About us

Marine Day & Mountain Day

Published on Jul. 29, 2016: The Denki Shimbun (The Electric Daily News)
Shojiro Matsuura
President & CEO

This year, a new national holiday “Mountain Day” was instituted to be celebrated on August 11. I, for one, am very fond of the mountains and felt quite happy about this proclamation, ultimately choosing to write this article on the topic of “Mountain Day”. As a matter of fact, the day on which I started to pen this essay, July 18, just happened to be “Marine Day”. As luck would have it, I decided to make the mountains and sea the subject of this article.

Japan is both a maritime nation ringed by the sea and a quintessential mountain nation at the same time. Although there are several prefectures not facing the sea at all, no prefecture is devoid of mountains. Incidentally, Marine Memorial Day, from which Marine Day originated, was enacted long ago in 1941. There was no talk then of setting up a national holiday to commemorate the mountains, which people have also cherished together with the sea since long ago.

Such an outcome is natural when one considers the concept of a “national holiday” as prescribed by the state. Article 1 of the Act on National Holidays reads: “The Japanese people…shall determine dates on which citizens celebrate, give thanks and commemorate…” Such an arrangement does not provide for the establishment of a national holiday unless there has been some sort of formidable national event. Following such logic, activities undertaken in the mountains are extremely individual. So, even though many citizens expressed a fondness for the mountains, such a preference was probably not enough for a commemorative national holiday to be established. On the other hand, Marine Memorial Day had a respectable and well-recognized memorial foundation. When the Meiji Emperor visited Tohoku region in 1876, he made the voyage on the steamer Meiji Maru, a vessel employed for lighthouse patrols, rather than the customary battleship. Marine Memorial Day was enacted in tribute to July 20, the day on which the Emperor arrived back at Yokohama Port.

Incidentally, no other country in the world has established a national holiday like “Marine Day”. Japan is the only nation to do so. At any rate, being the only state to have taken such action has intrinsic value. Japan’s feat is probably the first such instance anywhere in the world.

Since ancient times, other than for forestry, hunting and craftsmanship carried out by mountain people, mountain pursuits in Japan have been exclusively religious. Ascetics have been schooled deep in the mountains since the Nara period.

During the Meiji period, British missionary Walter Weston hiked through the remote mountainous highland valley of Kamikochi to climb the Hida Mountains. He was so overwhelmed by the grandeur of these mountains that he named them the Japanese Alps. This was the catalyst for founding the Japanese Alpine Club, and the beginning of modern mountaineering in Japan.

Nevertheless, mountaineering during the Meiji and Taisho periods was an extravagance, definitely not something that commoners enjoyed at all. It was only much later, around 1955, that mountaineering became a popular sport, particularly among university mountaineering and trekking clubs. A Japanese Alpine Club expedition was the first ever to successfully reach the Mount Manaslu summit (8,163 meters) in the Himalayas, further adding to the mountaineering boom at the time. Eventually, the sport came to be enjoyed by ordinary citizens.

With the success of the Manaslu plan, people called for establishment of “Mountain Day”, but such appeals alone were not enough to push to tide of public opinion over the bar set in Article 1 of the Act on National Holidays. As the average lifespan has risen and more and more Japanese enjoy an increased healthy life expectancy after retirement, there has been a dramatic rise in recent years in the number of people appreciating mountaineering into their golden years. Furthermore, the number of female climbers has also increased dramatically. Japan’s heralded Mount Fuji has also been registered as a World Cultural Heritage Site.

This collective movement of citizens steered the country toward establishing Mountain Day as a national holiday so that people may “enjoy opportunities to be close to the mountains and appreciate their benefits”. Incidentally, the purpose of Marine Day is “to give thanks for the ocean’s blessings and pray for prosperity of the maritime nation Japan”.

No matter whether the activity takes place at the sea or mountains, both entail considerable risk. If more and more people and organizations prepare against risk, have a sense of self-responsibility, and maintain the resilience to respond should the unexpected arise, then both Marine Day and Mountain Day will be hailed with cheer. When a considerable proportion of the populace makes such an advance, I feel certain that we will have achieved a society sufficiently capable of confronting terrorism, a proclivity toward insularity, and populism due to which there is heightened concern that our world may be shaken.




end