speke, and Dr David Livingstone, who collectively rounded off this heroic era, successfully transitioned us into the modern age of Geography triumphant. Another distinctly masculine and assertively imperialist age in which, as Conrad saw it, ‘there will be no backyard left in the heart of Central Africa that has not been peeped into by some person more or less commissioned for the purpose.’ (p. 89) Citing, as a kind of self-conscious footnote to this era, the example of his own career as a merchant sailor in the romantic last days of sailing ships, wherein it was his ‘duty to correct and bring up to date the charts of more than one ship according to the Admiralty notices.’ (p. 14)

As needs must, however, Conrad observed that travel writing in his day had changed because travel and the modern-day traveller had changed. These three phases of questing geographical endeavour had clearly succeeded in shrinking the globe, and so the game was almost up. Hence a writer like Richard Curle, according to Conrad’s estimation, represented ‘a traveller of our day, condemned to make his discoveries on beaten tracks, he looks on, sensitive, meditative, with delicate perceptions and a gift for expression, alive to the saving grace of human and historical associations; and while pursuing amongst the men busy with ascertained facts the riddles presented by a world in transition, he seems to have captured for us the spirit of modern travel itself.’ (p. 92)

 

Now, exactly one hundred years after these words were freshly penned by Conrad, oddly enough they still seem indelibly apposite; has anything really changed in terms of travel and tourism in our increasingly globalised world? – Some might argue that the fortunes of travel writing and the popularity of travel writers has ebbed and flowed significantly during this century of accelerated development. But some might say that on the whole it has always been in a steady decline, like an echo of diminishing returns, travel writing in a sense has simply become a prolonged, self-repeating parody of itself – so much so, in fact, that it has essentially become redundant.

 

Conrad certainly thought so: ‘That category of travellers with their parrot-like remarks, their strange attempts at being funny, and their lamentable essays in seriousness has apparently passed away. Or perhaps they only print their books for circulation amongst friends. I suspect, however, they have ceased to write simply because there are too many of them. They do not appear as travellers even to the most naïve minds and perhaps even to their own minds. They are simply an enormous company of people who go round the world for a change and rest, either suffering from overwork (whatever that may mean) or from neurasthenia. And I am sure my best wishes go with them for an easy and radical recovery. Steamship companies love them.’ (p. 86)

 

Indeed, modern mass tourism and the increasing prevalence of social media has redefined the world and people’s perceptions of their place and how they interact within it. Perhaps, as Conrad seems to suggest, travel writing had a greater sense of authenticity in an era when fewer people travelled. Traveller’s tales may well have served a different and more vital social function in such times, whether those tales were first imbibed by simply listening to their retelling in the quayside inns of port towns or avidly devoured in the pages of popularly published travelogues. For those who did not go to sea and so were not able to savour the wider world firsthand, such texts were the only means to push back the bounds of their horizons and get a taste of the furthest reaches of the globe.

 

But not all travelogues have stood the test of time, many have long since fallen by the way. According to Conrad: ‘The outstanding figure amongst those men who dedicated their books of travel to popes and emperors is Marco Polo, with his meticulous descriptive gift, his cautious credulity, his eye for splendour and his historian’s rather than a traveller’s temperament. He gave his readers what the readers of that day wanted, historical facts in a foreign and gorgeous atmosphere. But the time for such books of travel is past on this earth girt about with cables, with an atmosphere made restless by the waves of ether, lighted by that sun of the twentieth century under which there is nothing new left now, and but very little of what may still be called obscure.’ (p. 88)

 

Nowadays everyone is a travel writer of sorts. But today images appear to be more important than words. Self-presentation has become a means of projection as much as reflection. Without really knowing it, perhaps, it strikes me that people have now become their own versions of Alan Whicker or Michael Palin. Social media is not so much a window on the world, but rather a window into our own worlds – shaped, defined and presented as we ourselves would wish others to see it, thereby fanning our own solipsistic vanity! – The world is now girded with fibre optic cables and the ether buzzes a relay back and forth between encircling satellites, transmitting millions of ‘selfies’ from tourist hotspots around the globe. Pixelating the present for posterity; each of us harnessing the here and now of the twenty-first century via our camera-phones. The present moment has in effect become a single unending photographic image, capturing and arresting the falling domino-like effect of time. Freeze-framing our lives and the world which we have ostensibly ventured out into, in order to explore for ourselves, in search of rest or a change – a panacea for that universal yearning for self-fulfilment and the need for self-expression; a universal Instagram account viewable by all in lieu of an album of holiday snaps, or perhaps in lieu of a travel diary, or a ship’s captain’s log.

 

Crafting itineraries from Rough Guides, Lonely Planets, and Time Out’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of lists advising on the ‘Ten Best Places to …’, etc., these are the means by which we now measure and triangulate our own personal journeys of discovery. Bookish gurus such as Bill Bryson, Peter Mayle, Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth Gilbert, et al., still provide traditional vade mecums of sorts to help us ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ our way around the globe with a hope of ameliorating our own modern-day neurasthenia. Hence the tradition of travel writing is far from defunct, rather it continues to do what it has always done; it’s perhaps the mode and the medium through which we engage with and respond to it which has reconfigured itself – as needs must.

