Climbing Fuji had been on my mind for a long while—just knowing that it’s possible for an average hiker to scale its iconic mass was enough to keep it in the forefront of my thoughts every time I gazed at it. It towers above the surrounding hills, sometimes masked with haze, sometimes awash in sunlight, its textures vibrantly sharp, but always larger than life—a waiting colossus on the horizon. In fact, I’d wanted to hike it as soon as possible after arriving in Shizuoka city the summer before, except that I had literally set my bags down in my new apartment a day or two after the official hiking season had closed for the year. You can climb the mountain at any time, however July and August make up the period when it is relatively snow free, particularly the coldest area near the summit, and considered the safest. I’m no mountain climber and therefore had to contend with waiting for a year to go by before I could finally set out to hike Fuji-san.
I planned to climb with two friends. Sandy and Lily were coming into Shizuoka by train on Sunday morning around noon (our weekend is Sunday and Monday), so I finished my exceedingly long nine-class Saturday and went home to get some sleep.
Or not.
Actually a friend called and effectively convinced me to come out for TGIS drinks at Hanonomae, our usual izakaya haunt. So I did that instead of crashing early, and my no-drinks policy for the night turned into splitting a pitcher, and that turned somehow into not getting home until around four in the morning.
I slept like a rock until ungodly sunlight finally roused me at about 11:00am. I looked at my clock, realizing I had an hour until my astute travel buddies would arrive prepared and ready. Then I looked at my messy room in which nothing was organized, packed, or ready in any way. This would take some degree of rapidity… First: water… okay, drank water, now shower. Do I have time for that? Yes, I need a shower. Shower, shower, shower…. Ack, ten minutes… okay, umm, let’s see… jacket, splash pants…aviators? Am I forgetting something? Change of clothes. Yeah that sounds right.
Then the phone rang, because my companions had arrived early. I dropped my things and ran to the station. Fortunately they decided to come over to my place for a moment to drop off some of their stuff before we caught the bus for the 5th station of the Fujinomiya. A trail is broken up, hiking wise, into 10 stations. The first five appeared to be immersed in forest, so a bus takes hikers to the fifth station where road ends and the altitude becomes too high for trees. Here the vegetation begins to spread out more barrenly, save for low growing scrub. There are four different trails, and the one we would be taking had an estimated five and a half hour hiking time. I’ll say this now: five hours feels a bit longer when you’re pulling yourself up a steep incline over shifting volcanic cinder and wet rocks in the thinned air of a reduced oxygen environment.
Fuji Fun Facts:
-The mountain summit is 3776 meters above sea level—the highest point in Japan.
-You can sleep at any station on the way up (we had booked beds at the 8th station).
-Stations are not hotels. They are more like big cabins with sleeping areas.
-The main point of sleeping at a station is so that you can awake to see the sunrise from the summit (known as goraikou or 御来光, meaning ‘honorable arrival of light’): the secondary goal for many, including us.
-Many people climb in the dark, this is not unusual.
I took Sandy and Lily to a good restaurant where we were sure to get a hearty meal, and we ate a power lunch knowing that from there on out it would all be snack food, peanuts, and the hideously bland “calorie mate” sticks that someone had toted along (at about the 3200 meter point I think we tried to openly convince ourselves that they weren’t “that bad.”) One of them asked me if I was all packed. “Yup,” I nodded.
“Did you get a flashlight?” Sandy asked.
“No,” I replied.
“Uh, how will you see?”
“It’s called the moon.”
I could see in their eyes that they were mentally slapping their foreheads.
“Seriously, it’ll be fine.”
Okay, so I didn’t pick up a flashlight for a reason more along the lines of it having completely slipped my mind during the work week and me not wanting to admit it. Luckily they had brought miner-style lights to strap on their heads. I decided, naively enough, that I could get by without one though.
Within a little while we were on the bus to Fujinomiya city, from where it would take us higher up the mountain to the fifth station. The ride was 2 hours and it was sunny, then rainy, then sunny, then rainy again, then kind of cloudy. Such is the nature of summer sometimes on the east coast of Japan.
Our bus emerged from trees and pulled into the parking lot of the 5th station, which stands at the place the forest ends and the slope of the mountain stretches on above unhindered. The temperature here was around 15 degrees or so—an enormous contrast from the sweltering heat of the lowlands. This was the coldest weather I’d experienced since probably March, and it had been at least 30 degrees in Shizuoka before we left. 
