Appropriating the Alps

How Japan got its local alpine ranges – and why some are for real.

On the way down from climbing Ishizuchi-san in mid-March, I happened on a faded sign about the mountain’s climbing history. As in the case of so many other Japanese peaks, the first ascent is ascribed to the semi-legendary mountain mystic En no Ozunu. This was back in the seventh century. Countless pilgrims have followed him since and the sound of their conches still re-echoes over the mountain paths in the summer months.

Mountaineers of the 1920s in the Shirouma snow valley.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Modern mountaineering started during the 1920s, when an inspirational teacher by the name of Kitagawa Jun’ichirō formed a “travel club” at Shikoku’s Matsuyama High School. For “travel”, one may read “mountaineering”.

On Jonen-dake in the 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

In 1925, Kitagawa-sensei upped the ante by publishing his collected mountain writings under the title of Shikoku Alps (Shikoku Arupusu). This was just fifteen years after Kojima Usui, the main mover and shaker behind the Japanese Alpine Club, had conferred the title of “Japan Alps” on the central ranges of Honshū.

The Ushiro-Tateyama range.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

On the face of it, Kitagawa had staked a bold claim. While some peaks in Honshū’s Hida and Akaishi ranges do exceed three thousand metres – and Mt Fuji would rank around twenty-eighth among the major summits if set down among Switzerland’s Bernese Alps – no part of Shikoku exceeds even two kilometres above sea level.

On the other hand, he had picked the perfect moment to award the alpine brevet to Shikoku’s modest peaks. Historians could light on 1925 as the meridian year of what they call “Taishō Democracy”, implying an unusual openness to newfangled and foreign concepts. And, whether or not by chance, promoting local mountain ranges as “Alps” also reached its apogee around then.

The Kurobe gorge.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

By coincidence, Gakujin, Japan’s second oldest mountaineering magazine, dedicated its March 2026 edition to exploring these local “Alps”. In the introductory article, Katō Yoshiki writes that the habit of “mitate” – here defined as comparing a local beauty spot with a prestigious foreign equivalent – goes back far into Japan’s past.

Lake Biwa’s famous Eight Views of Omi, for example, channel the even more famous Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers, a classic theme in Chinese poetry and landscape painting from the eleventh-century Song dynasty. A similar logic sits behind Japan’s local “Mt Fujis”, whether or not they particularly resemble their great original.

Mountaineer on Myojin-dake, 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Arrogating the Alps to Japan was a bit different, historically speaking. An English mining engineer was the first to make the comparison, writing it up in a guidebook for foreigners. Then Walter Weston, a mountaineering missionary, picked it up in the titles of his first and second books about the Japanese mountains.

But few Japanese had read these foreign-language books at the time. So it was only in 1910, when Kojima Usui decided to call his collected writings “Nihon Arupusu”, at the urging of his publisher, who was looking for a grabby title, that most of his compatriots realised that they had their own Alps on the doorstep.

On Tsubakuro-dake in the 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

There were, of course, objections. In the end, though, people picked up the alpine “mitate” and ran with it. The first of the regional alps might have been those coined by the Japanese Alpine Club members Nakamura Seitarō and Saegusa Inosuke when they described their traverse of the “Etchū Alps” in a 1911 issue of their club’s journal. But these Alps centred on Tateyama and were thus part of what would soon be accepted as the Northern Alps.

It was in the Taishō era (1912–1926) that the regional alps really started to proliferate. Quite soon, people were talking about the Yamato Alps (the Ōmine mountains), the Tohoku Alps (mainly the Asahi range, but also Iide and Zao), and the Kyūshū Alps (mainly the Kujū Mountains, but also Aso).

Snow gully on Tsurugi.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

In 1927, the soon-to-be famous solo climber Katō Buntarō went one step further. When he made his first winter forays into his local mountains, he not only rebranded them as the “Hyōgo Alps” but renamed their individual peaks after the highest summits in the Japan Northern Alps, thus piling one “mitate” on top of another:

I refer to the mountain range along the border of Hyōgo, Tottori and Okayama prefectures as the Hyōgo Alps. I rename Mount Mizunoyama (1,500 meters above sea level) as Hyōgo-Yari, Mount Mimuroyama as Hyogo-Norikura, and the southernmost mountain at 1,344.6 meters as Hyōgo-Ontake. Since the summit of Mount Hyōnosen is entirely within Tottori Prefecture, I've decided to call the mountain in front of it Hyōgo-Tateyama. I'm not entirely sure of the exact height of this Tateyama, but it's probably around 1,280 meters…

Winter on Norikura.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Foreigners too got back into the game. In their journal Inaka, published between 1915 and 1920, the mainly gaijin members of the Mountain Goats of Kobe referred to their local “Kobe Alps”, although probably with tongue in cheek.

