This story is from Smokies Life Journal Fall 2025 Volume 19 Number 2 NEW DISCOVERIES ABOUT GEORGE MASA Just as George
Masa: A Life Reimagined was going to press in the summer of 2024, researchers uncovered new information about Masa’s life in Japan and on the West Coast before he came to the Smokies. Read it here first. Story by Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel ❖ Design by Karen Key
“My friends call me ‘Yama’ instead of my real name” New discoveries enhance understanding of the life of George Masa by Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel In the June 1906 journal of the Japanese Alpine Club, a news item reported that two of its members, Mr. Kiyosawa and Mr. Shoji Endo, left for Seattle, promising to research the Rocky Mountain club and send reports home to the membership.
MR. SHOJI ENDO IS G E O R G E M ASA . Editor’s note: Just as George Masa: A Life Reimagined was going to press, Japanese researchers contacted authors Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel with an urgent request to stop the presses. A tantalizing tidbit in an old issue of Sangaku (Mountains), the journal of the alpine club of Japan, sparked a new discovery about Masa’s life in Japan and on the West Coast; subsequent research revealed new facts about Masa’s activities before he came to Asheville and the Smokies in 1915. With the book already on press, it was too late to incorporate these new details in the biography, published by Smokies Life to great fanfare in mid-September 2024, just before Hurricane Helene struck Western North Carolina and East Tennessee. These fascinating discoveries will be included in a forthcoming second edition, but the authors are sharing them with Smokies Life Journal readers in this exclusive article. Authors’ note: Untangling Masa’s name is complex. In George Masa: A Life Reimagined we discuss the reasons for the multiplicity—some related to the complications of his life, some echoing the nuances of the Japanese language, and others the result of misspelling or errors in transcriptions. Throughout this article we generally use the name George Masa unless the source shows Shoji Endo (or Endow). We also use English translations of Masa’s diary, his letters, and any articles in Japanese-language publications. Opposite page: George Masa, early 1920s. Photo courtesy of Buncombe County Special Collections, Pack Memorial Public Library, Asheville, North Carolina. Background: The Black Mountains of North Carolina. Photo by George Masa, courtesy of Miller Printing Collection, Daniels Graphics.
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耶麻 M
asa Knob, a 5,685-foot peak in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, honors the photographer and trailblazer George Masa. From the time of his arrival in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1915 until his death in 1933, Masa explored the mountains, capturing in photographs the grandeur and beauty of the Smokies, as well as documenting and mapping trails in support of the Appalachian Trail. “Few Men Have Ever Known Smokies as Well as Photographer Masa” declared one headline in the Asheville newspaper.
The long-held question for Masa’s friends and then researchers who followed was where did Masa’s love and fascination for trails and mountains originate? Asheville, Japan, or elsewhere? We now know Masa’s passion for mountains began long before his arrival in Asheville. Growing up in Shizuoka, a prefecture on Honshu, Japan’s largest island, he’d often catch glimpses of Mount Fuji, a majestic landmark in the distance, revered as a sacred site and valued as a cultural symbol. At 12,390 feet, Mount Fuji—actually a
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The arrow indicates the location of Masa Knob on the shoulders of Mount Kephart, as seen from the overlook called “The Jumpoff.” Immediately after his death, the idea to name a peak for Masa originated, but it would be almost 30 years before Carolina Mountain Club members restarted the task to honor Masa with the naming of the subtle peak deep in the Smokies in 1961. Photo by Paul Bonesteel. Opposite page: George Masa on Blackstack Cliffs, circa 1932, just off the Appalachian Trail near the Bald Mountains of Tennessee. Photo courtesy of Buncombe County Special Collections, Pack Memorial Public Library, Asheville, North Carolina.
Writing back to his friends in Japan, he explained, “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.”