A View of Enoshima, by Hokusai, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (c.1830)

 

All of these thoughts passed through my mind only a few weekends ago when I took the train from Shinjuku to Fujisawa in order to visit Enoshima, just along the coast from Kamakura here in Japan, where I am currently living. Enoshima is an island of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples which has long been a place of pilgrimage, particularly during the Edo Period (1600-1868); but, since the early twentieth century, tourism has been the predominant religion of most ‘pilgrims’ visiting this special place in modern times. Like so many religious ‘tourist hotspots’ in Japan, Enoshima exudes a kind of otherworldly spiritual enchantment. ‘There is a charm indefinable about the place—that sort of charm which comes with a little ghostly thrill never to be forgotten,’ as the writer, Lafcadio Hearn described it in 1894. ‘Not of strange sights alone is this charm made, but of numberless subtle sensations and ideas interwoven and inter-blended: the sweet sharp scents of grove and sea; the blood-brightening, vivifying touch of the free wind; the dumb appeal of ancient mystic mossy things; vague reverence evoked by knowledge of treading soil called holy for a thousand years; and a sense of sympathy, as a human duty, compelled by the vision of steps of rock worn down into shapelessness by the pilgrim feet of vanished generations.’ (pp. 94-95)

 

The island’s main shrine complex is dedicated to the Goddess Benzaiten or Benten, and mythology also credits the island as being watched over by a once wrathful dragon who was tamed by the goddess and later became her spouse. Benten, as manifested in the Shinto and Buddhist traditions of Japan, is related to the Hindu Goddess, Saraswati. She is a Dharmapala, or Dharma protector. And, like Saraswati, strumming her lute-like biwa in many of her effigies, she is the patron of music, the arts, eloquence, and knowledge. But, unlike Saraswati, in Japan she also has other associations too, thought to have derived from early associations with local gods or kami in different regions. Through one of these associations, she came to be viewed as a water deity, hence her association with dragons and snakes, as well as with wealth, fortune, protection from disease and danger, and the protection of the state. The association with water means that many of the shrines dedicated to Benten can often be found situated on islands; one such example, which has a personal connection for me, is the Benten-dō which stands on a small island at the centre of Shinobazu Pond in Tokyo’s Ueno, close to where I stayed on many of my earliest trips to Japan over twenty years ago. Given this personal affinity and the fact that I was born in the year of the Dragon, Enoshima seemed to be a place which should have a unique resonance for me, and in many ways, I found it did – perhaps all the more unexpectedly in the form of certain ‘ghostly’ echoes of home.

Benzaiten Seated on a White Dragon, by Aoigaoka Keisei (1832)

 

Seeing Enoshima for the first time from the shoreline, rising up in the form of a high, tree-covered mound with the rooftops of buildings peeping out from the green foliage, I couldn’t help thinking how much it reminded me of my hometown, Harrow-on-the-Hill, near London; which, similarly, is cloaked by tall trees and topped by a church with a tall spire, built and consecrated by Saint Anselm on a spot which is thought to have long been a religious site, since pre-Christian times even. In the twilight of the Edo Period, the famous artist, Hokusai, depicted Enoshima in one of his series of woodblock prints, entitled ‘Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.’ In this view a pagoda can be seen piercing the greenery, but today those trees are now more prominently parted by a tall lighthouse and observation tower known as the ‘Enoshima Sea Candle.’ Like other sacred islands throughout the world, such as Saint Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, or the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, situated just off the coast of Northumbria back home in England, Enoshima is a tidal island, which is connected to the mainland by a sand bar or tombolo at low tide. This has since been built over by a twin set of parallel bridges, one for the convenience of those travelling on foot and the other for those travelling by car or coach, making it accessible at all times and tides for pilgrims and day-trippers alike.

 

Ambling across this bridge, there are still echoes of Lafcadio Hearn’s visit to be found as you arrive on Enoshima: ‘We pass the sand-flats; and the ever-open Portal of the Sea-city, the City of the Dragon-goddess, is before us, a beautiful torii. All of bronze it is, with shimenawa of bronze above it, and a brazen tablet inscribed with characters declaring: 'This is the Palace of the Goddess of Enoshima.' About the bases of the ponderous pillars are strange designs in relievo, eddyings of waves with tortoises struggling in the flow. […] High before us slopes the single street, a street of broad steps, a street shadowy, full of multi-coloured flags and dank blue drapery dashed with white fantasticalities, which are words, fluttered by the sea wind. It is lined with taverns and miniature shops. At every one I must pause to look; and to dare to look at anything in Japan is to want to buy it. […] This curious street ends at another torii, a wooden torii, with a steeper flight of stone steps ascending to it. At the foot of the steps are votive stone lamps and a little well, and a stone tank at which all pilgrims wash their hands and rinse their mouths before approaching the temples of the gods.’ (pp. 86-88)

 

But different to Hearn’s day, there is now a set of three escalators which can comfortably whisk the weary pilgrim to the highest heights of the shrine, which is actually composed of a number of shrine buildings situated on several different levels. Three of these, the Hetsumiya, Nakatsumiya, and Okutsumiya, are dedicated to the three sister goddesses of the sea, of happiness and fortune, and of musical skills. The Yasaka Shrine is dedicated to Gozu Tenno, the guardian deity of Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto, and the Hoanden is an octagonal hall which houses two important Japanese ‘cultural assets’: two revered statues of Benzaiten – the Hadaka (or naked) Benzaiten, and the Happi (or eight-armed) Benzaiten.