On similar lines, a 1924 guidebook from the “Kinki Mountaineering Research Association” introduces not only the Kobe Alps, but also the Rokkō Alps (here referring to a spur ridge off the Jigokudani East Ridge) and the Suma Alps. The book also lists the Yamato Alps, the Hiei Alps, the Kōnan Alps and the Taki Alps. The Nikkō Alps and the Kubiki Alps emerged at around the same time.

On the way to Otensho-dake, 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Soon, and without apparent irony, even the lowly Kamakura hills were to acquire alpine status, although none top two hundred metres. This deficiency didn’t stop Fukada Kyūya, the emerging mountain writer, from writing a guide to them for the magazines Modern Sports and Fujin no Tomo in 1934. At the time, there was even a signpost pointing to the “Kamakura Alps” outside his house.

By 1937, though, Fukada was having second thoughts: “I used to think that calling them [the Kamakura hills] the Alps was incomparably twee,” he wrote in an essay on mountain views, “but these days I'm starting to feel this frivolous imitation is unacceptable”. Nevertheless, that same year, his friend Kawabata Yasunari, a fellow member of the so-called Kamakura literati, wrote an article about a hill walk for the Osaka Asahi Shinbun – under the title of “The Kamakura Alps”.

Shirouma in the snow season.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

So when it comes to the Shikoku Alps, it’s no surprise to learn that Kitagawa Junichirō was not the first to arrogate them. According to Gakujin, the haiku poet, journalist, calligrapher, art critic, noh dancer and mountaineer Kawahigashi Hekigotō referred to them as early as 1915. This was in a book on mountain landscapes, in which he lamented that "the name 'Alps' has gradually come to be abused, so that the Ishizuchi mountain range has been called the 'Shikoku Alps', and the Rikuzen-Iwaki mountains the ‘Abukuma Alps’.”

Fast-forwarding to the present day, we can see that Kawahigashi was right to be concerned. Drawing on both official and unofficial sources, Gakujin has written up no fewer than fifty local “Alps” in its March 2026 edition. These range from the О̄shū Alps up in Iwate to the Kankai Alps down in Kumamoto. Only in Hokkaido could no local Alps be found – and, of course, in the Shin’etsu, given that this region is already chokka with the original Northern Alps.

Such is the profusion of local Alps in Japan – the Gakujin editors say there might be more than a hundred in total – that some fundamental questions arise. Such as what qualifies as an alp in the first place. If you go back to the original Latin word “alpēs”, etymologists like to derive it from the adjective “albus”, meaning white with snow, or perhaps from an older pre-Latin root word for “mountain”.

But that is not how the word was traditionally used in the modern Europe languages. Whether in the French “Alpe”, the German “Alp” or the dialect “Alm”, the meaning traditionally indicated a high summer pasture for sheep, goats or cows. I was reminded of this back in March when we climbed a local Echizen mountain with no alpine pretensions at all.

Looking over a connecting ridge to the attractively snowed-up bulk of Echizen’s Heko-san, the Sensei observed that on the other side of this mountain a road leads almost to the summit. And that, in summer, the cattle are driven up there to pasture for as long as the grass stays sweet. Well, that is the very definition of a traditional alp.

Camping at Kamikochi in the 1920s.
Illustration from Nihon Arupusu.

Come to think about it, even Kamikōchi, the gateway to the Northern Japan Alps, was once an alp. According to Professor Fynn Holm, its flat valley floor served to pasture up to four hundred cattle for about half a century. The ranch was closed in 1934, partly because the overly aggressive bulls kept charging the tourists – Walter Weston and his wife Frances were among those who had narrow escapes, along with their guide Kamijō Kamonji.

So it’s true. Japan absolutely does have real Alps. If you want to find them, just follow the cows.

