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An overlooked ski range with a much deeper backstory

Betsy Manero’s “Mountain Spirit” begins like a destination feature, with train changes, ski bags and a confused arrival in Nagano, but it quickly reveals a much larger ambition. The article is not mainly trying to sell the Japanese Alps as another powder stop for international travelers. It is trying to explain why these mountains matter within Japan itself, and why reducing them to a cheaper alternative to Hokkaido misses the point. Manero’s opening claim is that Honshu’s inland ranges are both physically extraordinary and culturally formative. They inspired religion, poetry, mountaineering and modern skiing long before foreign visitors started ranking snow quality on the internet.

That framing gives the story unusual weight. The Japanese Alps are introduced not simply as terrain but as a civilizational landscape. Manero walks through Nagano and finds mountains everywhere behind the built environment: above train stations, behind temple roofs and at the edge of every modern convenience. Zenkoji and other sacred sites sit inside a much older pattern in which mountains were not just places to recreate but places to worship, fear and orient a life around. Fukada Kyuya’s One Hundred Mountains of Japan becomes the article’s ideal touchstone because it treats peaks as carriers of memory and character rather than interchangeable objectives. His standard for a meaningful mountain was not just height or difficulty but distinctness, history and presence. Manero uses that sensibility to tell the reader how to see the range before she says much about skiing at all.

That is the first thing that makes the article memorable. It insists that the Japanese Alps are worth knowing on their own cultural terms. Hokkaido may dominate modern ski fantasy, but Honshu’s mountains carry a different kind of gravity. They feel less like a snow product and more like a long archive of Japanese ideas about wilderness, effort, national identity and return.

Modern Japanese skiing grew out of far more than resort marketing

The article’s strongest section is its long middle history, where Manero reconstructs how skiing and mountaineering took root in these mountains. She traces a surprisingly broad lineage. There is the spiritual tradition of Shugendo and the old holy peaks. Then there is the arrival of Reverend Walter Weston, the British missionary whose alpine writing helped catalyze modern Japanese mountaineering. From there the piece moves through military training, early university alpine clubs, ski manufacturing and the rise of winter travel as both discipline and leisure. The result is not a neat linear history but a layered one. Skiing in the Japanese Alps emerges as part imported method, part local adaptation and part national project.

Manero is especially good at showing how quickly skiing became tied to larger ideas of modernity and prestige. The military used it. Students used it to push winter first ascents. Resorts and hotels grew around it. Chiharu Igaya’s 1956 Olympic silver medal becomes one of the article’s defining moments, not just because it was a sporting milestone but because it helped restore national pride after the war. Later, the 1980s boom and the 1998 Nagano Olympics transformed skiing from a more specialized pursuit into a mass lifestyle. High-speed trains, new lifts and lavish hotels made the Japanese Alps accessible to ordinary urban workers in a way that earlier generations could barely imagine.

The article is careful not to romanticize that development. Expansion brought crowding, commercialization and, eventually, a painful contraction when Japan’s economic bubble burst. Manero notes the abandoned resorts, the slow decline from the ski boom’s peak and the infrastructure that now feels like a preserved relic of a richer era. But she does not present that decline as simple failure either. It becomes part of the range’s personality. The aging chairlifts, old hotels and quieter base areas all suggest a ski culture that modernized intensely, then partially froze in place.

The real question is how these mountains should be shared now

By the final section, the article shifts from history into a live tension about tourism. International visitors eventually arrived in larger numbers, first through Hokkaido’s powder reputation and later, in Honshu, through ski media and films like Jeremy Jones’ Further. Manero acknowledges the obvious appeal. Hakuba and Myoko offer deep snow, lift-served access to serious backcountry and a mountain culture that still feels distinct from North American resort homogenization. The hot vending machines, the old lifts, the orderly train systems and the mountain huts are not ornamental details. They are part of what makes skiing here feel embedded in a particular place rather than staged for export.

But the article’s closing mood is cautious rather than promotional. More attention brings money and visibility, yet it also risks flattening these mountains into another global ski commodity. That concern is strengthened by Manero’s encounters with Sierra Schlag and others who are already thinking about what outsiders miss when they consume Japan as an aesthetic. The companion cultural pieces elsewhere in the issue sharpen this backdrop, but even within “Mountain Spirit” the point is clear: tourism only works if visitors are willing to step into an existing culture instead of treating it like set dressing for powder clips.

That is why the title lands so well. The mountain spirit in Manero’s telling is not mystical fluff and it is not just powder fever. It is the accumulated meaning created by temples, climbers, racers, hoteliers, filmmakers, local guides and ordinary travelers moving through the same ranges for different reasons over more than a century. The Japanese Alps matter because skiing there still feels connected to all of that history. The article’s closing takeaway is that the best future for these mountains is not to become the next oversimplified ski craze, but to attract people willing to appreciate why the place was significant long before they arrived with skins and fat skis.