Life in Japan is all but impossible without a regular job, and vacation time, apart from public holidays, is still a strictly theoretical concept in many companies. As a result, people climb like fiends during the little time they have outdoors. “Yeah, I was a climbing bum once,” reminisces one of the boulderers, “for two full months.” He’s not joking.
The train pulls into Shinjuku station, which regurgitates crowds equivalent to the population of L.A. on a daily basis. Topher, once again alienated by Japanese conversation and signs he can’t read, scrambles to collect his photo gear from the luggage rack before lunging onto the crowded platform. He figures that if he loses track of me, his only recourse will be to become a Tokyo street bum. He has already requested a sign written in Japanese: “My name is Topher. I didn’t vote for Bush. Please help me find home.”
The boulderers disperse onto various subways, stuck in the city for another week of work and pulling on plastic. The full-time climber would be a nonexistent animal in Tokyo if it weren’t for patron saints like Naoya Naito. Naoya is an old-timer of the Japanese climbing scene who made the not-unusual transition from mountaineering to traditional rock climbing, and then to sport climbing.
A much more unlikely transition that he also pulled off was morphing from run-of-the-mill salaryman, as white-collar worker bees are called, to owning five of Tokyo’s twenty climbing gyms, a couple of gear stores, and a climbing video production company. His business is carefully tailored to give all employees (himself included) a minimum of one month off per year and to feed an army of talented part-time youngsters who hope to someday become pro climbers. Ever on the prowl to increase his gym clientele, Naoya is on top of current climbing trends in the country.
“Routes are for old people, like us,” he says. “Both in the gym and at the crags, you’ll see that the vast majority of roped climbers are over thirty. The cool thing to do is bouldering, and that’s what the kids get into.” He invites us for a session at one of his gyms, and we see it for ourselves. An extremely fit-looking seventy-year-old is working on a 5.12d. He didn’t take up climbing until after his retirement. On weekday mornings the gym is well visited by retirees who have discovered a new hobby, and work on their routes with as much glee as the teenage bouldering crowd. The gym has practically no routes rated 5.9 and under, only a few easy 5.10s, and no topropes — everyone leads.
“The people who come here are seriously into it,” explains Naoya. “There are some other gyms that are more set up for novices and occasional climbers.” What about trad climbing? “Only a tiny fraction of the climbers nowadays do it. I sell about one rack of natural pro a year between the two stores. Partly it’s a matter of popularity, partly availability — there are more sport routes than trad climbs, and there aren’t a whole lot of beginner-friendly or easy trad climbs. Even at Ogawayama, which is a granite area, there aren’t too many splitters, at least not many that aren’t choked with mud after every rain.”
Naoya’s videos target the small climbing community. He shows us his latest opus, a chronicle of Yuji Hirayama’s onsight attempt of El Niño on El Cap, the first video he’ll release internationally. His current film project is a commission by a large publishing house to make a general-audience film featuring Yuji on classic climbs at some of Japan’s better-known crags. We tag along on a shooting and climbing road trip to the sea cliffs of Jogasaki on the Izu peninsula.
At the crag, director Kosuke Abe and Naoya start rigging in anticipation of the star’s arrival, while we warm up on a 5.10+ that turns out to be an eye opener. It’s a blustery day, the surf’s up, and boomers are exploding spray thirty feet high off the seaside boulders just behind us, making for grandiose scenery in a small-scale Japanese sort of way.
Yuji comes bounding down the trail, psyched as usual. Headlamps are obligatory on a cragging day with him, we’re told. Naoya witnessed Yuji’s early days. “Boy, was he a cocky little teenage brat. He’d go to Ogawayama equipped with a bowl and a spoon and hang out at the campground for a month. The other climbers would basically feed him. In return, you’d get comments like, ‘No way, Naito-san, you really fell off there? I thought it was pretty easy!’ Somehow he was just too likeable to get pissed off at, though. When he moved to France, not speaking a word of French, surviving on odd jobs and fending for himself — that’s what mellowed him out.” The grown-up Yuji is friendly, laid back, psyched to climb with anyone who’s motivated, dedicated to his sponsors, and a perfect diplomat — every inch the Dai Sensei, or Grand Master, as he’s nicknamed.