References

Katō Yoshiki, “Nihon Arupusu to go-tōchi no arupusu” (“The Japan Alps and the local alps)”, Gakujin, no 945, March 2026.

Fynn Holm, “Uniquely Japan, Uniquely Alpine: The Transformation of the Kamikōchi Mountain Valley into an Alpine Landscape, 1892–1938”, Environmental History, January 2023.

Katō Buntarō, “Hyōgo Tateyama tozan” in Tandokkō (Solo climbs), Sangaku Meicho Series, Futami Shobō, September 1970.

Illustrations are from Nihon Arupusu, edited by Nakama Teruhisa, with contributions by various members of the Japanese Alpine Club, Shinkōsha, Tokyo, June 1930. For the provenance of this copy, see A meizanologist’s diary (44).

Biting the world heritage berry

A muted cheer for UNESCO's inscription of the highest Greek mountain.

On the way up to the hut on Mt Olympus, there used to grow a spiky shrub festooned with glossy black berries. In case anybody was tempted to try one, a sign warned them off in perfect English: caution, poisonous plant, don’t eat.

Two decades after encountering this deceitful shrub, I’m wondering if our Greek hosts haven’t just indulged in an enticingly lubricious fruit of a different kind. Last week, Mt. Olympus was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, alongside the D-Day landing beaches and the ancient Japanese capitals of Asuka and Fujiwara.

In the case of Olympus, designated as a mixed world heritage site in recognition of its cultural and natural significance, the news was met in Greece with “near euphoria”, according to the Guardian.

In a previous article, the same newspaper quotes Dimitris Pappas, an official of the Olympus national park management agency, as saying “There’s no doubt that if the area is declared a UNESCO world heritage site it will help contribute to the mountain’s protection.”

Back in 2003, the mountain seemed to be looking after itself quite well. The path from the plateau where I left my rented car led off through shady woods. By the time that we emerged from the trees, afternoon clouds had veiled the sun.

It was cool at 2,060 metres, where the Spilios Agapitos Refuge stands in its grove of pine trees. A mule was parked placidly outside, waiting for somebody to remove its paniers. I stepped around it and into the hut.

Patrons are these days advised to book their stay here “months in advance”. As the local town mayor quoted in the Guardian says, “Olympus’s carrying capacity has reached its limit.” Last year, half a million people visited the mountain. And that was without the added amphetamine shove of a UNESCO inscription.

Because the refuge stands higher than many an alpine hut, the atmosphere within was relaxed. As the summit rises only eight hundred vertical metres above, there would be no need for an alpine start, so no call to fossick around with headtorches while fumbling for the path in the dark.

Instead, we stepped out of the door after a leisurely breakfast of buttered bread with honey washed down with black coffee. Nobody charged us a peak fee, or made us fill in forms, or demanded evidence of a rescue bond, or checked our footwear (although I’m moderately confident that my old but trusty Zamberlans would have ticked that box). Nor did they insist that we bring rain pants as well as a jacket.

For a couple of hours, we walked up a winding and well-marked path, crunching over limestone splinters, and so out onto the hogsback of Skala (2,882 metres). 

Candidates for the main summit of Mytikas (2,918 metres) must then leave the hiking path and step onto the bare rocky floor of a stone couloir that looks as if some ancient cirque glacier might have scooped it out.

Yet route-finding remained straightforward, thanks to the sequence of red paint dots marking the way. No cables or chains defaced the rock, nor was there any need for them – the rock strata here helpfully form natural steps, so that the scrambling was easier than the angle of the couloir’s backwall might suggest.

Except for the red dots, indeed, the mountain seemed to be much as Frédéric Boissonnas and Daniel Baud-Bovy found it in August 1913, when they made the peak’s first modern ascent guided by Christos Kakkalos. The two Swiss alpinists must have felt at home here – in form, geology and height, Olympus resembles a typical “Kalkberg” of the Helvetic Alps. 

After the Great War, Kakkalos went on to accompany Marcel Kurz of Zurich's Academic Alpine Club to the massif’s second highest summit. By a curious coincidence, Kurz was the only Swiss alpinist to be mentioned in Japan’s most famous mountain book. A tireless monographer, he later published Le Mont Olympe, a book that includes the first detailed map of the summits.