T H E W O R D “ YA M A” M E A N S M O U N TA I N I N J A PA N E S E . dormant volcano—is the highest point in the archipelago that is Japan. The southern portion of the Japanese Alps also stretches into Shizuoka prefecture. Today more than 10 percent of the land in Shizuoka is protected as national or prefectural parks. Masa was athletic. His academic record at his secondary school revealed that the boy excelled at sports, particularly baseball; as a young man, Masa confided
in a letter that “when he had time and money,” he also went mountain climbing. EXPEDITIONS, ADVENTURERS, AND ALPINE CLUBS
Hannibal crossed the Alps in 218 B.C., but it was hardly for sport. For hundreds of years, people throughout the world have been climbing mountainous areas to support a livelihood or secure a territorial conquest. The
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Left: Shoji Endow’s (George Masa) membership card for the Mazamas Club of Portland, Oregon, a prominent climbing organization since its founding in 1894. His two qualifying climbs are listed as Mount Fuji when he was 17 and 20 years old. Image courtesy of Mazama Library and Historical Collections.
first book providing practical advice for climbing difficult terrain above the snowline was published in 1574. It explained the use of ropes and crampons, discussed avalanches and crevasses. Josias Simler’s book was not intended for the sportsman but for travelers who were by necessity crossing mountainous peaks. By the mid19th century, intrigued by glaciers, scientists such as Louis Agassiz and J. B. Forbes also set off on expeditions. Adventurers soon followed. “Appreciation of mountaineering itself was born among a small elite of Japanese youth,” wrote Yasuji Yamazaki in the British Alpine Journal v. 71 (1966). Masa was one of them. In 1905 the 20-year-old joined the Japanese Alpine Club soon after its founding. Alpine clubs, popularized by the British who established theirs in 1857, flourished in the mid-to-late 19th and early 20th centuries, first in Europe, e.g., Austrian Alpine Club founded in 1862, then both the Swiss and the Italian alpine clubs the following year, and others thereafter. In the early 20th century, countries outside of Europe formed their own national alpine clubs, including the United States (1902), Japan (1905), and Canada (1906). The Appalachian
Mountain Club, founded in 1876, focused on building trails and huts while also promoting advocacy for the protection of the mountains. A subset of AMC members adventured on climbing excursions to the Alps and to the Canadian Rockies as early as the 1890s, according to its history. Some alpine clubs focused solely on technical climbing, some restricted membership to men, but most were heterogeneous clubs with members enjoying hiking as well as mountain climbing. Most alpine clubs published journals or newsletters that included accounts of climbs and new scientific discoveries, as well as practical advice on equipment, techniques, accommodations, and travel. Clubs exchanged or subscribed to each other’s journals. Carolin Roeder reported in her 2017 dissertation for Harvard University that the “Adirondack Mountain Club, headquartered in Boston, maintained exchanges with thirty-eight alpine and geographical societies around the world in the 1880s.” Alpine clubs also published periodic newsletters that included tidbits about their members. It was in one of these club publications that we first learned new details about George Masa. In the June 1906 journal of
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The Asahi News climbing group making their way up Mount Rainier (left) and resting in the snow on the ascent (right). These images mirror much of Shoji Endo’s own climb that was completed a year earlier. Shoji Endo organized and instructed the group but could not lead them due to being injured when he was hit by a pitch playing baseball. The group followed his very specific advice for wool clothing, sunglasses, climbing sticks, and rope. He also advised them to “Get well trained in advance, especially do some leg exercises. Do not expect any help or support from others.” Both photos courtesy of the Nippon Kan Heritage Association Collection, Densho.
