Portfolio: Against the Flow

It is as beautiful a concept as it is a daunting challenge: to follow a watercourse to its source by staying close to the center line of a stream or river. Aesthetic purity tested by the realities of the material world, it’s called sawanobori (sawa = stream, nobori = climb) and has been practiced in Japan for centuries. At first, sawanobori was simply a way for people to move from one village to another—easier than scaling the steep, thickly grown mountainsides—but over time it became its own pursuit.

British climber James Pearson got his first taste of sawanobori in 2018, with a multinational team of professional climbers (but waterfall newbies) in Toyama province on the island of Honshu, about seven hours from Tokyo. The idea was to warm up with some gentle creek climbing, then attempt Shōmyō Falls, at 1,148 feet the country’s tallest waterfall, but even the smaller falls were intimidating.

“The thing I remember from the first day is being absolutely amazed