You could assemble a platoon or two of hikers atop Mytikas. But the summit rocks were a relaxed place in September 2003. The handful of visitors may or may not have forgotten themselves so far as to shake hands. Nobody was taking selfies,  though. After all, we would have had to wait seven years before uploading them onto Instagram.

Now we were now cut off from the lower world. A sea of cloud, or more likely morning mist, had swirled up and over the lower peaks. On my way down, a gust of wind took my favourite baseball cap and flung it into a gully, a small votive offering to Zeus and his crew. That couldn’t happen today, of course – helmets are more or less de rigueur while climbing in the couloir, no doubt for good reason.

In fact, they might one day soon be compulsory, depending on how deeply the Mt Olympus park authorities bite into the world heritage berry. If this happens, remember you read it here first.

A meizanologist's diary (138)

3 April We’ve climbed Arashima-dake in spring and autumn, but our winter attempt back in January didn’t get far. We’re hoping for better luck in this in-between season, when spring is starting to tinge the lower woods with green but snow still covers the summit ridges.

Alas, the snow has long since melted off a new sign enforcing one-way traffic on the ‘up’ and ‘down’ paths – an unwelcome byproduct of Arashima’s status as a Hyakumeizan peak. Excessive signage is a bête noire of Alex Kerr in his recent book on Hidden Japan:

Despite being known as the land of aesthetics, the physical environment of Japan could better be called the land of junk. It’s overwhelming, all enveloping. Tourists, Japan and foreign, simply don’t see it because they’re so focused on finding what’s beautiful. That’s a credit to their love of Japan. But the junk is there nonetheless.

We are soon distracted by an elegant slime mould growing on the path – I hope it will have the sense to complete its reproductive cycle before the Hyakumeizan-bagging hordes trample it flat later in the season. Or perhaps it’s lying in wait for them.

Now we’re climbing into the beechwoods. And that is an impressive burl on one of the trees – common enough in old forests, so Google says. It looks like the obi on a well-fitted kimono....

We meet a first snowdrift on Mochi-ga-kabe, the step that leads up to the summit ridge, but don’t deem it worthy of our crampons. That’s as well, because there’s still a hundred metres of dry, bouldery path to negotiate above it.

Nevertheless, we meet a mountain photographer coming down who seems to prefer crunching over the rocks in his new-looking climbing irons. Dry tooling is all the rage now, they say.

A steep ramp, which we tackle with crampons, leads us to the summit ridge, with aery views over to Hakusan. Even if we couldn’t identify our famous local ‘white mountain’, we would be sorted by the computer-generated panorama table that awaits us on the summit.

No need to invoke Alex Kerr for a rant here: the Hyakumeizan author expressed his views on such fixtures decades ago:

You never saw such things in the old days and, speaking for myself, I prefer my summits unencumbered with them. (Senjо̄-dake, One Hundred Mountains of Japan)

But the junk is there nonetheless.

Back in the bare woods, we are coming down the path as fast as our ageing knees will allow when we hear an odd clapping sound, somewhat guttural. I take it to be a large bird, pre-flighting its wings. Or, the Sensei says, it might be the discreet cough that a polite bear utters to remind visitors of his presence.

Birds or a courteous bear? A true Meizan is an inexhaustible font of mountain mysteries.

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2 April (cont.): ideally, one shouldn't visit the Miidera just as its famous cherry trees come into full bloom. I mean, the temple has hundreds of Important Cultural Properties, and how can you pay due attention to them with all that sakura in your face? Nevertheless, the Miidera lies on the way home and my Japan Rail Pass turns into a pumpkin at midnight. So it’s now or never…

Miidera, or the Onjō-ji, features as the eighth destination in Alex Kerr’s latest book, Hidden Japan: An Astonishing World of Thatched Villages, Ancient Shrines and Primeval Forests. Since the temple is “hidden in plain sight”, the taxi driver has no difficulty in finding it – it would have been an easy walk from the station, but every minute counts now that we’re halfway through the afternoon.

Without a millisecond to waste, I walk through the Daimon Gate – repurposed from Hideyoshi’s Fushimi Castle – and up the stone steps to the courtyard in front of the Kondo. This great hall was built in 1599 with funds donated by Hideyoshi’s widow. Regime change seems to have done this temple no harm at all.