Pilgrimage to the Iwaya Cave Shrine of Benzaiten, by Hiroshige (c.1850)

 

Another important site on the island, also with historical associations to Benzaiten, is the Iwaya Sea Caves, located low down on the island’s western shoreline. Eroded by the inexorable crash of ocean waves over unfathomable aeons of geological time, the first cave is a gallery 152 metres long which splits into two at its farthest end, and the second cave is formed of two interlinked galleries, each of around 56 metres in length. My Rough Guide is very dismissive of these caves, saying: ‘Though it’s an attractive walk, you might want to give these very artificial grottoes, with their piped music and roaring dragons, a miss.’ (p. 260) – Personally, I’d advise giving the jaded Rough Guide author a miss on this occasion, and listen instead to Lafcadio Hearn’s far more evocative description: ‘… the Dragon cavern, not so called, Akira [Hearn’s local guide] says, because the Dragon of Benten ever dwelt therein, but because the shape of the cavern is the shape of a dragon. The path descends toward the opposite side of the island, and suddenly breaks into a flight of steps cut out of the pale hard rock—exceedingly steep, and worn, and slippery, and perilous—overlooking the sea. A vision of low pale rocks, and surf bursting among them, and a toro or votive stone lamp in the centre of them—all seen as in a bird's-eye view, over the verge of an awful precipice. I see also deep, round holes in one of the rocks. There used to be a tea-house below; and the wooden pillars supporting it were fitted into those holes. I descend with caution; the Japanese seldom slip in their straw sandals, but I can only proceed with the aid of the guide. At almost every step I slip. Surely these steps could never have been thus worn away by the straw sandals of pilgrims who came to see only stones and serpents!

At last we reach a plank gallery carried along the face of the cliff above the rocks and pools, and following it round a projection of the cliff enter the sacred cave. The light dims as we advance; and the sea-waves, running after us into the gloom, make a stupefying roar, multiplied by the extraordinary echo. Looking back, I see the mouth of the cavern like a prodigious sharply angled rent in blackness, showing a fragment of azure sky.

We reach a shrine with no deity in it, pay a fee; and lamps being lighted and given to each of us, we proceed to explore a series of underground passages. So black they are that even with the light of three lamps, I can at first see nothing. In a while, however, I can distinguish stone figures in relief—chiselled on slabs like those I saw in the Buddhist graveyard. These are placed at regular intervals along the rock walls. The guide approaches his light to the face of each one, and utters a name, 'Daikoku-Sama,' 'Fudo-Sama,' 'Kwannon-Sama.' Sometimes in lieu of a statue there is an empty shrine only, with a money-box before it; and these void shrines have names of Shintō gods, 'Daijingu,' 'Hachiman,' 'Inari-Sama.' All the statues are black, or seem black in the yellow lamplight, and sparkle as if frosted. I feel as if I were in some mortuary pit, some subterranean burial-place of dead gods. Interminable the corridor appears; yet there is at last an end—an end with a shrine in it—where the rocky ceiling descends so low that to reach the shrine one must go down on hands and knees. And there is nothing in the shrine. This is the Tail of the Dragon.

We do not return to the light at once, but enter into other lateral black corridors—the Wings of the Dragon. More sable effigies of dispossessed gods; more empty shrines; more stone faces covered with saltpetre; and more money-boxes, possible only to reach by stooping, where more offerings should be made. And there is no Benten, either of wood or stone.’ (pp. 92-94)

Lafcadio Hearn (1891)

 

Though this was once the hallowed place where the first of the Kamakura Shoguns, Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147-1199), came to pray to Benten for victory in battle, and though the Benten statues have long since been removed for their safe-keeping higher up the island, the cave is still lined with votive statues and a small shrine can still be found by pious pilgrims and tourists alike at the end of its furthest reach. If you feel a cool breeze emanating from the inaccessible depths of the shorter branch this is because it is said to connect (whether spiritually or physically is not specified) to Mount Fuji, a mountain deity itself, on the far shore of Sagami Bay.

 

As in Hearn’s day, there is still a steep climb down (and then even moreso going back up again once you are done), but the stone steps are more evenly set and less polished today, and instead of a ‘plank gallery’ there is now a long wide concrete stilted walkway which comfortably skirts the cliffside, from which you can watch the sea surging over the rock shelf where local fishermen stand stoically while casting their rods, sending their fishing lines out into the surf, or you can descend there yourself to search among the rock pools for a natural rock formation which looks like a turtle swimming out to sea. The entrance to the caves is filled with information panels detailing the history of Enoshima and the caves, as well as the local flora and fauna, and the artworks this place has inspired. Such as a poem by one of Japan’s most well-known poets, Akiko Yosano, which is inscribed upon a rock set in a mirror-like pool near the mouth of the first cave. With an admirable economy of words characteristic of Japanese haikai, this short verse manages to evoke the magical atmosphere of the island’s inward and outward facing vistas.

 

沖つ風　吹けばまたゝく　蝋の灯に

志づく散るなり　江の島の洞

 

Wind from the sea,

The shimmering candle light,

A drop spread, the cave of Enoshima.

 

Akiko Yosano (1912).

