Mount Fuji (富士山) is Japan's highest mountain and its most beloved symbol: a near-perfect volcanic cone, snow-capped for much of the year, rising alone above the plains southwest of Tokyo. For centuries it has been worshipped as sacred, painted and written about endlessly, and, on a clear day, watched for from the city as a sudden pale silhouette on the horizon.
A sacred mountain
Fuji is an active volcano, last erupting in 1707, and its symmetry and solitude made it holy long before it became a tourist climb. It is a reihō (霊峰), a "sacred peak," home to kami and long a site of mountain worship; pilgrims climbed it as a religious act, and shrines sit at its base and summit. That reverence, together with its overwhelming presence in Japanese art, most famously Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, including the Great Wave, is why UNESCO inscribed it in 2013 not as a natural site but as a cultural one: a mountain that shaped a nation's imagination.
Climbing Fuji
Tens of thousands climb Fuji each year, but only in a short official season, roughly July to early September, when the trails and mountain huts are open and the snow has gone. The classic route is an overnight one: climb partway in the afternoon, sleep or rest at a hut, and set out again in the dark to reach the summit for goraikō (御来光), the sunrise seen from the top: the sun breaking over the sea of cloud below. Two proverbs capture the local wisdom: one calls a person a fool never to climb Fuji, and a fool to climb it twice; the reward is the once-in-a-lifetime view, not the hard slog itself.
Words & idioms to take away
Idioms & proverbs to carry away
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富士山: the reading is Fuji-san, where 山 is "mountain" (read san), not the honorific -san used for people; "Mount Fujisan" is therefore a small redundancy.
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御来光 (goraikō): the sunrise viewed from a mountain summit, especially Fuji; a word for a sight worth climbing all night to see.