Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (2)

Review continued: Andrew Bernstein applies a historian’s eye to the world’s most famous stratovolcano.

In the early historical period, Fuji lay far beyond the ken of Japan’s movers and shakers. That changed as Japan’s political centre of gravity moved east, first in the Kamakura period (1185–1333) and then, with finality in the Edo period (1603–1868). For would-be writers and travellers on and around Fuji, it helped too that a series of destructive flank eruptions ended in the second half of the ninth century.

Kaguya-hime ascends Mt Fuji.
Print by Toyohara Chikanobu (courtesy of Artelino).

Bernstein deftly charts the parallel shifts in religious belief in his second chapter, entitled “From Angry God to Parent of the World”. In time, the angry male deity, who had to be appeased with apologies and promotions in court rank, gave ground to more emollient personalities such as Kaguya-hime, a princess from the moon. A monk called Matsudai brought Buddhism to Fuji’s summit in 1149, when he set up a temple there, and in the following centuries pilgrims started to ascend the mountain regularly by several different routes. 

By 1707, religious beliefs surrounding Mt. Fuji were so well established that not even that year’s highly destructive flank eruption could shake them. In his chapter on the fallout of the Hōei event, Bernstein sets out the feudal government’s efforts to deal with the famine and devastation caused by the resulting ashfalls – which buried nearby villages and dumped up to eight centimetres of ash more than a hundred kilometres away.

Mayhem caused by the Hoei Eruption in 1707.
Print by Katsushika Hokusai (courtesy of Japan Forward). 

These efforts were hampered by the dual structure of the Tokugawa regime, in which the central Edo-based authority presided more or less uneasily over semi-independent regional fiefdoms. In prosperous times, the system worked well enough to sustain the shogunate for two and a half centuries. But, as Bernstein points out, a disaster on the scale of the Hōei eruption would test any political system to its limits.

In the event, the shogunate took two unprecedented steps. It expropriated more than half of the territory of Odawara, the feudal domain lying to the south of Mt. Fuji, effectively nationalising the relief and recovery efforts. And it imposed a nationwide tax to help relief and recovery efforts. But that relief, when it came, was distributed unevenly, causing some groups to suffer more than others.

Even so, the magistrate in charge of the disaster zone, Ina Tadanobu (d. 1712) played his part with such sincerity and dedication that grateful citizens later established shrines in his memory. A local legend has him making unauthorised distributions of rice from government storehouses and taking the resulting punishment on his own head. But here we stray outside the realm of history into terrain that would later be exploited for novelistic effect. And that is quite another story…

Pilgrims on Mt Fuji: print by Katsushika Hokusai.
Colourisation by ChatGPT. 

About a generation after the Hōei disaster, an oil merchant from Edo named Jikigyō Miroku (1671–1733) fasted to death on Mt Fuji’s eastern flank. Bernstein opens his fourth chapter, on “Holy Fuji”, with an account of this incident. Jikigyō’s sacrifice ushered in the heyday of popular pilgrimages to the mountain – perhaps too popular, in the eyes of the government, who found them subversive of social order. In the end, though, the officials failed in their attempts to rein in the Fujikō groups.

By the mid-nineteenth century, women too were climbing ever higher on the mountain as they pushed against the traditional restrictions; disguised as a man, a female pilgrim from Edo attained the summit as early as 1838.

As Bernstein points out, economic forces helped women to press their case. After all, the more pilgrims the better, given that they represented “an important source of income for the communities around Fuji, especially those on the northern and eastern sides of the mountain, where cold weather and the fallout produced by the Hōei eruption made large-scale agriculture difficult.”

The upshot was an economic rivalry between the various pilgrimage centres that, to some extent, has lasted to this day. The fourth chapter chronicles the Edo-era origins of such disputes in some detail. After the second world war, the age-old rivalries of Shizuoka and Yamanashi rekindled when the Sengen Shrine at Fujinomiya (Shizuoka) laid claim to the ownership of Fuji’s summit area. This controversy and the ensuing lengthy court case, settled only in 1974, are set out in the book’s seventh chapter.

