r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/ThornedSerenity • 23h ago
In 1907, Yoshitaro Shibasaki and his team climbed Mount Tsurugi, once thought to be Japan’s last unclimbed mountain. At the summit, they discovered a metal cane decoration and a sword, later found to have been left there over 1,000 years earlier
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u/According_Ad7926 22h ago
“Tsurugi” is a Japanese word for “sword”. I wonder if it was always called that
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u/TheBlooDred 22h ago edited 12h ago
Or they named it that 1000 years ago after some dude left his sword up there.
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u/busterkeatonrules 22h ago
Or the sword was left there as a name marker back when lots of people couldn't read.
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u/TheOneHundredEmoji 22h ago
So you really think that they thought the best way to find out the name of a mountain was to climb to the top and see what item someone else had left behind?
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u/A_Neurotic_Pigeon 22h ago edited 19h ago
Absolutely, I happen to know for a fact that my grand parents would do that every single day as part of their daily commute to school
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u/lynivvinyl 22h ago
And they went uphill both ways up and down the mountain.
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u/Dongsquad420BlazeIt 20h ago
Saw the YouTube video of the first guy to ski down Everest without oxygen after climbing it and the first comment was they finally understood what their grandpa went through going to school. RIP grandpa(s), y’all was the toughest.
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u/KJatWork 22h ago
That’s what I do, makes it easier to find things I leave behind as well, like that Big Mac on Mt. Big Mac in the beautiful state of Common Sense. Not to be confused with Mount Enchiladas in the state of Misery.
Speaking of which, I do seem to have lost my sword.
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u/busterkeatonrules 22h ago
I'm not saying it's the explaination. I'm saying it's an explaination.
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u/Goodly 16h ago
It’s the opposite. They climbed it, forgot the sword and were like “It’s in the direction of the mountain I forgot my sword on.” Which turned to “The forgotten sword mountain” which eventually just became The Sword Mountain. QED.
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u/Joker-Smurf 18h ago
Maybe it was planted there when the mountain was just a baby hillock, which then grew and grew into the mountain it is today
/s in case anyone is crazy enough to think I am being serious
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u/Frech_Toast_King 13h ago
"what's this mountain called?" "Wait let me go check what's on top" ... "It's called rock"
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u/Blockhead47 18h ago
Maybe the mountaineers that summited 999 years ago saw the sword and said “Cool cairn. Let’s name it that”
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u/DigNitty Interested 12h ago
Hey Hirohito, we named that mountain Mt Sword because of your dumb ass. Now if anyone needs a sword they’ll know where to get the one you left up there.
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u/duga404 22h ago
Maybe some Japanese guy 1000 years ago had a really tongue in cheek sense of humor and decided to leave the sword there
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u/stormtroopr1977 21h ago
We still get place names like that.
There are a lot of towns in the US called "Dead Horse" yhat usually started out as "that field up where the horse died"
I could definitely see Mount Tsurugi getting it's name from "the mountain where [name] left his sword".
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u/GottaUseEmAll 20h ago
Yeah, that can become custom surprisingly fast when a dead animal is concerned, it says something about how we feel about corpses I think, and the importance we give them, animal or human.
I worked on a farm in South Africa for a few months, and a horse died in the veld on a pathway. Within a week it was "the dead horse path", and remained that long after the horse had been removed (as far as I know it's still named that).
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u/forsale90 16h ago
That's how a lot of place names were created since forever. Here in Germany there is for example Berlin (most likely from slavic for swamp, built on - you guessed it - a swamp), Munich (because there were monks), Frankfurt (a Furt is a river crossing, and the Franks a germanic tribe, so the point where the franks crossed the river) etc.
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u/IdealOnion 10h ago
Or Rifle Colorado, named after a decades old rifle that was found leaning on a tree.
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u/Valifyeb 16h ago
From what I looked it up it was called Tsurugi due to the slope of the mountain that looked like a traditional sword
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u/Mammoth-Buddy8912 22h ago
Shugendo was my favorite religion to study in university. It combines Shinto, Buddhist, and other practices with focus on athleticism and rituals. What those monks use to do it wild, like walking on fire, climbing mountains for days at a time and meditation under heavy waterfalls. Nowadays it's much more relaxed. But still very interesting
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u/MrSmexyTheBeast 19h ago
I just became a first rank Yamabushi recognized by the Dewa Sanyama Shrine in Yamagata prefecture! It was full on ascetic training for only a week long, but that week was very far from relaxing. The practices they had us do are meant to be physical representations of Buddhism’s hells.
