Mt. Fuji

Mt. Fuji.

Mt. Fuji is so familiar it can be hard to see. Cherry-blossom postcards, ten-thousand-yen notes, century-old prints, the international shorthand for Japan itself — the image has been processed so many times that the actual mountain, the geological object, has nearly disappeared behind its representations.

Strip them all away. What remains is a near-perfect stratovolcano, 3,776 meters tall, with a circular base 50 kilometers in diameter and a permanently visible crater. It last erupted in 1707; the eruption rained ash on Edo, forty miles to the east, for two weeks. It is overdue, in geological terms, for another.

Sacred climbing of Fuji is older than the documentary record. By the medieval period, the mountain had three major routes from different villages — the Yoshida route from the north, the Suyama and Subashiri routes from the east, the Murayama route from the south — each managed by a community of oshi, pilgrim priests who functioned as religious innkeepers, accommodating climbers, performing purifications, and selling charms. The mountain was understood through Sengen Daibosatsu, a syncretic deity combining Shintō kami and Buddhist bodhisattva, with shrines clustered at the base on every approach.

In the late Edo period the practice exploded outward. The Fuji-kō movement, lay pilgrim societies founded by the charismatic ascetic Jikigyō Miroku in the early eighteenth century, made Fuji climbing a popular religious project across the eastern provinces. Members saved coins through the year to fund one annual climb by a delegated representative. By the 1850s there were hundreds of Fuji-kō chapters in Edo alone, each with their own group robe, their own coordinated climb date, their own miniature Fuji shrine in the home neighborhood.

The classical pilgrim climb is nocturnal. Pilgrims ascend through the night, sleeping briefly at huts on the upper slopes, in order to greet the dawn from the summit. The first light of the sun appearing from over the Pacific, seen from 3,776 meters, is called goraikō — the honorable arrival of the light. It remains, even for the contemporary climber, a serious event. The summit air is thin and cold; in the dark before dawn the temperature drops below freezing even in August.

The mountain offers no shelter, no shade, no real comfort. Only altitude, breath, the steady oxygen-thin progress through the dark. And at the top, that horizon you cannot find anywhere else: a horizon that bends slightly with the curve of the earth, with the Pacific glowing on one side and the lights of the Kantō plain disappearing into the residual dark on the other. The deity has always been the same: a feminine spirit, of the volcano, of rice, of the cold beautiful summit. Climb seriously and you may meet her, or her absence — which, on Fuji, is much the same thing.