Mrs Tsk *

Japan is a mountainous country, a country in which dense urban areas are squeezed between beautiful forested mountains and the sea. In summer, people in the cities head to the mountains (advertised in the train stations in wordless posters like this one) for fresher, cooler air and a particularly Shinto take on the pleasure of nature.


It isn’t just train companies which cater to this summer exodus. Several magazines and “one-shot mooks” spring up on shelves, aimed at hikers, nature photographers, or just people who want to dream about trips they’ll never make. These people — according to the hiking and “camera girl” magazines, anyway — are all beaming, wholesome women of about thirty.


Volume 4 of Hutte (available in iPad edition too) focuses on hiking in Japan’s northern Alps. It shows an unmade-up girl with a bob cut sitting atop a mountain, a glow of quiet satisfaction on her face. The title is the German word for “hut”, and one of the stories is trailed in English: “Mountain Summer Memories”.


Randonnée is the French word for “an organised long-distance cycling ride”, but this title too is about hiking. Volume 3 takes as its special theme “the first night’s hut”, and looks at journeys which require an overnight stay. The cover star is again a well-equipped, solitary woman of about thirty, suffused with pleasure as she hikes through the Japanese hills.


Capitalising on the summer season, Randonnée has also published a one-shot ABC Trekking and Hiking guide featuring an almost identical solitary, rapturous girl.


If the mountains are too much of a chore, and hiking equipment too expensive, this same thirty-ish female nature-consumer can opt to strap on her camera and visit the sea, according to Sha-Girl, a photography title from the same publisher as Randonnée, and seemingly featuring the same cover star as Hutte. “Sha” stands for shashin, a photograph, so this magazine is aimed at the camera joshi, or “camera girl”. But the idea seems to be similar to the hiking mags; young women rejoicing in nature.


I get a jumble of impressions when I look at these magazines. First of all, in a land as safe as Japan all sorts of adventures are possible that wouldn’t be possible elsewhere — Japan’s “boringness” makes all sorts of excitingness possible. Second, girls doing creative things in nature (assuming they exist) are more attractive than girls, you know, varnishing their nails and trying out free sachets of shampoo. Third, wholesomeness is wholly sexy, even to the unwholesome. Fourth, Japan has lots of weird crossover with Mitteleuropa and Scandinavia.

Fifth (new paragraph), I wonder if what I’m responding to is a class profile; the girls you encounter (according to these magazines, anyway) at mountain lodges seem to be well-to-do girls who can afford expensive retro-analogue cameras and sturdy hiking boots. Despite their exposure to the sun, they’ve somehow avoided the vulgar brown tan of the urban gyaru, itself a class marker. And sixth, I’m pretty sure that in real life hiking is always done in groups, and groups of mixed gender, made up of people over the age of thirty.

So perhaps the image of a happy solitary woman on a mountain-top is purely metaphorical: it’s a picture of “my happiness in nature”. Because inside, atop a mountain, we’re all girls.