The “fact that the mountain symbolized a supposedly unified nation," comments Bernstein, "made it a flashpoint in battles over the form that nation should take.” And perhaps more so than ever in modern times.

(To be continued)

Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (1)

Book review: Andrew Bernstein applies a historian’s eye to the world’s most famous stratovolcano.

“I once looked around for materials for a book on Fuji,” wrote Fukada Kyūya in the relevant chapter of his most famous book, “but found so much that I finally gave up the project.”

Where the Nihon Hyakumeizan author feared to tread, we are grateful that Andrew Bernstein has waded in. After pursuing his project both on and off the mountain for over a decade, he has given us Fuji: A Mountain in the Making. Published by Princeton University Press in September last year, this is a long-awaited vade mecum to the volcano’s history.

For history is the operative word here. To do full justice to Professor Bernstein’s achievement, it’s worth taking a moment to revisit his predecessors. Full-length books on Japan's and possibly the planet's most famous mountain are surprisingly far and few between in the English language. The first was probably the Chicago-based ethnographer Frederick Starr’s Fujiyama: The Sacred Mountain of Japan, published in 1924.

Starr’s book touches on the mountain’s presence in art, poetry and folklore, as well as its physical geography – vegetation gets a whole chapter to itself. But the prime focus, as the title suggests, lies on Mt. Fuji as a locus for pilgrimages. Indeed, for reasons never quite explained in the book, Starr made his own Mt. Fuji climbs garbed in the traditional cotton robes of a pilgrim.

After Starr, English-reading fans of Japan’s top mountain had to wait almost nine decades – until 2011 – when Harry Byron Earhart came out with Mt Fuji, Icon of Japan. As one would expect from an emeritus professor of comparative religion, this book’s emphasis also lay on the mountain’s history as a destination for worship. Earhart, like Starr, accompanied pilgrims on more than one ritual ascent, getting perhaps as close as any foreign writer could to the spirit that inspires them.

By contrast, Andrew Bernstein (pictured left) is a professor of history. Taking a chronological approach, he zooms out widely to show how people of all kinds – not just poets, painters and pilgrims, but politicians and papermakers too – have variously placated, portrayed, promulgated and exploited Mt. Fuji through time. “Any history privileges some views over others,” he writes in his introduction, “but by treating Fuji as an actor in, and product of, both the physical world and the human imagination, I hope to dispel some of the ‘magical haze’ that surrounds the volcano.”

In this, he has succeeded magnificently. If Fuji: A Mountain in the Making were to be screened, it would need a Cecil B. DeMille to direct it. In three hundred or so pages, the book takes us from the volcano’s fiery origins right up to its recent accession to world heritage status. On the way, it surveys Fuji’s prehistory, the shifting religious beliefs surrounding it, the response to the 1707 eruption disaster, the mountain’s transformation into a symbol of state from the nineteenth century onwards, and much more.

The origins and etymology of Mt. Fuji’s name are somewhat hazy. The Sino-Japanese characters used to write it in early historical times imply that the volcano was seen as undying or eternal. Contrarily, however, the savants have ruled that the graceful cone we see today, the so-called New Fuji, dates back no more than about seventeen thousand years – long after humans first migrated to Japan. So, in this sense, Mt Fuji is a mountain that has grown up alongside its human admirers.

Bernstein’s first chapter starts with an elegant synopsis of the latest thinking about the mountain’s geology and also the people who lived on its slopes in prehistoric times. The way that stones are lined up at some of these sites hint that, even in that remote era, Mt. Fuji may have served a “ritual focal point”.

Mt Fuji as a symbol of Japan...
Image by courtesy of ChatGPT.

