Biting the world heritage berry

A muted cheer for UNESCO's inscription of the highest Greek mountain.

On the way up to the hut on Mt Olympus, there used to grow a spiky shrub festooned with glossy black berries. In case anybody was tempted to try one, a sign warned them off in perfect English: caution, poisonous plant, don’t eat.

Two decades after encountering this deceitful shrub, I’m wondering if our Greek hosts haven’t just indulged in an enticingly lubricious fruit of a different kind. Last week, Mt. Olympus was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, alongside the D-Day landing beaches and the ancient Japanese capitals of Asuka and Fujiwara.

In the case of Olympus, designated as a mixed world heritage site in recognition of its cultural and natural significance, the news was met in Greece with “near euphoria”, according to the Guardian.

In a previous article, the same newspaper quotes Dimitris Pappas, an official of the Olympus national park management agency, as saying “There’s no doubt that if the area is declared a UNESCO world heritage site it will help contribute to the mountain’s protection.”

Back in 2003, the mountain seemed to be looking after itself quite well. The path from the plateau where I left my rented car led off through shady woods. By the time that we emerged from the trees, afternoon clouds had veiled the sun.

It was cool at 2,060 metres, where the Spilios Agapitos Refuge stands in its grove of pine trees. A mule was parked placidly outside, waiting for somebody to remove its paniers. I stepped around it and into the hut.

Patrons are these days advised to book their stay here “months in advance”. As the local town mayor quoted in the Guardian says, “Olympus’s carrying capacity has reached its limit.” Last year, half a million people visited the mountain. And that was without the added amphetamine shove of a UNESCO inscription.

Because the refuge stands higher than many an alpine hut, the atmosphere within was relaxed. As the summit rises only eight hundred vertical metres above, there would be no need for an alpine start, so no call to fossick around with headtorches while fumbling for the path in the dark.

Instead, we stepped out of the door after a leisurely breakfast of buttered bread with honey washed down with black coffee. Nobody charged us a peak fee, or made us fill in forms, or demanded evidence of a rescue bond, or checked our footwear (although I’m moderately confident that my old but trusty Zamberlans would have ticked that box). Nor did they insist that we bring rain pants as well as a jacket.

For a couple of hours, we walked up a winding and well-marked path, crunching over limestone splinters, and so out onto the hogsback of Skala (2,882 metres). 

Candidates for the main summit of Mytikas (2,918 metres) must then leave the hiking path and step onto the bare rocky floor of a stone couloir that looks as if some ancient cirque glacier might have scooped it out.

Yet route-finding remained straightforward, thanks to the sequence of red paint dots marking the way. No cables or chains defaced the rock, nor was there any need for them – the rock strata here helpfully form natural steps, so that the scrambling was easier than the angle of the couloir’s backwall might suggest.

Except for the red dots, indeed, the mountain seemed to be much as Frédéric Boissonnas and Daniel Baud-Bovy found it in August 1913, when they made the peak’s first modern ascent guided by Christos Kakkalos. The two Swiss alpinists must have felt at home here – in form, geology and height, Olympus resembles a typical “Kalkberg” of the Helvetic Alps. 

After the Great War, Kakkalos went on to accompany Marcel Kurz of Zurich's Academic Alpine Club to the massif’s second highest summit. By a curious coincidence, Kurz was the only Swiss alpinist to be mentioned in Japan’s most famous mountain book. A tireless monographer, he later published Le Mont Olympe, a book that includes the first detailed map of the summits.

You could assemble a platoon or two of hikers atop Mytikas. But the summit rocks were a relaxed place in September 2003. The handful of visitors may or may not have forgotten themselves so far as to shake hands. Nobody was taking selfies,  though. After all, we would have had to wait seven years before uploading them onto Instagram.

Now we were now cut off from the lower world. A sea of cloud, or more likely morning mist, had swirled up and over the lower peaks. On my way down, a gust of wind took my favourite baseball cap and flung it into a gully, a small votive offering to Zeus and his crew. That couldn’t happen today, of course – helmets are more or less de rigueur while climbing in the couloir, no doubt for good reason.

In fact, they might one day soon be compulsory, depending on how deeply the Mt Olympus park authorities bite into the world heritage berry. If this happens, remember you read it here first.

