Its image sits inside your wallet on the
1,000-yen note. Its name is inscribed on
cars and cameras, beer bottles and trail
bikes. In folktales, it’s a gateway to the
Moon and the afterlife beyond. And for
many visitors, it’s their irst vision of Japan
as their plane comes in to land; its white
summit puncturing the clouds as the movies
stop and the seatbelt signs goes bing.
“I believe everything has a spirit,
including Fuji,” says Tadasuke Omori, my
mountain guide. “And sometimes, she’s very
shy.” I’d met Tadasuke at a visitor centre at
the foot of the mountain, on a day when its
summit is cloaked in cloud. He tells me a
saying: “He who climbs Fuji once is a wise
man, but he who climbs twice is a fool”.
Tadasuke, having made between 200 and
300 ascents of the 12,390ft summit, proudly
considers himself ‘king of the foolish’.
Fuji casts a powerful spell on
mountaineers. It also has an almost
dangerous ability to hold one’s gaze,
distracting motorists when it looms in the
windscreen and causing spellbound diners
to spill their noodles. But look away and
the surrounding Kanto region in which it
stands is just as beautiful, spread over hills
as crisply contoured as folds of origami,
silken mists clinging to their slopes.
You can reach West Kanto from Tokyo in
little over an hour, but it feels aeons apart.
In place of bullet trains and broadband,
you can ind broadleaf forests and bubbling
springs. Instead of skyscrapers, secluded
shrines are cocooned among the clifs. It’s
also a place where travellers can take the
true spiritual pulse of Japan.
Formed by an eruption around 10,000
years ago (and dormant only for the past
Even when you
can’t see it, you
know it’s there.
300), Fuji was for centuries a place for tohai
(mountain pilgrimage), where devotion
was expressed through climbing every
skwyard. Faiths converged like crosswinds
on its holy summit, little Buddha statues
kept watch over its crater, while Shinto
pilgrims crawled into womb-like lava tubes
at the bottom of the mountain, symbolically
reborn before their climb.
Today, around 300,000 people climb Fuji
every year, and while pilgrims are fewer
these days, Tadasuke says even sceptics
ascribe supernatural powers to the volcano.
Bereaved souls carry portraits of their
loved ones up the mountain, returning with
sulphur on their boots and solace in their
hearts, and for Tadasuke, too, the ascent has
powerful meaning.
He tells me about a 42-year-old
Singaporean hiker he was guiding some
years ago who sufered a heart attack at the
seventh station, not far from the summit.
Tadasuke performed CPR but to no avail.
“You see the best and worst of life on Fuji,”
he says. “I met him once for two hours. I
think about him on the mountain, and now I
climb it for him.”
Outside the summer season, climbing is
prohibited on Fuji, so during my visit the
mountain exists more as an aloof igure
on the Kanto landscape, a presence in the
forest canopy among the birds’ nests, or a
relection in a mirror-still lake. Mesmerising
in its perfection, it slopes gracefully
upwards like an artist’s brushstroke,
reigning sovereign over the sky.Echoes of days gone by
To the south east lies the town of Hakone,
a popular weekend retreat from Tokyo.
Like Fuji, it’s a place with wayfaring in
its blood; it’s also a famous stop on the
Tokaido road, the route between the twin
capitals of Kyoto and Tokyo, an M4 on
steroids and the busiest transport corridor
in Japan. The original Tokaido, however,
was a cobbled path travelled at walkingpace by pedestrians; a place where samurai
marched and porters sang to keep up their
spirits. Today, most of the ancient path has
been lost, but in the hills above Hakone
a tiny fragment survives — still but for
passing visitors and falling leaves.
I spend a happy morning walking its mossy
steps. On the other side of the hill is the Tokyo
Metropolitan Area, a land of neon billboards,
electric toilets and a billion jingles. But
walking the Tokaido is like opening the pages
of old picture-book Japan. Bamboo thickets
reverberate with birdsong, and cedar trees
sway above me, planted, perhaps, by a kind
shogun to provide shade to travellers. Dotted
about the forests are little wooden signs;
they could say ‘KEEP OUT’ or ‘ASBESTOS’,
but to an outsider like me, their Japanese
calligraphy is mesmerising, the lines of the
characters sprouting and swooping like the
branches above them.
Like climbing Fuji, walking the Tokaido
has profound meaning in Japanese culture.
In the Tokaido’s Edo-era heyday (between
1603 and 1868), Japan was detached from
the world. As part of a policy of extreme
isolation, foreign travel was banned.
Outsiders stayed away and strict rules
governed local travel too, with checkpoints
meaning few could even leave their
own region. As far as most people were
concerned, Japan was the entire world — the
universe ended at the eastern sea.
During this time, making a journey
on the Tokaido was to taste remarkable
freedom. Reasons were invented so ‘pilgrims’
could make trips, to drink sake at inns, be
entertained by geishas, barter in markets and
marvel at unfamiliar shrines. The essence
of travel was walking the lagstones of the
Tokaido — the only road that led to elsewhere.
“You discover things at walking speed,’
Satoshi Yamamoto says wisely. “Trains,
cars and buses are not what travel is about.”
Satoshi is the owner of the last tea house
along the Tokaido. It’s been in his family for
13 generations and more than four centuries.PREVIOUS PAGES: Lake Motosu
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Haruki River, Mount
Shichimen; Yamamoto Satoshi in front of his teahouse;
Yoshida Trail signpost; Hashidate Cave; Omori
Tadasuke at the Fujisan World Heritage Center;
breakfast at Kakurinbo Temple Lodging, Kuon-jiPARTNER CONTENT FOR HEARTLAND JAPAN