 

Further down the passage, the same as when Hearn came here, visitors are still given lighted candles to carry. Clutching these we ventured into the wet, dripping darkness, following in Hearn’s literal footsteps, silently trepidatious and inwardly praying to Benten that the earth might hold off on initiating any tremors or full-scale earthquakes until we were safely outside once more. As the tall ceiling of the cave gradually lowers at its furthest reach, it does feel as though you are peeping into another realm of subterranean enchantment, like Rupert Bear humming a few familiar bars of the Frog Song. The long, dark and dank passage presents a challenge to the senses, especially those that usually manage to hold our fears of nocturnal claustrophobia at bay. There is, however, a leavening sense of light-relief to be found in the adjacent cave, where a Disney-esque dragon statue lurks and can be made to give a (concealed, tannoy-induced) roar if you clap your hands at its far end – a delight for young Rupert Bear-like kids and light-hearted, less fussy folk, rather than for our somewhat grumpy grown-up friend who penned the Rough Guide.

 

Continuing this whimsical quest for Enoshima’s dragon lore associations, at the top of the hill, far above the caves and tastefully set apart from the shrines, there is a so-called ‘Dragon’s Love Bell’ which visitors can ring. It’s a modern ship’s bell made of bronze, clearly installed in very recent times in a metal framework with a sturdy rope attached to its clapper so that it can be rung by couples (predominantly young, but also old alike) as a means of proclaiming their eternal and undying love to all within earshot. An adjacent set of metal railings have been very conveniently erected here to accommodate a new and now seemingly universal copycat-trend of modern-day Romeos and Juliets, who wish to set an immovable padlock to slowly rust at scenic spots (discarding the key) as a sign of their eternal troths having been duly pledged. However, setting up a fully-committed site for this purpose seems a very shrewd move on the part of tourist management strategies for the island, largely so that Enoshima isn’t plagued by the appearance of such padlocks in other parts of the island where they might cause damage to the island’s heritage or become unwanted eyesores. Oddly enough though, for a site of such dedicated personal absorption, this is also the one place on the island where complete strangers are most likely to interact, because despite there being a ‘selfie’ stand provided, more often than not couples seem inclined to offer to take photos for one another, in a kind of cupid-inspired relay of mutual assistance.

 

Everywhere I looked while wandering the paths and precincts of the island’s sacred shrines there seemed to be people taking photographs of their companions or group selfies rather than photos of the buildings and monuments, or more occasionally of the stunning views. It’s been widely reported in the news – this year especially – that, since Japan has re-opened its borders to tourists with the end of the Covid pandemic, the country has begun to suffer the ill effects of ‘over-tourism,’ with traveller’s disregarding ordinary decency as much as an awareness and sensitivity to local customs, or the rights of local people to go about their daily lives undisturbed. Some tourist hotspots here, such as the five lakes district around Mount Fuji, have attempted to discourage the internet-fuelled fever-trend for seeking out famously-framed views from particular locations specifically for the purpose of creating social media posts and ‘influencer content’ (the modern-day digital equivalent of “Kilroy woz ‘ere”) due to the disruption and damage it has increasingly spawned. The herd-like nature of mass tourism is nothing new, but the increasingly locust-like phenomenon of today’s traveller seems to be a new and deeply self-centred trait. Along with the usual flows of Europeans and Americans there certainly seem to be far more Asian tourists here now, particularly from India and China, compared to when I first began visiting Japan – but it’s definitely not a trend restricted to certain demographics or nationalities alone, it’s a symptom of our ever-increasing global mobility. All tourists regardless of culture or creed are equally culpable, and all tourists need to be more culturally aware. A good guest should be grateful, not greedy; discreet rather than rudely disruptive.

海街 diary (Umimachi Diary), also titled Our Little Sister (2015)

 

After all this arduous climbing in a dedicated pilgrim-like adherence to the three main tenets of modern travel (‘Eat, Pray, Love’), those footsore visitors to Enoshima who have prayed devoutly at the shrines and caves, and duly rung the dragon bell and set a padlock declaring their undying love should certainly reward themselves with some well-earned refreshments eaten and relished in one of the many tea shops or restaurants set along the tree-fringed verge of the high clifftops overlooking the sea. ‘Perched upon this verge,’ just as they were in Hearn’s day, with large windows and verandas ‘all widely open to the sea wind, so that, looking through them, over their [tatami] matted floors and lacquered balconies one sees the ocean as in a picture-frame, and the pale clear horizon specked with snowy sails ...’ (p. 90)

 

The foremost regional specialty in these restaurants is undoubtedly shirasu, or white bait. These are the tiny young fry of fish harvested in two limited seasonal periods during the spring and autumn, which are most commonly eaten atop rice bowls (donburi) garnished with various types of seaweed and Japanese basil (shiso), and they are either served raw or boiled, or a combination of the two. Boiled shirasu can also be eaten on toast, as I first encountered them in one of my favourite films, 海街 diary (Umimachi Diary), also titled Our Little Sister (2015), which was filmed only a short distance further along the coast between Enoshima and Kamakura. The name shirasu is said by local fishermen to be echoed in the shape they take when boiled, which uncannily conforms to the hiragana character for shi = し.

