Meaning of 日本をはじめ and the mystery of the missing particle

Question

日本をはじめ世界中の登山家の間で人気が高いアルプス山脈の最高峰モンブランで、...
Where I normally put my translation attempt

I understand this bit:

世界中の登山家の間で人気が高いアルプス山脈の最高峰モンブラン
The Alps' highest peak, Mont Blanc, which has high popularity among climbers throughout the world

although I'm a little uncomfortable with joining 最高峰 and モンブラン. I feel there ought to be a という in there somewhere.

But I can't understand the overall structure of the sentence at all. I think it should be of the form Aは/がBだ, but there doesn't seem to be a topic/subject to go in the A position.

Perhaps it doesn't help that I have no idea what 日本をはじめ means. Literally "something started Japan and ...".

Edit: maybe A = 日本をはじめ世界中の登山家の間で人気が高いアルプス山脈の最高峰 and B = モンブラン

I guess that would make sense, but is it really okay to miss a particle here? And even then I still don't understand 日本をはじめ

Answer 1

The question seems to assume that the quoted text should form a full sentence, but as the comma at the end suggests, this assumption is flawed. Looking at the source of the quote, the sentence continues:

日本をはじめ世界中の登山家の間で人気が高いアルプス山脈の最高峰モンブランで、近年、登山中の死亡事故が増えている

(Actually, the sentence is even longer than that, but we can safely cut it here, as this portion does form a full sentence.)

Now that we have the actual verb, if we strip out all the descriptors, the basic sentence can be simplified down to:

モンブランで死亡事故が増えている
Fatal accidents are on the rise at Mont Blanc.

Hopefully it should be clear from this simpler sentence that the で is not a copula form, but the common particle indicating the location of an action.

To flesh out the sentence back to its full form, everything preceding モンブラン is a description of Mont Blanc, and the remaining parts are qualifying the verb phrase at the end. If we put it all together, we get:

日本をはじめ世界中の登山家の間で人気が高いアルプス山脈の最高峰モンブランで、近年、登山中の死亡事故が増えている
In recent years, fatal accidents during climbing are on the rise at Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, which is popular with climbers from around the world including Japan.

Answer 2

It seems that

noun + をはじめ

is a shortened form of

noun + をはじめとして

so literally means "making noun the starting point" and less literally means "for example...", "starting with..." etc.

Thanks to @Chewie for the comment and link, which I thought I should summarise here for completeness.

Answer 3

According to "A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar", page 320:
"をはじめ（として）:a phrase that is used to give a primary example."

It can be translated to "starting with".

Examples:
父をはじめ(として)家族全員スポーツが好きだ。
Starting with my father, all of us like sports.