After towing us around until we wave our over-inflated forearms in surrender, he returns to his project on the Ninja Rejecter boulder. The base is lined with pads and some twenty ninjas, their cheering squad, and a peanut gallery. The ninjas are taking turns throwing themselves at a handful of problems ranging from V5 to V13. I get the same encouragement for trying to do a couple of moves on the easy problem as the next guy who’s teetering his way towards the topout of the V13 — a chorus of Gam-ba!, short for gambare, meaning “do your best,” gives way to general hilarity when the hardman topples off the final mantel. Hardman himself is lying on the pads, hooting with laughter, then rolls out of the way as the next climber launches himself at the same problem. Like clockwork, one woman craters off the highball crux of a V8 every five minutes, and a couple of guys barely find time to slink up in between her attempts, only to fail on the first move.
There’s a pad procession to the train station at the end of the day. Most of the boulderers reappear on the train back to Tokyo with a couple of cans of beer they acquired somewhere. The train is jam-packed with happy, tired hikers, similarly equipped with beer for the hour’s ride.

Topher and I marveled at finding a crowd at the most difficult boulder while all the easier routes were deserted, but the climbers are dismissive. “Well, yeah, most climbers get good pretty fast, but it’s probably just something in the national psyche to enjoy being obsessively dedicated.” I’m reminded of a friend’s story about a Japanese mountaineer reduced by exhaustion to crawling on an Ecuadorian volcano’s snow slope on all fours — still going up — while smiling from ear to ear and insisting that she was having a grand old time, which she probably was. While membership in the formerly popular mountain clubs has dwindled to almost nothing, free climbing, and especially bouldering, offers endless new fun in self-castigation.