To understand East Asian nationalism, climb a mountain

SHIKOKU, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands, is famous for its Buddhist pilgrimage route: a two-month circumambulation if all 88 temples are visited. The route takes you through cities and along a rugged coast. But it lingers mainly in the mountains that run inland along forested ridges, like a scene from a Chinese scroll painting.

Many of Japan’s Buddhist temples are built high up. The sensation as you approach is of climbing almost vertically into the sky. It is as if the point is to arrive out of puff, with your senses awry. In the still of the wooded dell, before you swing the huge log against the bell to announce yourself to the gods, the not-unpleasant sensation is of feeling small, in the lap of greater powers.

For Buddhists, the mythical mountain kingdom of Shambhala, described in the earliest Sanskrit texts, has the allure of a pure, visionary land of bliss. For Mongolian new year in February, a low table in every herder’s ger (yurt) strains under mounds of food. Next to the prized, fatty sheep’s tail, a pyramid of biscuits and sweets represents the mountains of Shambhala. In Shikoku, pilgrims follow a route once taken by Kukai, the eighth-century monk who brought esoteric Buddhist teachings from China and moulded them to a Japanese form. His sect’s headquarters is still high up on Japan’s main island, at Mount Koya.

Importing mountain-veneration to Japan was, admittedly, preaching to the converted. Japan’s indigenous religion is Shinto, an animist faith that sees the divine in everything—“8m gods” inhabiting nature. Ancient Shinto shrines also sit high in montane forests—indeed, often sharing a site with a Buddhist temple. Cultural critics who consider the Japanese unmoored in a materialist world look to the mountains for a roborant spiritual cure.

In the tumultuous decades following Japan’s Meiji Restoration of 1868, mountains took on an ominous, hulking purpose at a time when the country threw off its isolation and launched into a frenzy of industrialisation and militarisation. Notions that Shambhala existed somewhere in Asia were seized upon by the chauvinist ideologues advocating a new pan-Asian new order, led by Japan. At home snow-capped Mount Fuji, the perfect embodiment of a volcano, was shaped into a symbol of racial superiority. This nasty idea collapsed with Japan’s defeat in 1945, and Fuji-san went back to adorning paintings and postcards.

Yet mountain mysticism lives on, on the Korean peninsula. The rugged peaks among which Koreans live have long been central to their sense of their homeland: “Over the mountains are mountains,” runs a Korean saying.

When Japan annexed Korea in the early 20th century, the colonial authorities understood the sacred significance of mountains. As Alexis Dudden of the University of Connecticut explains, the peaks overlooking the city of Seoul determined the layout of Gyeongbok Palace, home to the ruling dynasty. Its throne room was aligned with the mountains to channel the spiritual power of the landscape through the Korean emperor’s veins. In 1911, in an early act of colonial violence, the Japanese governor ordered the construction of a massive, neoclassical building to block the flow and serve as colonial headquarters. In 1945 the naive American liberators understood none of this, lowering the Japanese flag on the building and raising the Stars and Stripes. The offending structure was at last razed in 1996.

Korea’s Japanese rulers had maintained that Koreans were blood relatives of the Japanese, younger brothers on a winning racial team. Many Koreans lapped this up. When the North Korean state was founded after the war, it lacked founding myths. So it recruited Koreans who had served as propagandists under the Japanese. These, as B.R. Myers of Dongseo University in Busan puts it, simply kicked the Japanese off the winning team.

Imperial Japanese symbols came to Kim Il Sung’s aid. First he, and more recently his grandson, Kim Jong Un, the North’s current dictator, were depicted astride a white charger, just like Emperor Hirohito. As for Mount Fuji, that was swapped out for Mount Paektu, another volcano, with a pristine crater lake, that straddles the border of North Korea and China. It carried little significance before. Now Paektu is presented as sacred racial symbol: not only the birthplace of Dangun, the mythical founder of Korea, but also of Mr Kim’s late father, Kim Jong Il. (In fact, he was born in grimy Khabarovsk in the Soviet Union.)

By chance, the Manchus who founded China’s last dynasty, the Qing, also chose to retrofit their own founding myth onto Mount Paektu (Changbaishan in Chinese). That matters because Chinese nationalists view the Qing empire’s maximum extent as the border that modern China should seek to reimpose. Koreans fear an assertive China might in future make expansive claims to Korean territory. South Korea, too, has adopted the adoration of Mount Paektu, pictures of which hang in government offices. State-sponsored mountain-worship with Japanese imperialist roots: it ought to make South Korean democrats blush.

Raising the roof

Yet Korea’s future is more likely to be marked by a cursed mountain than a mystical one. Mount Mantap in the North, not far from the Chinese border, is the regime’s nuclear test site. It has detonated six nuclear devices there since 2006, placed deep in the mountain via tunnels quarried by prisoners from the country’s biggest concentration camp, nearby. This has taken a toll on Mantap. During the latest explosion, of what was probably a hydrogen bomb in September, satellite pictures showed the contours of the mountain visibly shifting.

Mantap suffers from “tired mountain syndrome”: it is at risk of caving in. Chinese scientists are especially concerned. Another test might blow the top off, leading to devastating leakage of radioactive material. Over the mountains are mountains, some more daunting than others.