 

Naturally, the best and most memorably romantic way to round off a day’s exploration of Enoshima is to watch the magnificent, resplendent orange-blaze of the sun as it sets into the mist shrouded horizon of the sea from the high viewpoint of the island’s cliffs. But finding a spot which isn’t crowded out by the human throng of fellow day-trippers, all straining to take the perfect selfies on their camera-phones, is a challenge. It was here, at this very moment in our own wanderings around the island, that I first began to think about the shifting characteristics of travel in its current, modern-day manifestations. I found myself thinking about the words of Lafcadio Hearn and Joseph Conrad, and of all the information panels we’d encountered and read, as well as the half page of my inch-thick Rough Guide describing Enoshima. I found myself pondering how the experience of travel is both uniquely individual and inescapably generic. There is no one true form of travel writing. What Conrad and others lament the loss of isn’t so much the novelty of discovery, but rather the lost sense of exclusivity.

 

Mass tourism may well have overcrowded the places which we have collectively deemed to be the most interesting or picturesque locations to visit. It is only natural to mourn the fact that at many of these tourist hotspots it’s nigh impossible to savour them in silence and solitude. But we often curate our own experiences, waiting for that gap in the swarming crowd to snap an unpeopled view which in time will end up posted on our social media accounts, rendering a memory which may well with the passage of time mellow into a projection of the place which we have sought to create, that unique idea of a place such as Enoshima, sacred and beautiful, and the charmed experience which perhaps we went there in search of. It’s all a matter of perspective – ‘Twas ever thus! – Travellers have always embellished and distorted the truths found in the places they encountered and the tales they told upon their return. It’s disingenuous to think or claim otherwise, after all, the world is essentially whatever we make of it.

 

In writing this essay, Enoshima has already begun to transform itself in my memory, converting ‘historical facts in a foreign and gorgeous atmosphere’ through the lyrical and picturesque words of other travel writers, poets and the woodblock prints of Ukiyo-e artists to add character and flavour to my own carefully curated photographs and the paragraphs of self-reflective prose which I’ve spent time very carefully crafting above. But who am I? And why should anyone be interested in my meandering tales? – I’m just another travel writer, as Conrad might observe, for whatever it is worth, attempting to distil ‘the spirit of modern travel itself.’ – Another personal perspective on times and places far away, already fading and all too soon to be forgotten.

 

References

Andrei Codrescu, ‘The Many Lives of Lafcadio Hearn,’ The Paris Review (2 July 2019)

Joseph Conrad, Tales of Hearsay and Last Essays (Dent’s Collected Edition, 1955)

Robert D. Foulke, ‘Life in the Dying World of Sail, 1870-1910,’ Journal of British Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (November, 1963), pp. 105-136

Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Vol. 1 (Houghton Mifflin, 1895)

Henry Johnson, ‘Enoshima: Signifying Island Heritage Across Space and Place,’ Okinawan Journal of Island Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2022), pp. 3–20

Iwaya Benzaiten, Enoshima, History in Postcards (27 July 2024)

Zoria Petkoska, ‘Island-Inspired Poetry From Around Japan,’ Tokyo Weekender (2 November 2022)

The Rough Guide to Japan (2008)

Shirasu – Trails to Oishii Tokyo (NHK World, Japan: first broadcast 4 May 2022)

海街 diary (Umimachi Diary), also titled Our Little Sister (written & directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015; based on the manga by Akimi Yoshida, serialised in Shōgakukan’s Monthly Flowers magazine, 2006-2018)

Also on 'Waymarks'

The Buddha at Kamakura - Japan

A Poetic Pilgrimage to Matsushima

Lost Japan - Tradition & Transience

The Dancing Girl of Izu

"My Asakusa" - Sadako Sawamura & Me

The "Isle of Bow" - A Journey of Discovery

Razumov & The Ile Rousseau

Visiting Conrad's Grave - Canterbury

All photographs of Enoshima by Tim Chamberlain, October 2024.

"Everest Through The Lens" - Exhibition Review

 

Climbing Mount Everest. Under the auspices of the Mt. Everest Committee: the cinematograph record of the Mount Everest Expedition of 1922. EE/6/5/60 (RGS-IBG Collection)

Exhibition Review: Everest through the lens (Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), 1 Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2AR, UK: 5 October 2022-20 January 2023) - this review was originally written for the Other Everests Research Network. 

NB - the exhibition is currently back on display at the RGS from 20 January 2025 - 15 April 2025 (10.00am-5.00pm, Monday-Friday), free entry. Click here for more information.

Everest through the lens was an exhibition marking the centenary of the first two British attempts to climb the world’s highest mountain in 1922 and 1924. It examined the expeditions as seen through the lens of official expedition cinematographer, Captain John Noel. Focussing on the two films he made, Climbing Mount Everest (1922) and The Epic of Everest (1924), the exhibition set out ‘to unpick the uncomfortable and complex social, racial and geopolitical dynamics that shaped the expeditions – from their beginning to enduring legacy.’ Utilising a range of photographic and documentary sources, as well as a handful of well-chosen objects – such as a kinomatograph camera, similar to the one Noel used at high altitude, and Noel’s own Remington portable typewriter – exhibition visitors were guided through the various stages of the two expeditions, from their meticulous preparation, through their actual execution, to their final presentation in both print and film media.

