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.

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 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 a movie, it would need to be directed by Cecil B. DeMille. 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 still 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. Its portrayal of what would one day become Japan’s mountain was far from favourable, showing it as an inhospitable curmudgeon in contrast to a friendly and charitable 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” which 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…

(To be continued)