the Japanese Alpine Club, a news item reported that two of its members, Mr. Kiyosawa and Mr. Shoji Endo, left for Seattle, promising to research the Rocky Mountain Club and send reports home to the membership. Mr. Shoji Endo is George Masa. Although George Masa’s birthname was Takahashi, the child was adopted by the Endo family following the death of his birth mother. For the first half of his life, including the years he lived on the West Coast, his name was Shoji Endo. When he moved to Asheville, he was known variously as George Masa Iizuka, G. M. Iizuka, and Masaharu Iizuka, along with different spellings of those names. Not until establishing his own photography studio in Asheville did he adopt the name George Masa professionally. MASA BECOMES A MA Z AMA
George Masa’s first attempt to emigrate from Japan was in 1904, but he was turned away at the port of San Francisco because of trachoma, an eye infection, and repatriated. On his return to Japan, he enrolled in Tokyo’s prestigious Meiji University, leaving after a semester to try once again to come to the States. This time he succeeded. Masa spent nearly a decade on the West Coast, mostly in Seattle and Portland, where he had a variety of jobs before relocating to Asheville in 1915. On the West Coast, in his spare time, he continued playing hard. He was a talented baseball player—the Oregon Daily Journal called him “a splendid fielder”—and played, coached, and managed for a number of Japanese teams in the Pacific Northwest. He also continued his mountain climbing pursuits. On September 13, 1909, Masa applied for membership in the Mazamas Club. Established in 1894 on the
summit of Mount Hood, the club’s membership was open to “any person who has climbed to the summit of a perpetual snow peak, on the sides of which there is at least one living glacier and to the top of which a person cannot ride, horseback or otherwise.” On the Mazamas application form, as his qualification for membership, Masa recorded his ascents of Mount Fuji, the first on August 5, 1902, when he had been only 17, and his second, as a 20-year-old on August 15, 1905. For the next seven years (1909–1916), he is listed in the Mazama membership roster. Rightly proud that one of its climbers was now a Mazama, the Japanese Alpine Club announced in its November 1909 journal that Masa was likely “the very first member of us who was allowed to join an overseas mountain club in our history.” On August 3, 1911, at 11:20 a.m., M. S. Endow, member of the Mazama and Japanese Alpine Club, signed the summit register on Mount Hood. At 11,240 feet with twelve named glaciers, Mount Hood is the highest mountain in Oregon. Masa and his climbing buddy, Gaintsu Senow, who just two months previous had graduated from the Kimball School of Theology, summited the mountain with a guide, George R. Miller. The summit registers for Mount Hood, archived in the Mazama Library and Historical Collections in Portland, Oregon, show that the two friends, Endow and Senow, also added their signatures in Japanese as an addendum to their names and club affiliations. It was not easy to summit these peaks. Although both the historians’ reports in the Mazama journal and the club’s 75th anniversary history, We Climb High: A Thumbnail Chronology of the Mazamas, 1894–1964, provide stories of
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Left: The Asahi News newspaper climbing group before the start of its climb. Having arrived at Longmire Springs by train from Tacoma, Washington, the group walked 28 km to Camp of the Clouds before attempting the summit. It is not known who owned the dog in the photo nor how it traveled. Right: The group at the Mount Rainier summit crater. The Rainier summit is 14,410 feet in elevation, though the photo is labeled 14,526 feet. Clearly the weather was good and the trip successful. Preserved in a photo album once owned by Juichiro Terusaki, who ran the Asahi News, these photographs chronicle the 1910 expedition and are now in the Densho collection. Both photos courtesy of the Nippon Kan Heritage Association Collection, Densho.
