Funiculars on Mt Fuji (1)

Many have proposed railways and cable cars, but nobody has built one – yet.

Mt Fuji recently opened for its tenth summer season as a UNESCO world heritage site. Yet officials are already fretting about overcrowded huts and paths, to say nothing of the perpetual traffic jams at the fifth station bus terminals. Some might be musing that Mt Fuji would be better off with an efficient mass transport system.

If so, they are not the first to think such thoughts. Proposals for mountain railways on Mt Fuji go back more than a century. In 1908, Saburi Kazutsugu (1864-1924) suggested one from the Shizuoka side. Nobody at that time could have been better qualified to build it. As a railway engineer, Saburi could point to an impeccable track record, so to speak; he ended his career as president of the Korean Railway Company. 

He also had a convincing “hook” for the project, which he aimed to complete in time for a world fair commemorating the 50th year of Emperor Meiji’s reign. But that anniversary never happened, and nor did the railway.

Nobody was in the least discouraged. The Taishō period (1912-26) saw three separate proposals, starting with a mountain railway project in 1914, and two cable car schemes, in 1922 and 1924. Like Saburi’s, all these projects would have started on the mountain’s south-facing slopes.

Thus, it was all but inevitable that somebody would soon champion a route from the eastern side – as if to re-enact the age-old rivalry of the towns that presided over Mt Fuji’s two main pilgrimage routes: Fujinomiya in Shizuoka Prefecture and Fuji-Yoshida in Yamanashi.

Yamazaki Kamekichi
(Photo: Citizen)

The most ambitious east-side proposal came from Yamazaki Kamekichi (1870-1944), a precious metals tycoon and Tokyo politician. Yamazaki was accustomed to thinking big: among his other achievements, he founded what later became the Citizen watch company. In 1935, he sketched out a cable-drawn funicular railway that would start in Fuji-Yoshida and run in a tunnel, buried some 40 metres deep, all the way up to the summit.

To let passengers catch their breath on the journey, the funicular would also feature a stop at the fifth station. “Women and children should be able to make the ascent,” Yamazaki said, adding that foreigners too would find the service useful, as they rarely had time to climb Mt Fuji on foot. As for the mountain scenery, the tunnel would leave it undisturbed.

Yamazaki too had a hook: he meant to open his funicular in time for the Olympics scheduled for Tokyo in 1940. As for the engineering challenge, a mere funicular seemed eminently fungible when set beside the proposals for a Japan-to-Korea undersea rail tunnel that were floating around at the time.

Yamazaki’s plan found some unexpected supporters. One was Fujiki Kuzō, the journalist and pioneer rock-climber. When interviewed for a travel magazine, Tabi, he pointed out that Nikkō, Mt Kōya and Kyoto’s Atago-yama all had cable cars, so why not Fuji too? (The media of the day seem to have applied the word “cable car” indiscriminately to both aerial ropeways and cable-drawn funicular railways that ran in tunnels).

Others were less convinced. The heavyweights of the Japanese Alpine Club, who had helped to face down Saburi’s plan, now lined up against this one. Kanmuri Matsujirō, best known as the pioneer of the Kurobe River, expostulated that a funicular would open the way to “geisha girls and drunken revelry” on the summit. The club’s elder statesman, Kojima Usui, chimed in too: “Mt Fuji is not a matter of profit and loss: it is a national treasure and a natural masterpiece.”

In the end, the all-powerful Home Ministry spoke for all the naysayers: “One can hardly approve of slithering (‘sura sura’) up the nation’s most sacred mountain in a cable car, where traditionally people have sweated their way to the top, chanting ‘rokkon shōjō’ in order to purify their souls,” fumed an official.

And, with that, the Yamazaki plan was kicked into touch. And so too was an entirely separate – and rather prescient – proposal to build a road to the fifth station….

(Continued)