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.
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| A six-panel screen showing Mt Fuji by Kano Tan'yu. Image by courtesy of Christie's. |
At the same time, 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, it followed that its theology had become 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.
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| 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.
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 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 places of worship.
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.
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.
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 for the first time on record during the month of October 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.
As history relates, the mountain has 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 appear erupt only once or twice a century, we will likely be reaching for this vade mecum for quite a few decades yet.
References
Andrew Bernstein, Fuji: A Mountain in the Making, Princeton University Press, September 2024.
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.
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 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 places 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 for the first time on record during the month of October 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 has 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 appear erupt only once or twice a century, we will likely be reaching for this vade mecum for quite a few decades yet.
References
Andrew Bernstein, Fuji: A Mountain in the Making, Princeton University Press, September 2024.
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.
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