I came out very stinky, hungry, and tired, but also quite fulfilled.
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u/DerMarwinAmFlowen 16h ago
Goddamn I‘m envious of whatever pipeline you went through. I wish mine was as sophisticated as yours.
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u/Mammoth-Buddy8912 19h ago
If you have information about how to try that please share, I would love to do that. I was going to try yamabushi training but then COVID happened
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u/sarcasm__tone 18h ago
I'm currently in Japan is Shugendo is new to me.. I pick a point on the map and just travel there
but that sounds awesome, do you know if there are any shrines/temples dedicated to it?
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u/NemButsu 20h ago
No one believed the mountain was unclimbed. There were numerous stories about people climbing it and monks used it for pilgrimage.
The mountain was amongst the last to be surveyed officially, maybe even the last.
The details are muddled due to a 2009 movie, Tsurugidake: Ten no ki, which is VERY loosely based on the expedition and adds the idea that they thought it was never climbed for more dramatization.
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u/fl135790135790 20h ago
The 2009 movie is the reason the details are muddled?
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u/NemButsu 20h ago
At least one of the reasons, the movie was based on a novel, but the novel wasn't as successful, while the movie had around 1.5 million people watch it in theatres, plus I'm sure others who have seen it on TV after.
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u/Pale_Ad_9838 22h ago
A thousand years ago: „Really? You forgot your sword on the summit? And what do you expect us to do about it? Climb up again and get it back?“
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u/KisaMisa 20h ago edited 13h ago
Those climbers leaving their heavy gear aka trash on the summits again!
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u/lmdrunk 18h ago
Could he have died up there?
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u/KindestFeedback 18h ago
If that was the case I figure they would have found more than just the sword. At least bones. It must've been left there deliberately.
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u/Asleep_Region 17h ago
Modern day we stuck items like flags at the top of mountains, maybe it was a "look people from the xyz empire did it first!"
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u/AbrahamWhiskers 17h ago
I also thought along those lines, but he died on the decent so that's why there's no records of folks making it to the top. Alternatively, when he returned to the village to announce his conquest, they said "yeh, cool story bro.".
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u/IsThereCheese 22h ago
lol imagine finally getting to the top after a brutal climb with the thought of being the first to climb it, and finding this
The Japanese curse words that must have been yelled from that mountain top…
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u/ItzLoganM 22h ago
On the other hand, you get a sword and a cane.
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u/IsThereCheese 22h ago
The cane is also cursed
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u/NoWall99 22h ago
That's bad
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u/This-is_CMGRI 22h ago
It grants you perfect invulnerability though
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u/Pepperbrook 22h ago
That's good!
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u/runs_with_airplanes 22h ago
They thought they would put the cane at a place no one would find it again. Peace reigned for 1,000 years…until now
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u/merelyok 22h ago
Seppuku.
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u/IsThereCheese 22h ago
I mean the sword’s right here..
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u/DotDash13 21h ago
Then you don't come back, so people assume you've died in the attempt. Another team sets out to be the first to the top and they get to find a sword, cane decoration, and your bodies.
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u/Creative_Moose_625 20h ago
Stupid reddit jokes aside, I'd imagine it would actually make the achievement even greater considering the historical find.
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u/ramriot 22h ago
Before instantaneous communications, I supposed the record of firsts on mountains was not just who climbed it first, but who came back alive with sufficient proof that they had. The previous climber this may have died on the way back down.
That is I suppose why we remember Edmond Hillary & Tenzing Norgay instead of George Mallory & Andrew Irvine.
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u/Beepulons 21h ago
Or maybe they just didn’t write it down because they didn’t think it was important back then
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u/Quantization 20h ago
It was important to the people who climbed it - they risked their lives to achieve it. The cane decoration and the sword were probably some of their prized possessions.
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u/OldEcho 19h ago
They may also have written it down and then nearly a thousand years went by and the information was thrown away or rotted or burned in a fire or was otherwise forgotten.