 

As a documentary filmmaker, Noel’s lens was far from an objective one. The narrative of both films gives a distinctly colonialist view of the ‘heroic’ exploits of the British climbers, whilst the far larger entourage of local porters and other indigenous labourers who were key to enabling the endeavour are lost somewhere in the flickering side-lines, obscured by the simultaneous glare of the white snows and the reflected imperial glory bestowed upon the films’ British protagonists. Viewing the expeditions in the context of their times, this was a period when empires and nations vied to best one another in epic feats of exploration in harsh and extreme environments. Notably the British had lost out in the races to be the first to reach the North and South Poles, hence the summit of the world’s highest mountain – or the ‘Third Pole’ as it was then dubbed – represented a last chance at attaining pre-eminence. Together, the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club formed the Mount Everest Committee, which tasked itself with recruiting a team of elite mountaineers and geographers. Naturally these men were all British born and bred, privately educated and recruited through a network of mutual contacts. Letters and medical appraisals show that social considerations of class and military background counted as much as aptitude and experience in mountaineering. We are told that George Finch, as an Australian, was a lone exception to this rule, but that consequently he ‘was looked down on by some team members.’

 

A far more overtly condescending view was expressed with regard to the indigenous communities whom the expeditions encountered as they made their way through Tibet. An intertitle card from one of Noel’s films gives a clear example, stating that: ‘The men and women exist from the cradle to the stone slab, on which their dead bodies are hacked to pieces, without a wash the whole of their lives.’ The British expedition members were genuinely fascinated by the cultures they encountered in the Himalaya. Noel filmed scenes described in another intertitle as: ‘the weird and fantastic devil dances at the sacred monastery of the Rongbuk.’ A Tibetan cymbal brought back by the expedition leader, Brigadier-General Charles Bruce in 1922, included in the exhibition, shows how the British climbers were particularly struck by Tibetan music which must have seemed very different to their unaccustomed ears. Climber and surgeon, Howard Somervell transcribed Tibetan folk songs into Western musical notation, and Noel later had bands perform this music as an evocative accompaniment to the screenings of his silent films.

 

Trailer for Noel's "The Epic of Everest" (BFI)

              

Social hierarchies shaped the expeditions. Base Camp was effectively a small village, run by the British along familiar colonial lines, with clear demarcations according to social, racial and class considerations. The selection process for local porters may have been less careful to note down details, but everyone recruited – ‘from bootmakers to botanists’ – had a role with set expectations and was renumerated accordingly. Ranked highest in this hierarchy were the high-altitude porters, who were very skilled and often more adept mountaineers than the British, who nicknamed them ‘tigers.’ It is notable in many of the photographs of the expedition that there is a marked discrepancy in the size and weight of the loads which these men were charged with carrying compared to the British members of the team. Without their efforts, lugging huge quantities of supplies, equipment and oxygen tanks to the various camps ascending the mountain, the British climbers would have struggled in their attempts to reach the summit. These efforts were not without genuine risk, as a disaster in 1922 made only too apparent. Seven porters – six Sherpa, Thankay, Sangay, Temba, Lhakpa, Pasang Namgya, Pema, and one Bhotiya, Norbu – lost their lives in an avalanche. George Mallory, seen as the hero of Noel’s films, felt himself responsible. Writing to a friend, he stated that the men who died were ‘ignorant of mountain dangers, like children in our care. And I am to blame.’ However, the loss of these men’s lives was dealt with in a bureaucratic manner, with their families in Tibet, Nepal and Darjeeling being financially ‘compensated.’

 

In Noel’s film, the disaster was edited out of the final cut for fear of a negative backlash from viewers. A poignant memorial of this fact is embodied in a small bronze figure of the goddess Tara, which was on display in the exhibition. This was given to the British climbers on their return from Everest by Dzatrul Rinpoche, the Head Lama of Rongbuk Monastery, to commemorate the lives of the seven men who died. This action was filmed by Noel, but in the final version of his film Noel edited and placed these scenes at the start, representing the exchange as though it were a gift given to bless the expedition when it was first setting out.

 

Similarly, Noel appears to have had no qualms about appropriating an image of a deity depicted in a mural at the monastery in order to accentuate the sense of drama. A deity which the British stylised as ‘a mountain goddess angrily destroying the bodies of white climbers.’ As it is well-known, the 1924 expedition resulted in the loss of the lives of climbers, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who disappeared from view while making a bid to reach the summit and never returned.

 

The names of Mallory and Irvine, like those of Robert Falcon Scott and his men in Antarctica, were of course duly added to the roster of ‘heroic defeats’ which now characterise the annals of British Imperial exploration. A vision of heroism and self-sacrifice which Noel’s films did much to crystallise. As the final sections of the exhibition showed, this was not without controversy however.

 

Noel very actively sensationalised Tibetan culture as a marketing ploy for his films. He was personally invested in them, having funded much of the 1924 expedition himself in order to retain the rights to his footage. He hired and brought to London a troupe of seven Tibetan dancers to perform at screenings. These ‘dancing lamas’ were in fact Tibetan novice monks rather than lamas. The publicity stunt deeply offended the Dalai Lama and Tibetan government, such that they banned all Westerners from entering Tibet to climb Everest for the next ten years. Despite the fact the British mountaineering community knew that the controversy of the ‘dancing lamas’ was the real cause of the ban, the Everest expeditions were meticulously stage-managed operations, consequently they drew ranks and found a convenient scapegoat in John Hazard, who undertook an unauthorised survey expedition in Tibet also in 1924, pinning the blame on his activities instead.