A meizanologist's diary (136)

2 April: nansen-hokuba, 南船北馬, sailing south by boat, riding north on horseback is a phrase that denotes the urge to madly rush about. Overtaken by just such an impulse when a Japanese Rail Pass is about to expire, I let the Hokuriku Main Line waft me down to Kusatsu on the shores of Lake Biwa.

Although it may seem off-script for a meizanologist to visit a museum dedicated to a lake, an exception has to be made here. As a geological phenomenon, Lake Biwa is remarkable not just for its size – the largest freshwater expanse in Japan – but for its age. Most lakes fill in quickly, yet Biwa-ko has endured for four million years, so that it sustains no fewer than sixty or so endemic plants and fish.

An exhibit in the endemic Lake Biwa Museum explains this longevity. The reconstructed site of a geological fault line shows how the lake’s rocky floor has kept sinking over time, at roughly a metre every thousand years. In addition, the lake has tended to migrate in a northerly direction.

I’m reminded of the folk tale that a Godzilla-like giant Daidarabotchi excavated Lake Biwa, all in a single night, and piled up Mt. Fuji from the left-over spoil-tip…

The folk tale has it right in one respect - the lake has a history that is every bit as epic as the mountain's. Back in the museum, a diorama takes us into the deep past, when elephants roamed through forests of metasequoia, and crocodiles lurked at their watering holes. The elephants dwindled in size over time, thus anticipating the art of bonsai by almost two million years. 

One of these smaller elephants later caused a sensation. In 1804, when people discovered its fossilised bones on the lake’s western shore, they thought at first they’d found the remains of a dragon.

From geology, we move into historical times. In the feudal era, long barges known as maruko-bune plied the lake, moving as elegantly as a modern N700, if not quite as fast.

There’s also a typical lakeside house, set up as it was in 1964, when water came from a stream and the nightsoil went straight onto the vegetable patch. In his Japan Journals, Donald Richie recalls how this latter practice led in the late 1940s to what he wryly calls a reverse Occupation…

After an hour or so among the cultural exhibits, I decide to make shorter work of those on insect and plant life.

After gawking at a giant dragonfly, I follow the children who are tugging their parents in the direction of the museum’s famous aquarium. 

Somehow I manage to miss an encounter with a giant catfish, one of the so-called lords of Lake Biwa. This one must have luck on its side too, having miraculously survived the rupture of its tank three years ago.

I miss the catfish because I’m distracted by a friendly seal, who seems to be inspecting his visitors as curiously as they are inspecting him. Surely he can’t be an endemic? No, the seal is a Russian émigré, imported from Baikal, presumably one of Biwa-ko's Twin Lakes. I hope he doesn't miss the depths and ice sheets of his native waters.

Intending patrons of this museum should note that there is only one bus an hour back to Kusatsu station. Before catching the next one, there's just time to stroll out onto the outdoor viewing platform. A brisk spring breeze is whipping up white-capped waves out on the lake.

Under the clear sky, I start to appreciate Lake Biwa's scale. It seems reasonable that scooping it out would leave you with a Mt. Fuji-sized spoil-tip. How sad then that the volumes don’t match. No, not at all – the savants have calculated that you’d need to dig out something like fifty* Lake Biwa basins to pile up just one 3,776 metre-high mountain. Now even for a Daidarabotchi, that sounds too much like hard work...

*Footnote: Or perhaps only thirty-seven Lake Biwa basins. In his Fujiyama: The Sacred Mountain of Japan (1924), the o-fuda expert and anthropologist Frederick Starr has this to say:-

The Japanese often claim that Mount Fuji was formed in a single night and that simultaneously with its elevation the basin of Lake Biwa was scooped out. Apparently the idea is that the material from the lake basin was thrust up into the mountain. The distance between the two mountain and lake is about one hundred and fifty miles. 

Lake Biwa takes its name from its shape. The biwa is a musical instrument something like a guitar. The lake is contracted at the middle by a bending in of the shore lines. It is about 36 miles long, and 12 miles in greatest width. 

So persistent is this notion of a relation between the lake and mountain that Professor Omori has seen fit to demolish it by a calculation. According to the popular notion there should be some equivalence of bulk between the mountain and the lake basin. 