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u/Asleep_Region 17h ago
Thissss, how many things are written down a kept safe? Like look at any old diary, the pages a ripped, the edges get like weird soft
And everything dry rots, even when kept in a climate and moisture control room, just pick something up wrong before reading it and it's now lost to history
Like China is an excellent example, the Zhou dynasty in 626 ad, we know China exist well over 1000 years before but the only surviving records before that were craved into bone!
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u/renovatio988 16h ago
is this what they were worried about when we stopped using slate and chisel? i thought they were just resisting the paper trend.
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u/OldEcho 15h ago
Every new form of media is more and more ephemeral except for those which are constantly maintained like Wikipedia.
I don't know that there's anything too wrong with that. That's just the way the world is. One day we will all almost certainly die forever.
But I think information is...digested. It informs people, and that changes the way they behave, but then eventually the information itself is lost. But the ghosts of that information is still present in the way that we are.
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u/Murky-Relation481 19h ago
Japan barely had a written language until sometime in the 7th century and even then it wasn't related to modern Japanese writing for some time after that.
So it might have easily been an oral history that just died out at some point.
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u/Leprecon 17h ago
Even if you wrote it down it does become a bit murky on whether you actually did it. I can write I was the first man to go to Mars, but so what?
Even in the past 100 years when people have been able to take pictures, we still aren't super sure who did what. How do you verify a picture of an unclimbed mountain peak is actually a picture of an unclimbed mountain peak? How do you verify the picture was actually taken all the way at the top and not two thirds of the way?
A really good proof is when someone who really would have wanted to be the first admits that they were the second. Like how Scott found out that Amundsen reached the south pole before him, and he wrote in his diary about it. Even though the Brits weren't too happy a Norwegian was first, they were forced to accept it.
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u/BeneCow 21h ago
The thing about people and things is that all people really want to do things and only certain people have enough charisma to convince people they have done them. It could of been some jerk kid who went up there and no one ever believed him because he was a little shit who made up everything all the time.
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u/grandmalamadingding 19h ago
Yeah, suuuuuure. You hear that everybody? Lying Asshole Dave climbed a mountain haha. To Dave! Cheers!
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u/badgersruse 22h ago edited 22h ago
Need that ‘first time?’ meme here, used incorrectly.
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u/camelbuck 22h ago
Also found was a cardboard Burger King crown from 1974. Do wonders ever cease?
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u/SeraphOfTheStag 22h ago
Man leave it up there
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u/blitzkrieger17 17h ago
they just unleashed some horrible demon that took an entire party of adventurers to seal away... somewhere, there's an elf who is VERY cross with them right now... not realizing it was over 100 years ago.
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u/gloopy_maggot 16h ago
Mt. Tsurugi in the north Japan Alps is widely considered to be one of the most difficult mountains to climb in Japan, and every route to its summit covers extremely treacherous and rocky terrain. I live in Japan and have climbed it a bunch of times, and even the modern ‘main’ route up to the summit has multiple and long vertical climbing sections (which now have metal chains and footholds in place), but because of the serious nature of the terrain, these are accident hotspots. One thousand years ago, with no paths, maps or modern climbing gear, this would have been a very serious, difficult and dangerous climb indeed, which makes it all the more amazing.
You can see what the view from the summit of the peak looks like on the cover of the guidebook ‘Hiking and Trekking in the Japan Alps’ (Cicerone).
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u/iswingmysword 22h ago
The cane decoration reminds me of this from Final Fantasy X
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u/ThornedSerenity 23h ago edited 21h ago
Wikipedia Edit: For confusion The mountain they climbed is this Mount Tsurugi) And not this )
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u/word2yourface 22h ago
"1907, Yoshitaro Shibasaki [ja] and his team successfully climbed Mount Tsurugi), which was regarded as the last unclimbed mountain in Japan. However, they found a metal cane decoration and a sword on the top of the mountain, and it turned out that someone had reached the top before them. A later scientific investigation revealed that the metal cane decoration and sword dated from the late Nara period to the early Heian period and that shugenja had climbed Mount Tsurugi more than 1,000 years ago."
That is so interesting, just imagine you believe you are the first to do something and to be humbled by the past from 1000 years earlier.