the camaraderie and triumphs, they also provide glimpses of the harrowing experiences climbers faced—lightning storms on the summit, blind crevasses, limbs crushed by rolling boulders, rescue teams transporting injured or dead climbers off the mountains. We don’t know the route Masa used on his ascents, but we do know there were no highways or well-worn trails leading to the summits. “Two-thirds of the early mountaineers’ problem was getting to where the climbing began,” John D. Scott, the club historian asserted in We Climb High. Scott describes the route to Glacier Peak, a remote snow-capped volcanic mountain in Washington state and the site of the 1911 annual Mazamas outing: “First they went by rail from Portland to Seattle and on east to Wenatchee. Then up the Columbia by steamboat to Chelan Falls, next by stage to Lakeside (town of Chelan) and by boat 50 miles (the length of the lake) to Steheken [sic] Landing on the northwest end. From here it was packtrain and foot slogging up the Steheken River ten miles to Agnes Creek, 17 more up to Suiattle Pass and southerly a dozen very wild trailless mountain miles to base camp at Buck Creek pass, some four miles east of Glacier Peak.” MASA’S CLIMBING EXPLOITS
We also learn through the journal of the Japanese Alpine Club that Masa climbed Mount Rainier, the highest mountain in Washington state at 14,410 feet in elevation. Although the early summit registers for Mount Rainier are not in any archive, having either been lost, destroyed, or perhaps held privately, both the newsletter of the alpine club and the History of Japanese Mountain
Climbing (1969) assert that Masa was the first Japanese man to climb Mount Rainier. “Since Shoji Endo’s ascent of Mount Rainier in 1909, there are things that cannot be overlooked in the actions of Japanese people on the mountains of North America. The second Japanese ascent of Mount Rainier was made by Ryozo Azuma in July 1910 . . . ” Considered the John Muir of Japan, Azuma met the famous naturalist a few years after summiting Mount Rainier and later wrote a biography, The Life of John Muir, Father of Nature Conservation, published in Japan in 1973. “What a spectacular glacier,” Masa exclaimed in a letter home to the Japanese Alpine Club. Apologizing to his climbing community for not writing a full report of his experience of climbing Mount Rainier, he confided that a recent baseball injury prevented him from submitting an official account of the expedition. Hit in the chest by a pitch, Masa had been laid low with an infection and a fever. Claiming that he was improving, he wrote he’d be back on his feet as soon as the doctor allowed it. Eager to explore again, he reluctantly conceded in his November 1910 update, that he wouldn’t be able to “climb mountains this summer with this physical condition.” Likely his injury knocked out his baseball season as well. The setback did not prevent Masa from encouraging others to climb Mount Rainier, however. He reported in his letter that he had “urged the Asahi newspaper to recruit a climbing party . . . of 15–16 people. If they succeed in this first attempt, they will be able to form a bigger climbing party,” he averred. Preserved in a photo album once owned by Juichiro Terusaki, who ran the Asahi News, the photographs
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The first-known published photographs by George Masa are included in John H. Williams’ book The Guardians of the Columbia (1912). Shoji Endow is credited with six photos in Williams’ book, including a surprising photo of a butterfly poised slightly above its shadow captioned “Butterfly on the summit of Mount Hood.” Shoji Endow signed the summit register along with a recently graduated Japanese seminary student, Gaintsu Senow, and well-known Mount Hood guide, George R. Miller.
chronicle an expedition of a 12-person climbing party from 1910. The photographs, featured in an exhibit titled “The Way It Was: Northwest Issei and Nisei before 1942” at the Nippon Kan Heritage Association showcased early Japanese American activities around Seattle. Not only do the scrapbook photos depict the logistics of the excursion (i.e., transportation, lodges, etc.) but they also document the climbing party’s progress as they settle into the basecamp, struggle with the terrain, traverse the snowfield, scale the glaciers, and ultimately reach the summit itself. Negatives of these photos now are held in the archives of Densho, the Seattle-based nonprofit organization focused on “preserving Japanese American stories of the past for the generations of tomorrow.” What’s more remarkable is learning that Masa was photographing some of his own climbing trips—evidence found in John H. Williams’ book The Guardians of the Columbia (1912). Williams focuses his book on three snow-capped peaks in the Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest: Mount Hood, Mount Adams, and Mount St. Helens. Lavishly illustrated with 200 photographs, some in color, the book aims “to show the individuality of each peak,” highlighting Mount Hood’s “sharp and finely scarred pyramid; or Adams, with its