In Japanese measures Lake Biwa is 16 ri 9 cho 45 ken in length by 5 ri 26 cho 49 ken in greatest breadth; it covers an area of 44.5 square ri and has an average depth of 130.7 shaku; its volume is 20,956 cubic cho, or 0.449 cubic ri. 

Mount Fuji rises to a height of 34.6 cho above the sea; it covers an area of about 68 square ri; considering it a regular cone, its volume will be 16.7 cubic ri. The volume of Mount Fuji then will be thirty-seven times that of the water in Lake Biwa.

A meizanologist's diary (119)

24 January: forty-seven centimetres of snow have fallen on the Sensei’s hometown in the last couple of days, enforcing on us what Scottish climbers are pleased to call a “fester”. 

Recalling that a former head of the Mt Fuji Weather Station has lent us a DVD of Nikkatsu’s Fuji-sanchō, we settle in for a video evening.

The opening sequence, showing a survey team struggling through a high-altitude blizzard, makes us grateful to be sitting in a warm living room. 

Then the scene switches to a meeting at the finance ministry, where a meteorological agency staffer named Katsuragi (Ashida Shinsuke) is putting the case for building a radar station atop Mt Fuji to give advance warning of incoming typhoons.

Once Katsuragi has his budget allocation, Umehara (Ishihara Yujiro), an engineer from Mitsubishi Electric, and his team take on the challenge of designing and installing the radar. 

Huge amounts of material have to be moved up the mountain, forcing the traditional packhorse drivers to master the art of high-altitude bulldozer driving.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of the entire cast, the radar station is completed on time. 

As the grand finale, a bold pilot, straining his helicopter to its limits, flies in the dome that will house the radar. And soon the new installation successfully meets the test of a real typhoon…

It’s a ripping yarn, well told. The Sensei is impressed with the all-star cast, which even includes a few female luminaries such as Hoshi Yuriko to leaven up an otherwise all-guy gig. 

And thanks to plentiful on-location filming, Japan’s top mountain is allowed to do a great job of starring as itself. 

In fact, the camerawork alone would be sufficient reason to see this film. The location shots underscore the volcano’s vast size and the varied challenges of working there – the summit’s thin air, the storms and the shifting slopes of scoria. There’s even a cameo appearance by a brockenspectre.

Fuji-sanchō came out in 1970, a bare six years after the radar station was completed. Thanks to this promptitude, it feels credibly authentic. The helicopters, bulldozers and other featured hardware must be identical to the kit actually used during the building campaign. 

Even so, after an hour or so of highly convincing re-enactions, we had to remind ourselves that Fuji-sanchō is just a movie. The movie, in turn, drew on a 1967 novel of the same name – whose author, Nitta Jirō, had been the actual leader of the radar station project a few years earlier. So the underlying events have been twice filtered through the prism of fiction.

In the end, it’s probably futile to try disentwining fact from fantasy. If Fuji-sanchō isn’t exactly documentary, then it shows what history should have been like. And it does that very entertainingly. It's no surprise to learn that Fuji-sanchō did well at the box office too.

So anybody who feels any nostalgia for that mid-Shōwa spirit of high-altitude derring-do should not hesitate to sit down and soak this movie up, all 126 action-packed minutes of it. Especially if you happen to be snowed in for an evening or two.

A meizanologist's diary (114)

12 January: thanks to yesterday’s cold front, which swept away the haze, we get a clear view of Japan’s top mountain from the morning Kagayaki. 

It is Mt Fuji that hales us to Tokyo today, for a meeting of the Fuyō Nikki no Kai. This is a research association dedicated to the memory of the meteorologist Nonaka Itaru and his wife Chiyoko, who held out on the summit of Mt Fuji for almost three months in the winter of 1895 while they made weather observations.

As usual, we meet in the offices of the non-profit organisation that leases the buildings of Mt Fuji's former summit weather station. After the weathermen went down the mountain for the last time in 2004, their jobs taken over by automated instruments, the NPO has kept up the buildings so that high-altitude researchers can use them during the summer months.

This year, the NPO Mt Fuji Research Station will celebrate its second decade, and we discuss how to mark the event (please watch this space). After the meeting, our association’s literary scholar presses a bag of Mt Fuji-themed confectionery into our hands. 

And, in case we feel in need of more cerebral fare, a former head of the weather station lends us some DVDs about its illustrious backstory.

Now it looks as if we have some homework to do…

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.