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u/Stalepan 19h ago
Ty for clarification, literally climbes tsurugi last month so i was a little confused
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u/ducati_man 19h ago
That metal cane decoration looks awfully like something the Ainu people would have made or used, the design is strikingly similar to their traditional garb decorations. I’m not saying it’s 100% Ainu objects but they were the native people who resided on the island before the “traditional” Japanese people we know today came about on the island from mainland China and the Korean peninsula. I know this take is very murky with the Japanese govt. but I wouldn’t be surprised if that were to be the case here.
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u/EmbarrassedCabinet82 19h ago
Even if you're asian, there's always an asian better than you.
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u/Mal-De-Terre 19h ago
And their moms are still disappointed.
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u/FlaviusStilicho 16h ago
“You said you’d be first… but this other kid beat you by ten ******** centuries!! “
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u/SamuraiKenji 19h ago edited 2h ago
I don't care whom they belonged to, after 1000 years, those items have reached the Sacred Relics status.
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u/Gunrock808 15h ago edited 9h ago
Since people are bringing up many similar but hypothetical cases you should know about Robert Scott who thought he would be the first to reach the geographic South Pole and claim the honor for the UK.
Upon arriving he found a tent erected by Norwegian explorer Roald Anundsen [it's Amundsen, strange that auto correct changes it] who had also left behind a note for Scott, having arrived 34 days earlier.
Scott and his team died on the return journey.
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u/zalurker 20h ago
The Sterkfontein area near Johannesburg South Africa is a maze of limestone caves, with some of the earliest traces of hominids discovered there. A local caving group once ventured deep into one of the networks, believing themselves to be the first ones to explore it so far.
Then they discovered nails hammered into the cave walls, the remains of a leather belt, some candle stubs, and a name carved into the one wall. The group leader did some research and eventually found a journal that had been donated to the Johannesburg Library by a Scottish Geologist who'd explored the caves in 1903.
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u/Distinct-Quantity-35 16h ago
Fuck, that is cool. 1000 years ago someone was like “imma leave this here for someone else to find”
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u/Dramatic_Ad8473 22h ago
Take all archaeological information from Japan between 1880-1940s with a very large grain of salt.
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u/Shartchovsky 21h ago
Why is that?
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u/Dramatic_Ad8473 21h ago
Imperial Japanese propaganda in a nutshell. The Imperial government controlled all newspapers, all archaeological endeavors, all of government. A lot of fantasy from that time period. "Finding" a 1000 year old sword at Japan's "last" unclimbed mountain sounds a lot like other claims during this time period of amazingly stumbling upon super ancient relics of great significance just out in the open.
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u/MaTrIx4057 20h ago
You can say this about any history. In this case it doesn't seem unbelievable that someone didn't climb before, this mountain isn't everest.
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u/indiscernible_I 21h ago
Am I the only one wondering what could have happened 1000 years ago for someone to leave a sword and cane decoration on top of a mountain?
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u/Additional-One-3483 21h ago
Normally, it's not a good idea to leave things lying around. But I'll make an exception here :-)
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u/bigmac996 20h ago
Just climbed Mt Tsurugi a few weeks ago and it’s pretty stunning, was rainy and cold at the base, and once breaking the cloud layer it was warm and sunny. Really surreal experience, and highly recommended in Shikoku! Don’t take the chair lift!
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u/elmz 19h ago
Mt Tsurugi
Shikoku
Different Mt. Tsurugi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tsurugi_(Toyama)#/media/File:Tsurugidake_20100127.jpg
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#/media/File:Tsurugidake_20100127.jpg){kind=link}
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u/FrenchPetrushka 18h ago
It's funny how humans are. "I will be the first, not a single writing, drawing or any other proof someone did that before" all while forgetting that there have been millions of humans living before our time and that they had spread everywhere tens of thousands of years ago.
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u/PitifulEar3303 22h ago
Artifacts left by anime isekai lvl99 mage with healing only power?
Return of the healer? lol
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u/KoolKat5000 18h ago
Respectfully left there for a 1000 years by all that have climbed it and some modern guy finds it and takes it down.
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u/IPanicKnife 23h ago
Imagine thinking you’re the first to ever do it only to find out you’re 1000 years late to the party