editorial

A religious experience for some, a bucket-list adventure for others, climbing Japan’s highest mountain is the lofty goal of hundreds of thousands of hikers each year. Yet for one visitor, the lake region in Mount Fuji’s northern foothills provides its own down-to-earth allure.
Photographs by Mark Parren Taylor
<figure id="attachment_139629" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-139629" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-139629 size-full" src="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-1-Revised.jpg" alt="Hiker Naoki Hayashi passing under a torii gate on the Yoshida Trail; a trail marker." width="1200" height="894" srcset="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-1-Revised.jpg 1200w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-1-Revised-300x224.jpg 300w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-1-Revised-1024x763.jpg 1024w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-1-Revised-768x572.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-139629" class="wp-caption-text">Left to right: Hiker Naoki Hayashi passing under a torii gate on the Yoshida Trail; a trail marker.</figcaption></figure>
Mount Fuji — at 3,776 meters high the closest anyone on Japanese soil can get to the heavens — is beautiful, dangerous, spiritual. But here they also know that Fuji is shy, often evasive. Some days the mountain pulls clouds around itself like a geisha hiding her face behind a fan, or a kabuki actor stepping back, theatrically, behind his kimono sleeves. And on this golden autumn morning, the sacred peak puts on no less of a performance for me. From a viewing point on the far shore of Lake Motosu, some 17 kilometers northwest of the volcano’s conical summit, I wait expectantly for Fuji to appear from behind a bank of conspiring clouds. Eventually, it does, but only briefly, with the fleeting beauty of a shooting star.
Motosu is the westernmost of five lakes that arc around Mount Fuji’s northern foothills. If you imagine a clockface with Fuji’s summit in the center of the dial, Motosu is at the 10 o’clock position. Tiny lakes Shoji and Sai straddle 11 o’clock; Lake Kawaguchi and the resort town of Fujikawaguchiko rest at 12; and Yamanaka, the easternmost and largest of the lakes, is at two o’clock. Together, these picturesque bodies of water give the Fuji-goko (Fuji Five Lakes) region its name. And it’s from here that the mountain’s most photographed side is seen — the side that’s kissed by the morning sun.
In ancient times, Fuji was venerated as the home of spirits who had the power to control such elements as fire and water. Worshippers kept their distance — not surprising for a volcano that erupted often. The mountain later became regarded as the dwelling of the Shinto goddess Konohana Sakuya Hime, who is still revered in shrines at Fuji’s base and summit.
<figure id="attachment_139580" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-139580" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-139580 size-full" src="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-2.jpg" alt="A view of Mount Fuji from across Lake Motosu." width="1200" height="800" srcset="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-2.jpg 1200w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-2-300x200.jpg 300w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-2-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-2-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-139580" class="wp-caption-text">A view of Mount Fuji from across Lake Motosu.</figcaption></figure>
When Buddhism arrived in Japan, mountain climbing was regarded by its adherents as a metaphor for the spiritual ascent to enlightenment. The ninth century saw the emergence of a sect called Shugendo that based its practice on mountain climbing itself; ascetics known as yamabushi took to climbing Japan’s hallowed peaks as a way to commune with nature and attain mystical powers. It was they who laid the groundwork for the first pilgrimage route up Mount Fuji, the Yoshida Trail.
Today, over a quarter of a million people climb the volcano each year, though only about half of them make it all the way up. The ascent may not be as grueling as it was in the days of the yamabushi, but it’s still a tough hike. As the saying goes, “You’re a fool if you don’t climb Fuji, and a fool if you climb it twice.”
There are four hiking trails up Mount Fuji, each divided into 10 stations, or stages. Recreational climbers usually start halfway up at the fifth stations, which are reachable by car or by bus. Beginning in the small city of Fujiyoshida, the Yoshida Trail is the most accessible route from Tokyo and by far the most popular, so much so that it’s now restricted to 4,000 trekkers a day, each one having pre-booked their entry through a new gate at the fifth station — elevation 2,300 meters — for ¥2,000 (US$12).
<figure id="attachment_139575" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-139575" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-139575 size-full" src="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-3.jpg" alt="A guide on the Yoshida Trail; an evening’s relaxation at a local ryokan." width="1200" height="894" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-139575" class="wp-caption-text">Left to right: A guide on the Yoshida Trail; an evening’s relaxation at a local ryokan.</figcaption></figure>
<figure id="attachment_139631" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-139631" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-139631 size-full" src="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-6-Revised.jpg" alt="A view of Japan’s iconic Mount Fuji from the northeast; a bridge over the Haruki River." width="1200" height="894" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-139631" class="wp-caption-text">Left to right: A view of Japan’s iconic Mount Fuji from the northeast; a bridge over the Haruki River.</figcaption></figure>
