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, for good and all, 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)