The Kondo, Kerr writes, is “one of the most splendid Momoyama buildings in existence …expansive and strong, yet delicate and light.” 

Alas, the late afternoon shadows, not to mention the distracting highlights of the flowering trees, reduce the otherwise graceful hall to a black hulk. So I give up on architectural appreciation, shuck off my shoes, and go inside.

Halfway round our clockwise shuffle around the hall, we come to a dark corner. And there, as if carefully segregated from the fine and polished examples of classical statuary all about, are seven figures that look as if they were roughly hewn out of a discarded log. The labels identify each one as a “dragon king” (or queen), yet each wears a gentle and engaging smile.

Image courtesy of Miidera1200 (Instagram)

I make a slight bow in their direction. This is by way of an apology. In One Hundred Mountains of Japan, the English version of Fukada Kyūya’s Nihon Hyakumeizan, mention is made of a wandering monk called Enkū (1632–1695), said to have been the first to climb Kasa-ga-dake in the Northern Alps: “This is the monk,” says the translation, “who with a hatchet carved an image of the Buddha that latterly became famous.”

One image? That should have read thousands. Enkū himself vowed to carve 120,000 religious effigies during his lifetime, and he may well have done so. Ten a day could have sufficed, one scholar has calculated. At any rate, something like 4,320 of his sculptures survive. These include the seven in front of me, which were rediscovered as recently as 1963, in a dusty niche above the Miidera’s revolving sutra repository.

As this history suggests, both Enkū and his works fell into obscurity after his death. It was only in the 1930s that scholars started to take an interest in him, and not until the late 1950s – just before Fukada started writing Nihon Hyakumeizan – that big museums began to exhibit Enkū’s statues.

As a result, Enkū’s origins are difficult to establish. He grew up in Mino Province, in the southern reaches of what is today’s Gifu Prefecture. When he was seven years old, his mother may or may not have perished in a great flood. Later he took religious orders in the Tendai sect and set out on mountain pilgrimages in all parts of the realm.

A visit to Hakusan in June 1679 seems to have been particularly revelatory. While Enkū was meditating beneath a waterfall, the Hakusan deity appeared to him and announced “Here lives Shaka.” From this time forward, says Julian Daizan Skinner, a modern Rinzai Zen master, “his work is considered to take on a new depth and excellence.”

Curiously, it was in the very next month that Enkū came here to the Onjō-ji and received the "Succession Lineage of the Buddha-nature Eternal Vajra Castle" from the hands of the Great Abbot Dōei himself. This, and we seem to be on firm historical ground here, was on July 5th of the seventh year of Enpō (1679). The Hōryū-ji in Nara had bestowed a similar honour on him some years before.

As Alex Kerr notes, Enkū did not often seek out the great prelates of Kyoto and Nara. He preferred to make the rounds of country villages, offering his services as a traditional healer or performing ceremonies to end a drought. However, Kerr suggests, he may have made an exception for the Miidera on account of its “mystical Mikkyō teachings”. Enkū visited the temple again in August 1689 and received a further transmission, this time from the Abbot Son’ei.

Tradition has it that Enkū ended his days far from the big cities. Returning to his hometown in Gifu, he had a cave dug into the banks of the Nagara River and entered into his final meditation there – at the very same place where his mother had been swept away in a great flood so many years before.

By the time I leave the Kondo, the sun has set behind the bulk of Hiei-zan. At least the sakura are less distracting, now that the shadows have muted them. 

There’s just time for a last quick circuit of the temple grounds. Last of all, I pass the sacred spring which gives the Onjō-ji the name that everybody knows it by: Miidera, the temple of the three wells. 

Now it really is time to run for that evening Thunderbird. Only hours are left on my well-worn Rail Pass...

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2 April: nansen-hokuba, 南船北馬, sailing south by boat, riding north on horseback is a phrase that denotes the urge to madly rush about. Overtaken by just such an impulse when a Japanese Rail Pass is about to expire, I let the Hokuriku Main Line waft me down to Kusatsu on the shores of Lake Biwa.

