Uniquely Japan, Uniquely Alpine: The Transformation of the Kamikōchi Mountain Valley into an Alpine Landscape, 1892–1938

Holm, Fynn (2023). Uniquely Japan, Uniquely Alpine: The Transformation of the Kamikōchi Mountain Valley into an Alpine Landscape, 1892–1938. Environmental history, 28(1), pp. 109-132. Oxford University Press 10.1086/722505

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While the Japanese mountain valley Kamikōchi is today marketed as an alpine landscape that is both “foreign” and “Japanese,” the Alps-like aesthetics of the valley are the result of a series of anthropogenic alterations. The renaming of a non-European mountain range as “Alps” was a common practice among Western colonial powers, but in the case of the “Japanese Alps,” to which Kamikōchi belongs, it was the Japanese themselves who took the Swiss Alps as a model landscape and strived to emulate European industrial and touristic mountain land-use patterns. Comparing the valley to the Swiss Alps then changed how stakeholders perceived the valley and its possible economic utilization for the emerging Japanese empire.

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