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From George Masa’s 1915 arrival in Asheville, North Carolina, till his loss of life in 1933, the trailblazing Japanese photographer explored the Smoky Mountains, mapping trails and capturing the area’s grandeur and wonder in pictures that helped make the case for the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But Masa’s buddies—and the researchers who adopted—have lengthy puzzled: the place did Masa’s love of the mountains originate?
We now know that it began lengthy earlier than his arrival in Asheville. Growing up in Shizuoka, a prefecture on Honshu, Japan’s largest island, Masa—born with the surname Takahashi, changing into Shoji Endo (generally spelled “Endow”) when he was adopted following his mom’s loss of life, and solely later often called George Masa—would usually catch glimpses of Mount Fuji within the distance. At 12,385 ft, it’s the highest level in Japan. The southern portion of the Japanese Alps additionally stretches into Shizuoka prefecture. Today greater than ten % of the land in Shizuoka is protected. When he had money and time, Masa went mountaineering.
“Appreciation of mountaineering itself was born among a small elite of Japanese youth,” wrote Yasuji Yamazaki within the British Alpine Journal v. 71 (1966). Masa was certainly one of them. In 1905, on the age of 20, he joined the Japanese Alpine Club.
Such golf equipment usually printed periodic newsletters that included tidbits about their members. It was in certainly one of these publications that we first discovered new particulars about George Masa. The June 1906 journal of the Japanese Alpine Club reported that two of its members, Mr. Kiyosawa and Mr. Shoji Endo, left for Seattle, promising to analysis the Rocky Mountain Club and ship stories residence to the membership.
Masa had first tried to enter the US in 1904 however was turned away on the port of San Francisco resulting from a severe eye an infection. He enrolled in Tokyo’s prestigious Meiji University, left after one semester, and tried as soon as once more to come back to the States. This time, he succeeded.
Masa spent almost a decade on the West Coast, largely in Seattle and Portland, working quite a lot of jobs however enjoying laborious in his spare time. Talented on the baseball subject, he performed, coached, and managed for numerous Japanese groups within the Pacific Northwest, and he additionally continued his mountaineering pursuits.
On September 13, 1909, Masa utilized for membership within the Mazamas Club, an alpine membership that had been established on the summit of Mount Hood in 1894. His software listed two ascents of Mount Fuji, made on the ages of 17 and 20. Rightly proud that certainly one of its climbers was now a Mazama, the Japanese Alpine Club introduced in its November 1909 journal that Masa was seemingly “the very first member of us who was allowed to join an overseas mountain club in our history.” In 1911 he and his climbing buddy Gaintsu Senow signed the summit register on 11,249-foot Mount Hood, the best mountain in Oregon. In addition to their names and membership affiliations, the 2 buddies added their signatures in Japanese. Masa remained on the Mazamas membership roster by 1916.
We additionally be taught by the journal of the Japanese Alpine Club that Masa climbed Mount Rainier, the best mountain in Washington State at 14,410 ft in elevation. Although the early summit registers for Mount Rainier will not be in any archive, each the publication of the alpine membership and the History of Japanese Mountain Climbing (1969) assert that Masa was the primary Japanese man to climb Mount Rainier.
“What a spectacular glacier,” Masa exclaimed in a letter residence to the Japanese Alpine Club. Apologizing to his climbing neighborhood for not writing a full report, he confided {that a} current baseball damage prevented him from submitting one. Hit within the chest by a pitch, Masa had been laid low with an an infection and a fever. Eager to discover once more, he reluctantly conceded in his November 1910 replace that he wouldn’t be capable of “climb mountains this summer with this physical condition.” Likely his damage knocked out his baseball season as properly.
The setback didn’t forestall Masa from encouraging others to climb Mount Rainier, nonetheless. He reported in his letter that he had “urged the Asahi newspaper to recruit a climbing party … of 15–16 people.” Photographs preserved in a photograph album now held by the Nippon Kan Heritage Association and as soon as owned by Juichiro Terusaki, who ran the Asahi News in Seattle, chronicle an expedition of a 12-person climbing social gathering from 1910.