The haze thins considerably when we come to the historical period. Perhaps surprisingly to those accustomed to thinking of Mt Fuji as a symbol of Japan, the mountain is nowhere mentioned in Japan’s oldest ‘myth histories’, the Kojiki (712 CE) and the Nihon Shoki (720 CE).

Instead, Mt Fuji makes its first written appearance in the Hitachi Fudoki, a regional gazetteer completed around 721 CE that deals with a province in eastern Japan. The portrayal of what would one day become Japan’s top mountain was far from favourable, showing it as an inhospitable curmudgeon in contrast to a friendly and liberal Mt. Tsukuba. I can’t resist here patching in the lively retelling of this legend from Nihon Hyakumeizan:

When the goddess Mioya went visiting other deities, she lighted one evening on Fuji’s summit. But that mountain’s guardian spirit would not let her stay, saying the day was unpropitious. Mioya flew into a rage and told the god of Fuji that, henceforth, his mountain would be locked forever in the embrace of frost and snow, winter and summer alike. With that, she whirled herself away to the east, to Tsukuba, whose guardian welcomed her warmly and prepared a feast. Delighted beyond measure, Mioya pledged this mountain would wax prosperous with the days and months.

Despite this unpromising start, Fuji had achieved something of an image upgrade by the time that the Man'yōshū, Japan’s oldest extant poetry collection, appeared about forty years later. In the Man'yōshū verses that Bernstein uses to head up his first chapter, the poet Takahashi no Mushimaro (fl. c. 730) sings of a “treasure of a mountain” and one that houses a god who defends the realm.

Even so, the Man'yōshū poems featuring Tsukuba outnumber those about Fuji by about two to one. The reason, Bernstein suggests, might be simply ‘out of sight, out of mind’: in those days, Fuji lay far beyond the ken of Japan’s movers and shakers…

(Continued)

A meizanologist's diary (107)

New Year’s Day: Akemashite omedeto gozaimasu – the Year of the Horse has dawned, so congratulations to all who read this blog. Although, it has to be admitted, it’s far from clear whether it has dawned at all in the Sensei’s hometown this morning. Rain and sleet scatter down from lowering clouds all through breakfast, so that it takes a warm bowl of home-made o-zōni, accompanied by oddments of osechi ryori from a supermarket, all washed down with a fine blend of Swiss-roasted coffee and chicory, before we can steel ourselves to attempt a mountain hatsumōde – the first shrine visit of the year.

For any local meizanologist, the destination has to be Monju, a mountain that musters just one metre of altitude for each day of the year. But height isn’t everything: “It rises as if floating in the surrounding plains, possessing a presence that exceeds its elevation,” says YamaKei, a bit hopefully. 

Even if it doesn't float very far above the plain, Monju has a backstory that extends a fair way into the past. Not only was it opened in the first year of Yōrō (717) by the mountain mystic Taichō – who made the first recorded ascent of Hakusan in the same year – but, some twelve centuries later, the Hyakumeizan author and his friends inscribed their names on its summit shrine. And, as any classical mountain should in this part of the world, it disposes of three distinct summits.  

It's still drizzling when we park the car. Bear bell a-jingling, the Sensei lights out at a blistering pace – presumably to get out from under the dripping cryptomerias – and we take the variation route across Monju’s north flank. This path is slightly less crowded than the normal route. By the time we emerge beside a pavilion dedicated to the Kannon (this being a very ecumenical mountain), the drizzle has turned to wet snow that limns every branch and bough.

Traditionally, a monk from a nearby temple attends the summit shrine on New Year's Day (as I said, few mountains are as ecumenical as this one), handing out “eto” – miniature votive animals – on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. As he usually runs out by the time we get here, we avoid importuning him to prevent embarrassment. 

But, no matter, on the way down, we drop in at a viewpoint just as the sun starts to peek between the clouds. And then a stray ray of light picks out a lifelike “eto” that somebody has scooped out of the snow and left recumbent on a picnic table. So our new year starts with a horse after all, even if it looks a bit like a cow.