Although it may seem off-script for a meizanologist to visit a museum dedicated to a lake, an exception has to be made here. As a geological phenomenon, Lake Biwa is remarkable not just for its size – the largest freshwater expanse in Japan – but for its age. Most lakes fill in quickly, yet Biwa-ko has endured for four million years, so that it sustains no fewer than sixty or so endemic plants and fish.

An exhibit in the endemic Lake Biwa Museum explains this longevity. The reconstructed site of a geological fault line shows how the lake’s rocky floor has kept sinking over time, at roughly a metre every thousand years. In addition, the lake has tended to migrate in a northerly direction.

I’m reminded of the folk tale that a Godzilla-like giant Daidarabotchi excavated Lake Biwa, all in a single night, and piled up Mt. Fuji from the left-over spoil-tip…

The folk tale has it right in one respect - the lake has a history that is every bit as epic as the mountain's. Back in the museum, a diorama takes us into the deep past, when elephants roamed through forests of metasequoia, and crocodiles lurked at their watering holes. The elephants dwindled in size over time, thus anticipating the art of bonsai by almost two million years. 

One of these smaller elephants later caused a sensation. In 1804, when people discovered its fossilised bones on the lake’s western shore, they thought at first they’d found the remains of a dragon.

From geology, we move into historical times. In the feudal era, long barges known as maruko-bune plied the lake, moving as elegantly as a modern N700, if not quite as fast.

There’s also a typical lakeside house, set up as it was in 1964, when water came from a stream and the nightsoil went straight onto the vegetable patch. In his Japan Journals, Donald Richie recalls how this latter practice led in the late 1940s to what he wryly calls a reverse Occupation…

After an hour or so among the cultural exhibits, I decide to make shorter work of those on insect and plant life.

After gawking at a giant dragonfly, I follow the children who are tugging their parents in the direction of the museum’s famous aquarium. 

Somehow I manage to miss an encounter with a giant catfish, one of the so-called lords of Lake Biwa. This one must have luck on its side too, having miraculously survived the rupture of its tank three years ago.

I miss the catfish because I’m distracted by a friendly seal, who seems to be inspecting his visitors as curiously as they are inspecting him. Surely he can’t be an endemic? No, the seal is a Russian émigré, imported from Baikal, presumably one of Biwa-ko's Twin Lakes. I hope he doesn't miss the depths and ice sheets of his native waters.

Intending patrons of this museum should note that there is only one bus an hour back to Kusatsu station. Before catching the next one, there's just time to stroll out onto the outdoor viewing platform. A brisk spring breeze is whipping up white-capped waves out on the lake.

Under the clear sky, I start to appreciate Lake Biwa's scale. It seems reasonable that scooping it out would leave you with a Mt. Fuji-sized spoil-tip. How sad then that the volumes don’t match. No, not at all – the savants have calculated that you’d need to dig out something like fifty* Lake Biwa basins to pile up just one 3,776 metre-high mountain. Now even for a Daidarabotchi, that sounds too much like hard work...

*Footnote: Or perhaps only thirty-seven Lake Biwa basins. In his Fujiyama: The Sacred Mountain of Japan (1924), the o-fuda expert and anthropologist Frederick Starr has this to say:-

The Japanese often claim that Mount Fuji was formed in a single night and that simultaneously with its elevation the basin of Lake Biwa was scooped out. Apparently the idea is that the material from the lake basin was thrust up into the mountain. The distance between the two mountain and lake is about one hundred and fifty miles. 

Lake Biwa takes its name from its shape. The biwa is a musical instrument something like a guitar. The lake is contracted at the middle by a bending in of the shore lines. It is about 36 miles long, and 12 miles in greatest width. 

So persistent is this notion of a relation between the lake and mountain that Professor Omori has seen fit to demolish it by a calculation. According to the popular notion there should be some equivalence of bulk between the mountain and the lake basin. 

In Japanese measures Lake Biwa is 16 ri 9 cho 45 ken in length by 5 ri 26 cho 49 ken in greatest breadth; it covers an area of 44.5 square ri and has an average depth of 130.7 shaku; its volume is 20,956 cubic cho, or 0.449 cubic ri. 

Mount Fuji rises to a height of 34.6 cho above the sea; it covers an area of about 68 square ri; considering it a regular cone, its volume will be 16.7 cubic ri. The volume of Mount Fuji then will be thirty-seven times that of the water in Lake Biwa.