wide, truncated dome and deeply carved slopes; or St. Helens, newest of all our extinct volcanoes, if, indeed, it be extinct,—and least marred by the ice, its cone as perfect as Fujiyama’s. Each has its own wonderful story to tell of ancient and often recent vulcanism.” Williams’ book is not only an invitation to Eastern adventurers to experience the beauty of the western Cascade–Columbia area but also a reflection of the early 20th-century “See America First” campaign launched by the railroads. Shoji Endow is credited with six photos in Williams’ book, including a striking photograph of stormswept white-bark pines, a sharp image of Newton Clark Glacier, another of Eliot Glacier taken from near the summit of Mount Hood, and a cluster of three climbers approaching the summit of Mount Adams, the second-highest peak in Washington state, with an elevation of 12,277 feet above sea level. Newton Clark and Eliot are two of the largest of the twelve named glaciers on Mount Hood, all of them above 6,000 feet. A surprising photo of a butterfly poised slightly above its shadow is captioned “Butterfly on the summit of Mount Hood.” While some of the other photographers in Williams’ book were using larger format
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T H E J A PA N E S E A L P I N E C L U B announced in its November 1909 journal that Masa was likely “the very first member of us who was allowed to join an overseas mountain club in our history.” cameras, Masa was likely carrying a smaller Kodak #2 or #3 Brownie on these climbing trips. He had clearly gained enough experience to produce quality photos, proving an early interest in photography along with budding technical skills. More than 50 photographers provided illustrations for Guardians, including well-known photographers Edward S. Curtis and his brother Asahel Curtis. Although the brothers worked together initially in Seattle, their interests diverged with the elder Edward documenting the North American Indian in a 24-volume series while Asahel’s bread and butter became the business community, portraits, and promotional material for the city of Seattle. Asahel’s real passion, however, was landscape photography, particularly Mount Rainier, which he photographed thousands of times. He was also a mountain climber, and perhaps it was through that sport that he and Masa might have met. “MY FRIENDS C ALL ME ‘ YAMA’”
Masa’s passion for mountains also gave him a new nickname, according to the November 1909 Sangaku, the journal of the Japanese Alpine Club. Writing back to his friends in Japan, he explained, “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 word “yama” means mountain in Japanese. Soon the West Coast Japanese language newspapers began referring to Yam or Yama Endo in articles. The Taihoku Nippo newspaper (the Great Northern Daily News) reported on March 12, 1913, that “Mountain climber Endo’s Mikado style of training has given the team [Seattle Mikado baseball team] a great advantage and all of the Japanese in the city have joined the cheering squad.” When Masa arrived in Asheville in 1915, Fred Seely, his boss at the Grove Park Inn, had no idea that the “ironing man” he’d just hired for his laundry was both a talented mountain climber and an experienced
photographer. Neither did his hiking friends from the Carolina Mountain Club who arranged his funeral 18 years later in 1933 know of his early experiences with climbing and photography. And, until recently, neither did we. What we do know is that George Masa’s life continues to fascinate us. We discover new facets of his personality, new talents and accomplishments that help us refine our perspective on his life. We could not have guessed that he was the first Japanese person to climb Mount Rainier, nor imagine John Williams publishing Masa’s photos of his expeditions on Mount Hood and Mount Adams in The Guardians of the Columbia in 1912. We do understand, however, that we will never be “finished” with George Masa. We are grateful to the members of our research team, particularly Nagomi Onda, who continued to scour Japanese language sources for additional information. Onda’s discovery of the alpine club journal, recently digitized and made available online, led her to Williams’ book and us to Matthew Brock, the collections manager for the Mazama Library and Historical Collections. In coming to Asheville and the Smokies, Masa built on his West Coast climbing and hiking experiences. Having lived in a region where national parks already existed—Mount Rainier was established in 1899; Crater Lake in 1902—he could imagine the great possibilities and the value of establishing a national park in the Smokies. Having been a member of the Mazamas, a vibrant hiking and climbing community, he saw the success and influence a well-organized outdoor club could have on conservation. He was primed to pour his energies into revitalizing the Carolina Mountain Club. Through Williams’ book and perhaps through Asahel Curtis’ studio, he understood the value of advocacy campaigns and promotional photography of parks and natural areas. Masa’s West Coast life provided the scaffolding for his work in the Smokies. We are the beneficiaries . . . and now, the guardians. v
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