 

For a small exhibition, Everest through the lens, explored a number of less well-known faces of the two earliest attempts by British mountaineers to ‘conquer’ the world’s highest peak very effectively. It elucidated a number of often overlooked themes, incorporating a rich array of written and visual documentation; particularly Noel’s film, The Epic of Everest, which was screened on a continuous loop as part of the exhibition. Shining a light on the lives of those whose names are well-known to history, such as Mallory and Noel, but more importantly it also highlighted the indigenous team members who have stood, obscured in the background for far too long. Recovering some of those names which otherwise might have been lost to history in the panel and label texts, as well as listing them in the leaflet accompanying the exhibition. In doing so, Everest through the lens showed that there is still much to be learned about cultures of imperial exploration. By taking a closer look, information which has lain hidden in the archival shadows cast by the official record which the two British expeditions carefully created as their own legacy can begin to emerge. Much like the unnamed Sherpa who can be seen steadying the camera tripod, if one looks very carefully, at the well-known photograph of John Noel, seated on a kit box, shooting the first of his films at high altitude in 1922.

Captain Noel kinematographing the ascent of Mt. Everest from the Chang La [one of his Sherpa porters can be seen steadying the tripod] MEE22/0602 (RGS-IBG Collections)

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'Other Everests: One Mountain, Many Worlds' Edited by Paul Gilchrist, Peter H. Hansen & Jonathan Westaway (MUP, 2024)

For more information on my involvement with the 'Other Everests' Research Network, and my chapter in the forthcoming (open access) edited volume of essays which the network will publish in 2024, see here.

Also on 'Waymarks'

'Other Everests' - A New Research Network

Himalaya - The Heart of Eurasia

Betrayal in the High Himalaya

The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957)

Exploring "Other Everests" - One Mountain, Many Worlds

Circumnavigating the Cornubian Batholith

 

The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey by Tim Hannigan (Head of Zeus, 2023)

Tim Hannigan's Route

This is a book which I’ve long been looking forward to reading, and, now that I have turned its last page and closed its covers, it’s a book which didn’t disappoint. In fact, it is a book which I’m tempted to begin re-reading immediately. While he was writing it, I watched Tim Hannigan posting updates on his progress as he penned The Granite Kingdom on Twitter. Tantalisingly scanning the list of chapter titles which he posted several months before it was published, I could tell that this book would touch upon an array of topics which have both intrigued and challenged me over the years: Bordering; Merlin’s Magic Land; Piskey-Led; Coasting; See Your Own Country First; Rebel Country; Looking for the Light. As the book-blurb on the inside of its dust jacket describes: “Few areas of Britain are as holidayed in, as rhapsodised over or as mythologised as Cornwall … it is a region densely laden with images, projections and tropes. But how do they all intersect with the real Cornwall – its landscapes, histories, communities and sense of identity?”

 

 

As anyone who is familiar with Tim Hannigan’s The Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys In Search Of A Genre (Hurst, 2021) will know, Hannigan is an academic who writes about travel writing with admirably accessible flair. Travelling in companionable prose with him is always a joy, and in this book particularly so, because here we are on his home turf. But writing a travelogue about one’s own homeland, as Hannigan acknowledges, is perhaps a more challenging task than writing as an outsider. Most travel writing has a kind of ‘through the looking glass’ quality to it. The whole point of the travel writer’s self-appointed task is to act as the outsider looking-in, providing an interpretation of ‘the other’ for readers who (it is tacitly assumed) are similarly placed at one remove from both the place and people described. But writing as an insider looking both within whilst also attempting to present an outward-looking personal interpretation for insiders and non-insiders alike could very easily become a tautological trap set in a hall of mirrors, yet Hannigan manages to remain aware of this inherent difficulty at all times. Hence, he acknowledges his own scruples, and his at times instinctively defensive reflex in seeking to assert his non-Englishness in certain situations, rather than trying to hide it or gloss over such matters. Particularly when he encounters other people during his travels through the county/duchy with whom his interactions prompt reflections upon Cornish nationalism and questions of native identity. ‘Cornwall is not England,’ is an often-encountered assertion here, and as such this gives the book its central underlying theme. What does it mean to be (or to claim to be) Cornish? – Where exactly does Cornwall begin and England end? – How closely can Cornish nationalism align to the allied spirit of fraternal ‘Celtic’ nativism which is found in Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and even Brittany as a region with its own language which has died out and is now being revived, along with all the attendant trappings of the recently invented St Piran flag, Cornish tartan, and other emblems designed to highlight its sense of distance from generations of Anglo-Saxon and Norman cultural appropriation?

 

Gala Day, by Stanhope Forbes

It's an intriguing proposition when Hannigan reflects that, despite being born and raised in West Penwith, his ancestry has roots outside of Cornwall. As he states, “this shouldn’t matter, doesn’t matter, but if I’m writing about Cornwall and Cornishness, I have to mention it.” – However, it does matter in the sense that Cornwall has long been a place out of kilter with the rest of the UK. Today, shamefully, it is one of the poorest regions not only in the country but also in western Europe too. As Simon Reeve has poignantly illustrated in a recent BBC television series focussing on the country’s farthest southwestern region, people living in Cornwall face huge adversity most obviously in employment and the housing market. Recent decades have seen a boom in property sales to wealthy outsiders who have bought holiday homes which have essentially hollowed out local communities, turning picturesque villages into affluently neglected ghost towns out of season. It’s little wonder that outsiders are resented by some locals. On the one hand, tourism is the industry which has supplanted the dwindling or extinct traditional industries of fishing and tin mining, which most people Romantically associate with Cornwall. In this respect, Cornwall has confounded itself in the fact that the very thing which now sustains Cornwall is also the thing which is slowly killing it. One can’t help wondering how such a detrimental trend might be reversed?