At the height of the climbing season from July to early September, that limit is soon reached, but for me it’s late in the year and quiet. Still, when I stop to catch my breath under a torii gate near the trail’s fourth station, it doesn’t take long before I’m passed by another hiker pressing on up the mountain. “Running a bit behind,” Naoki Hayashi sighs. The 40-year-old photographer is expecting his ascent to the eighth station to take about five hours, after which it’s another two-and-a-half-hour trek to the summit. I ask how often he has climbed Fuji. “Too many times,” he says with a smile and a slight slump, as if the enormity of the journey ahead had just landed squarely on his shoulders.
We part ways. While Hayashi-san continues upward, I turn back to Fujiyoshida, keen to explore life at the mountain’s foot.
Not far from the Yoshida Trail’s starting point at the ancient, forest-ensconced shrine of Kitaguchi Hongu Fuji Sengen Jinja, Zuzuya has served as a pilgrims’ lodging, or oshi no ie, for 450 years. Dotted around the lower slopes of Mount Fuji, these small inns once numbered almost a hundred, welcoming devotees with a bed for the night and a nourishing meal of fish and local vegetables (meat-eating for those heading onto Fuji was forbidden). These days, just a dozen or so oshi houses remain.
The cooking at Zuzuya follows age-old recipes, and my lunch of marinated kelp and wood ear mushrooms is keenly presided over by owner Emiko Kozawa. Afterward, she shows me the inn’s simple facilities, its shrine, its tatami rooms, even century-old printing blocks used to apply talismans to the white-cotton tunics traditionally worn by pilgrims. Kozawa’s family has been here for 20 generations; her son now manages the property.
<figure id="attachment_139578" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-139578" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-139578 size-full" src="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-5.jpg" alt="Sake maker Yogouemon Ide; breakfast at Kakurinbo." width="1200" height="894" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-139578" class="wp-caption-text">Left to right: Sake maker Yogouemon Ide; breakfast at Kakurinbo.</figcaption></figure>
Closer to the shores of Lake Kawaguchi, the Ide Sake Brewery has been in business for a similar length of time. It started out making soy sauce, until current owner Yogouemon Ide’s great-great-grandfather took to producing sake in the mid-19th century. The brewery uses local rice and sparkling clear spring water fed by snowmelt. “Meltwater from Mount Fuji’s cone takes longer than a generation to filter through the volcano rock to reach us here,” Ide explains, proud of his sakes with flavors as pronounced, if elusive, as the summit that looms above us.
Water, in the Shinto scheme of things, is also an element that purges and renews. Those powerful properties are put to the test at Hagoromo Shiraito no Taki, where a purification rite called misogi can often be witnessed. Located due west of Fuji, the waterfall flushes into a gorge below Mount Shichimen, joining a tributary of the Fuji River that runs between its namesake volcano and Japan’s Southern Alps. This terrain is densely forested and rugged, with valleys that are often shrouded in a chilly mist.
But that doesn’t deter Tamaki Harayama, a tutor from Tokyo, from embarking on a week’s worth of misogi under the stinging 20-meter cascade. “I feel reawakened,” she tells me after one of her morning sessions. “I feel a part of this landscape. I feel Japanese.” She follows in the footsteps of Lady Oman, a consort of the first Tokugawa shogun, who broke convention in 1616 by performing the ritual here at a time when only men could access Fuji and other holy mountains.
If the waterfall calls on the Shinto facet of Japanese spirituality, then nearby Mount Minobu is sacred to the country’s Buddhist leanings. This is where Kuon-ji temple was founded by the great 13th-century sage Nichiren. Followers of his teachings — 1.5 million each year — make pilgrimages here, climbing the 287-stepped “stairway of enlightenment” to the compound’s main structures, which include a five-story pagoda and a giant bell that is rung before dawn prayers by an acrobatic monk.
Nichiren Buddhists chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo (“Devotion to the mystic law of the Lotus Sutra”) morning and night. The mantra generates a compulsive rhythm that seems to reverberate within the worshipper, through the temple, and into the forest beyond. Indeed, for many, it is a rhythm that beats deep in the hot heart of Fuji.
<figure id="attachment_139576" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-139576" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-139576 size-full" src="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-4.jpg" alt="A ryokan in the Fuji foothills; Tamaki Harayama performing a misogi purification ritual under the Hagoromo Shiraito waterfall." width="1200" height="894" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-139576" class="wp-caption-text">Left to right: A ryokan in the Fuji foothills; Tamaki Harayama performing a misogi purification ritual under the Hagoromo Shiraito waterfall.</figcaption></figure>
<figure id="attachment_139581" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-139581" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-139581 size-full" src="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-7.jpg" alt="Devotees praying at Minobu’s Kuon-ji temple; the entrance to Kakurinbo, a historic temple inn in Minobu." width="1200" height="894" srcset="https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-7.jpg 1200w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-7-300x224.jpg 300w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-7-1024x763.jpg 1024w, https://staging.destinasian.com/wp-content/uploads/Fuji-7-768x572.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-139581" class="wp-caption-text">Left to right: Devotees praying at Minobu’s Kuon-ji temple; the entrance to Kakurinbo, a historic temple inn in Minobu.</figcaption></figure>
This article originally appeared in the <a href="https://subscription.destinasian.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">August/September 2024</a> print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“Fuji”).

In the Shadow of Mount Fuji

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