Mt. Fuji is just one of those victories in brand-recognition. You see it and you instantly know what it is and where it is. About 100 km from Tokyo and easily viewed from the Japanese capital, Mt. Fuji is not only one of the most recognizable landmarks on the planet for its nearly perfect symmetry, but also one of the most revered. Shinto, Japan’s native religion, attributes supernatural qualities to almost everything in nature, mountains included. Arguably, Mt. Fuji is the most sacred natural site in all of Japan.
So of course people climb it. Actually a still very much active volcano (!), the geologic history of the thing does not even put a dent in the herd of over 300,000 people that ascend yearly. At 12,389 ft., Mt. Fuji is far and away the tallest mountain in Japan, but luckily, the slope of the mountain is so gradual that even neophytes can take it on with minimal prep.
But that prep is important. This is a mountain, and you need mountain gear, from all-weather clothing to good climbing boots. Mt. Fuji is so high that it can be summer at the base and polar at the summit; there is no climbing at all when winter comes. The weather changes wildly, there will be a point where you enter the clouds and are effectively in a fog bank. Then there is the wind, which can turn into a gale. The higher one gets, the less plants there are to keep the soil down. So you have a pumice-dust storm along with the fog. Bring goggles. Sunglasses at the least.
Happily, there are set paths to the top, with 10 waystations that have beds, bathrooms, and basic foodstuffs along the way; most people start at the fifth station. You can take busses to it. The downside is that many of these stations are basic at best. The latrines are holes in the ground, the beds are planks of wood. Climbing this mountain is not an exercise in luxury. This is the local proverb: “To climb Mt. Fuji once is wise; to climb twice is foolish.”
And climb they do. It’s a point of pride, in fact, that you’ve conquered Mt. Fuji. Oddly, most climbers start at night. The method to the madness is goraikō, or catching the dawn from the summit. Japan is either very mountainous or very flat; you can see for MILES from the rim of Mt. Fuji. Dawn from Fuji is nothing more of transcendental.
No wonder it’s sacred.
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