It was not straightforward to summit these peaks. Although each the historians’ stories within the Mazamas journal and the membership’s seventy fifth anniversary historical past, We Climb High: A Thumbnail Chronology of the Mazamas, 1894–1964, present tales of the camaraderie and triumphs, in addition they provide glimpses of the harrowing experiences climbers confronted—lightning storms on the summit, blind crevasses, limbs crushed by rolling boulders, rescue groups transporting injured or lifeless climbers off the mountains. We don’t know the route Masa used on his ascents, however we do know there have been no highways or well-worn trails resulting in the summits.
What’s extra exceptional is studying that Masa was photographing a few of his personal climbing journeys—proof present in John H. Williams’ e book, The Guardians of the Columbia (1912), now available digitally by Project Gutenberg. Williams focuses his e book on three snow-capped peaks within the Cascade Range: Mount Hood, Mount Adams, and Mount St. Helens.
Shoji Endow is credited with six of the 200 pictures featured within the e book,
together with a hanging {photograph} of storm-swept white-bark pines, a pointy picture of Newton Clark glacier on Mount Hood, one other of Eliot Glacier taken from close to the summit of Mount Hood, and a cluster of three climbers approaching the summit of Mount Adams, at 12,281 ft the second-highest peak in Washington state. A shocking photograph of a butterfly poised barely above its shadow is captioned “a butterfly on the summit of Mt. Hood.” While a number of the different photographers in Williams’ e book have been utilizing larger-format cameras, Masa was seemingly carrying a smaller Kodak #2 or #3 Brownie on these climbing journeys. He had clearly gained sufficient expertise to supply high quality images, proving an early curiosity in pictures together with budding technical expertise.
Masa’s ardour for mountains additionally gave him a brand new nickname, in keeping with the November 1909 Sangaku, the journal of the Japanese Alpine Club. Writing again to his buddies in Japan, he defined, “As I am so obsessed with mountains, my friends call me ‘Yama’ instead of my real name. Therefore, I’ve started to use ‘Yama耶麻’ as my penname.”
The phrase “yama” means “mountain” in Japanese.
When Masa arrived in Asheville in 1915, Fred Seely, his boss on the Grove Park Inn, had no concept that the “ironing man” he’d simply employed for his laundry was each a proficient mountain climber and an skilled photographer. Neither did his mountain climbing buddies from the Carolina Mountain Club who organized his funeral 18 years later know of his early experiences with climbing and pictures.
And, till not too long ago, neither did we. We do perceive, nonetheless, that we’ll by no means be “finished” with George Masa. Masa’s West Coast life offered the scaffolding for his work within the Smokies. We are the beneficiaries … and now, the guardians.
An expanded model of this story was initially printed within the fall 2025 challenge of Smokies Life Journal, a twice-yearly journal that’s the major advantage of becoming a member of Smokies Life. The piece follows the 2024 publication of the award-winning biography George Masa: A Life Reimagined, coauthored by Jane McCue and Paul Bonesteel and printed by Smokies Life. To learn extra tales like this whereas supporting Great Smoky Mountains National Park, go to SmokiesLife.org/Membership and grow to be a Park Keeper.
Janet McCue is a author, researcher, and avid hiker who, along with coauthoring George Masa: A Life Reimagined with Paul Bonesteel, wrote Back of Beyond: A Horace Kephart Biography with the late George Ellison. She can also be a member of the Smokies Life board of administrators. Bonesteel is a filmmaker, author, and passionate lover of the outside whose work has knowledgeable the dialog about Masa’s life since he produced the movie The Mystery of George Masa in 2002. George Masa: A Life Reimagined has obtained four awards, together with an honorable point out within the 2025 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Awards.
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