Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (3)

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

During the Edo period (1603–1868), Mt Fuji started to attract a following that went far beyond its religious devotees. Thanks to Edo’s growing influence on popular culture – and what has changed in our own century, we may ask – millions of Japanese came to see the mountain as a familiar image in pictures, books and ceramic glaze. And, in time, even on bathhouse walls.

A six-panel screen showing Mt Fuji by Kano Tan'yu.
Image by courtesy of Christie's.

Meanwhile, the feudal authorities started to arrogate Fuji’s prestige to themselves. At the “heart of Edo castle”, the bakufu’s official painter Kanō Tan'yū (1602–1674) placed Mt Fuji in the centre of a diorama that covered a set of sliding doors in the shogun’s retiring rooms.

If Mt Fuji was a nascent symbol of state, its theology was now too important to leave to the discretion of temple priests and the Fujikō houses. The neo-Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan (1583–1657), an advisor to four shoguns, weighed in with an attack on the legends invented by Buddhist priests about Mt Fuji and the foreign-influenced tale of Kaguya-hime. 

The goddess Konohanasakuya-hime in flight.
Rendition by Evelyn Paul, c.1912, for a book on Japanese myths.

The mountain’s true deity, Hayashi asserted, was Konohanasakuya-hime, a fire goddess who first appears in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki (although not in connection with Mt Fuji, which these chronicles omit to mention).

In time, the nationalist stirrings fomented by Razan and fellow thinkers would culminate in an officially sponsored cultural revolution. Soon after it came to power in 1868, the Meiji government launched a campaign to disentwine Buddhism and Shinto, the so-called haibutsu kishaku movement that aimed to "abolish Buddhism and destroy Shākyamuni". On and around Mt Fuji, temple buildings were torn down, and sculptures removed or vandalised.

In 1874, the Shintoist official placed in charge of the Fuji Sengen shrines personally led an expedition to remove any Buddhist icon that remained on the mountain. Yet some statues from the Yakushi hall on the summit were rescued and brought down to Fujinomiya, where, as Bernstein documents with a photograph, they still preside over the sake vats at a brewery.

Buddhist statues brought down from Mt Fuji and now
displayed at the Takasago Brewery, Fujinomiya.
Courtesy Butsuzo World blog. 

While the government’s muddled and inconsistent anti-Buddhist campaign soon fell by the wayside, its effects were lasting. The Sengen shrines at the mountain’s foot remain “thoroughly Shintoized” to this day. And the Fujikō schools were ultimately forced into a Shintoist framework, accelerating their decline in a modernising age.

Meanwhile the government had discovered that, as a means of inculcating the desired virtues in the populace, it was much more effective to indoctrinate them at school than to meddle with their forms of worship.

Mt Fuji in a Taisho-era songbook for schools (1911).
Courtesy of Shoka Shinto (唱歌深層) blog.

Thus it was that Mt Fuji started appearing in school textbooks well before the Imperial Rescript on Education was promulgated in 1890. A songbook issued in 1881 includes a set of lyrics on “Fujisan” that states, as quoted by Bernstein, “Foreigners gaze up admiringly. So do Japanese. [Fuji] is our pride.” A reading primer published in 1900 shows a picture of Fuji accompanied by the words “A big mountain. This is Japan’s greatest mountain”. And so on. 

At several removes, perhaps, the Ministry of Education also presided over Nonaka Itaru’s (1867–1955) bid to turn Mt Fuji into a mountain of science. The ministry was the ultimate employer of Wada Yūji (1859–1918), the professional meteorologist who encouraged Itaru in his attempt to overwinter on Mt Fuji while making hourly weather observations. 

A cinematic rendition of the Nonakas' sojourn on Mt Fuji.
Poster advertising Toei's 1967 movie Fujisancho.

The epic story of Itaru’s struggle for survival on the blizzard-wracked summit in the winter of 1895, loyally supported by his wife Chiyoko (1871–1923), has provided fodder for movies, school textbooks and blogs to this very day.

In “A global mountain on a human planet”, his second-to-last chapter, Bernstein presents Fuji as the locus of modern industry and military firing ranges. In it, he describes how the papermaking and other manufacturies established at its base have come up against their ecological limits, whether by exhausting the groundwater that percolates out of the mountain, or by pouring long-lived pollutants into the surrounding ocean. 

Surprisingly little snow for the time of year...
Mt Fuji on January 21 this year (Project Hyakumeizan).

Fuji also serves as a waymark of climate breakdown. As a kind of synecdoche for the fix we’re in, no snow fell on the mountain during October for the first time on record in 2024.

Bernstein’s concluding chapter chronicles the two attempts to have Fuji inscribed as a world heritage site. The first try, during the 1990s, foundered because the volcano was to be submitted as a “natural” monument – leading to the objection that it was just one more stratovolcano among many on the Pacific Rim, and hence not especially heritage-worthy.

Heritage Fuji: from the official video....

As history relates, the mountain fared better as a cultural site. Promoted as “Fujisan, sacred place and source of artistic inspiration”, it acceded to world heritage status in June 2013. Inevitably, perhaps, the official webpage marking the inscription mentions hardly any of the “complex and contested history of the mountain”, to say nothing of the ecological and policy challenges brewing around it.

Yet, says Bernstein, “It is only by accounting for the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, that we can do historical justice to the multiple lives of Fuji and, one could argue, even more fully celebrate this famous but in many ways hidden peak.”

It’s fair to say that, in any other language than Japanese, nobody has ever celebrated the full panoply of Mt Fuji’s history more comprehensively than Professor Bernstein. And, given that on past performance, full-length English-language books about this mountain seem to erupt only once or twice a century, we will likely be reaching for this magnum opus for quite a few decades yet.

References

Andrew Bernstein, Fuji: A Mountain in the Making, Princeton University Press, September 2025.

H Byron Earhart, Mount Fuji: Icon of Japan, University of South Carolina, October 2011.

Frederick Starr, Fujiyama: the Sacred Mountain of Japan, Chicago: Covici-McGee, 1924.

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 pay for these activities. But the 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 flared again 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.

(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 a bit when we come to the historical period. Yet, surprisingly perhaps 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)