Mount Tsurugi

I had braced for suffering. Every mountain I had climbed until then in Japan had involved at least one stretch where I questioned my life choices, usually on all fours. So when we took the chairlift partway up Tsurugi and I realised the rest was going to be a walk — an actual walk, on grass and boardwalk — I felt almost cheated, and then deeply grateful, in that order, within about a minute.

The Lazy Man’s Sacred Peak

Tsurugi-san rises to nearly 1,955 metres in the heart of Tokushima, the second-highest mountain on all of Shikoku, and it wears its holiness lightly. A little single-seat chairlift, the Tsurugisan Tozan Lift, carries you up from Minokoshi to just under the ridgeline, and from there the summit is under an hour of easy ascent. There is something almost comic about stepping off a chairlift onto a sacred mountain, but the pilgrims have been coming here for centuries and clearly nobody minds a shortcut.

Lia, who does not love heights, made peace with the lift by narrating to the empty seat in front of her the entire way up. I let her.

Boardwalks Over the Bamboo Grass

What makes Tsurugi strange and lovely is the summit itself. Instead of a rocky peak you get a broad, rounded plateau carpeted in dwarf bamboo grass, and to protect it the authorities have laid wooden boardwalks across the top. So you walk the final stretch on planks, a metre above a sea of pale green that ripples in the wind like water. Near the shoulder of the mountain sits Tsurugi-san Hongu, a small mountain shrine, and we stopped there long enough for me to fumble a coin into the box and clap in the wrong rhythm, as I always do.

The wind up there was constant and clean. Lia lay down flat on the boardwalk with her hat over her face and announced she was staying. We had the plateau nearly to ourselves — two hikers passed, nodded, vanished over the ridge.

The View That Kept Widening

From the true summit the land falls away in every direction — the Tsurugi range folding off into blue distances, and on the clear day we got, a thin grey line to the south that Lia swore was the Pacific and I chose to believe. Off to one side rose Jirogyu, Tsurugi’s near-twin peak, connected by a ridge walk that looked so inviting we nearly did it on impulse and then remembered we had a car to return.

We ate our convenience-store rice balls sitting on a rock with our backs to the wind, and I remember thinking that most of the best views I’ve earned cost me a great deal of sweat, and this one had cost me a chairlift ticket and a gentle stroll, and it was no less beautiful for it.

Getting There

Tsurugi-san sits deep in the mountains of western Tokushima, and reaching the trailhead at Minokoshi is genuinely the hard part — the roads are narrow, winding, and long. We drove from the Iya Valley, which took the better part of two hours of switchbacks; from Tokushima city it’s closer to two and a half. There is no train anywhere near, and buses to Minokoshi are seasonal and sparse, so a car is really the only sensible option. The Tozan chairlift runs roughly from spring through late autumn, cutting the climb to something almost anyone can manage in an hour or so. Check that the lift is running before you commit to the drive, bring a windproof layer even in summer — that plateau is exposed — and if the sky is clear, do not rush the top. The view only gets better the longer you sit with it.