 

My family might well have been seen as part of this problem (hence one avenue of my interest in this book). My parents along with my aunt and uncle began holidaying each year in Cornwall long before I was born. My grandfather even cycled to Land’s End with his friends back in the early 1930s. But it was a small advert in Dalton’s Weekly in the early 1960s which began this collective pattern of family pilgrimage. For many years, before the recent boom in the annual invasion of “the bucket and spade brigade” (as one local Tory MP famously disparaged it in the late 1980s), throughout my childhood, we hired two sail lofts on the west pier of Newlyn harbour from the same local family, whom we came to know well through two generations. I even have very clear memories of watching Tim Hannigan’s dad’s distinctive fishing boat, the Heather Armorel, coming and going beneath our window. We were later given the opportunity to buy the sail lofts (as well as other cottages we subsequently stayed in), but my family always resisted doing so. We always thought that there was something very wrong in the idea of a property standing empty for the majority of the year simply so that we might own our own patch of paradise for those two spare weeks of the year when we could get down there.

 

The Heather Armorel entering Newlyn harbour

Consequently, we were always very aware of both the harmful effects and the negative perception of incomers. But on the other hand, it was a duality which we realised had to be reconciled in as positive and as equitable a manner as was possible. I spent so much time there each summer that Cornwall is as much a part of my identity as my native Middlesex. And there are parallels of self-perception here too in the erasure of an old Anglo-Saxon County which still actively seeks to assert its identity several decades after its County Council was dissolved and it was subsumed into the homogenising boroughs of northwest London. Questions of identity do matter, and perhaps ironically, we later came to learn that we do in fact have Cornish ancestry – with forbears hailing from the Cornish village of Menheniot – so perhaps we aren’t the invasive interlopers we always feared we were. Every summer, I used to play in and around Newlyn harbour with the local kids, we even visited out of season at Christmas too, and several generations of my family have their ashes scattered on a particular cliff along that rugged coastline of West Penwith which forms Hannigan’s personal ‘Granite Kingdom.’ The salt sea air, the scent of gorse, and the sun-baked lichen of those granite-cleft coastal paths, along with the less clement weather of squalls and drizzling thick fog, are as much a part of me as all the other places which have come to feel like home throughout the course of my life. Cornwall remains a place for me to return to whenever I need to recharge my physical and emotional batteries, a testament to how we ground ourselves and all that makes us who we are in an acute sense of place. As such, there is a lot which I can relate to in this book.

 

The West Cornwall Experience (c.1980s)

There is much to like and much to be learnt from the pages of The Granite Kingdom. Hannigan expertly weaves into his long walk a lot of careful research and insightful analysis, reflecting upon both familiar and perhaps less well-known tales of local folklore, from King Arthur to Jan Tregagle; the standard tourist-titillating tales of smugglers, wreckers, and pirates; as well as the observations made by Hannigan’s literary predecessors, in works by writers such as Daniel Defoe, Wilkie Collins, D.H. Lawrence, and Daphne du Maurier. He also looks at the so-called ‘artist colonies’ which flourished in Newlyn and Lamorna, and which continue to characterise St Ives (for better or worse) to this day, as well as the ‘Rick Stein phenomenon’ that appears to define a lingering air of unrealised expectancy in Padstow – something which Hannigan as a former chef in the kitchens of Cornwall’s tourist high season can comment upon with firsthand knowledge and experience. He also reminisces and riffs upon the ‘anthropological’ intrigue which he felt the tourist brochures and TV adverts of the 1980s conjured in his mind as a child whose grandparents ran a guesthouse in Penzance – with its elastically-stretched parallels between the Cornish and Italian Rivieras! – representing the curious exoticisation of what was for him especially just the everyday reality of life lived in his home county. And all of this is deftly told with both eloquent erudition and good humour.

 

Essentially, what The Granite Kingdom demonstrates is how all locales are shaped both by insiders and outsiders alike. There’s no stopping the waves of change which sweep in and out of the eras like tides which shape and define the landscapes we perceive to be our own homelands, especially in the British Isles. In walking a meanderingly meditative (and many a pasty fuelled) route through Cornwall, from the banks of the River Tamar to his childhood home of Morvah, Hannigan guides us through his own unique view of, and engagement with the history, folklore, and geology, as well as the physical and cultural topography of a Cornwall which as a writer he aims to reconcile within himself as much as for the reader who accompanies him on what is a very personal journey. One reviewer has very astutely and accurately described this multi-facetted, gem-like book as “an inland journey, both introspective and expansive.” – It’s often said that the point of travelling is best realised in homecoming; hence, if this book represents a new direction in an erstwhile familiar genre of travel writing, I think the kind of homeward route which Hannigan sets out to explore in The Granite Kingdom should be a welcome one for others to take and emulate. 

On The Cliff, by Eleanor Hughes

Study of a Fisherwoman, by Stanhope Forbes

I would like to thank Tim Hannigan and Jade Gwilliam at Head of Zeus Books for very kindly sending me a review copy of The Granite Kingdom.

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Also on 'Waymarks'

From Coast to Carn Euny

Seeking Solace & Sunshine

What is Place?

Between the Tides, by Walter Langley

The Shoal Fisher, Newlyn (Penlee House Gallery & Museum)