Without further ado we began our hike, walking past tired but happy looking cloud-soaked people coming off the mountain. The volcanic cinder shifts beneath your feet so that it’s a bit like walking up a mountain of sand sometimes, until you get to the larger rocks. We reached the 6th station with no problem. From here we were already able to see clouds passing on the mountain face just below us. I’d never been so close to actual clouds, besides through the window of an airplane. I don’t quite mean fog in the traditional sense, I mean you can actually see the billowing cumulus shape passing nearby. At this point in the mountain the soil is punctuated by a single species of scrub, which grows with a curiously even polka dot pattern. We continued up past the 6th, only 20 minutes in to our 5 hour hike, and the trail got steeper. The scrubby bushes began to thin out as our altitude slowly increased.
Our next station was much further ahead, and it was called New 7th, which was somewhat disheartening, because we knew that if there were now ‘new’ and ‘old’ stations, there was more than 5 to go before we got to the summit. I suppose that’s completely psychological, as the distance remains the same. It was around 7:00 in the evening as we drew up to the New 7th, and as we approached the station a girl standing on its deck called out “Hello! How are you?” I began to converse with her and it turned out she spoke very nice English—evidently a hard studier. She was 12 years old and from the city of Osaka with, get this, 160 classmates, which were all crammed into the New 7th station for a little sleep before continuing on. By this point, it was about 7:00 in the evening. I’ve always heard that Osakans are pretty much the nicest people around, reportedly more “open” than many other parts of Japan, and everyone I’ve met from there has held true to this. The girl chatted as much as she could with the three of us… super sweet and bold of her. When I was 12, I don’t know if I’d readily try to pull twenty-some year olds into a conversation, much less people who speak my second language.
After a few minutes we continued on up the mountain. We knew we couldn’t sleep until we got to out reserved “beds” at the 8th station. I hoped we’d see our young friend again at some point on the hike.
Darkness fell by about the old or ‘real’ 7th station. Then before long there was only the pale light of the moon. The air had grown thinner, and five minutes of walking would force our hearts to accelerate and our breathing to turn to gulps in an effort to get more oxygen. The moon was a sliver in the sky but still quite bright. My legs are longer than Sandy’s and Lily’s and for much of the climb I couldn’t help but walk a ways ahead of my companions, stopping every once in a while for a break and to wait for them to catch up. Deprived of the illumination from their miner’s lights and continued up the mountain, following white arrows painted on the rocks and the glints of wetness blanketing the rocks, all caught in the moonlight. It wasn’t so bad at all, though the thought of slipping or stumbling and cracking my skull occurred to me.
At one point we stopped to sit down and from so high up we could see cities for unknown numbers of miles spread out far beyond the base of the mountain. I recognized Shizuoka in an instant, for the way it curves around the beach on Suruga bay. It was the first time I’ve seen my whole city in one glance besides through photos taken from aircraft, and it made me realize how unbelievably small everything was. The mountain can do that to you. There’s hardly enough that could be said about just seeing Fuji—ceaselessly captivating, rising out of the earth with a raw, stony beauty—and being on it is like climbing up the back of some immense dormant creature. It could erupt and wipe out every spark of life on it, or it could shake a little and loosen a rock which would crush me in the dark. People are just ants on its side, tripping over the rocks and pulling themselves upwards against gravity.
So up through the darkness we went. Finally, to our relative relieve, we huffed our way up over some final rocks to get to the eight station. We rested for a moment. The air had grown chill since the sun went down and the wind tore at us in sporadic gusts. We went and announced our arrival to the sparse staff and were shown to our huge bunk-like sleeping quarters. I think you could uncomfortably squish five people into it if you really tried, but there were only three of us so we had some space to spread out and relax in. It was about 8:30 at this point and many people were already asleep. We asked that the owners wake us at 2:30 in the morning so that we could make it to the top by 4:30: sunrise. This is completely the norm. We had to be dead quiet because people were sleeping in their respective quarters all around us. We lay down on the blankets and had a little picnic consisting of peanuts and almonds, crackers, and a box of Pocky sticks. That was dinner and breakfast rolled into one, and damn it tasted good. Finally we turned off the flashlight to conk out. Sandy did immediately, but Lily and I, on the opposite sides of her, didn’t. It wasn’t until I checked for sure by whispering “Lily?” that I knew we had both been just lying there for hours. I was excited, like at Christmas, except Christmas was a draining climb to the top of a volcano. Also, the altitude had given me a headache that I only felt for the first time that evening when I lay down there was pressure against my head. I just couldn’t sleep.
At length Lily and I both needed to use the washroom and so we climbed over unconscious Sandy and left the bunk in the darkness. The washroom was located in a separate building. We put on rubber slippers available at the door and when we got outside were treated to what was for me the most gripping and memorable moment of the journey. The once clear night had been swallowed by cloud, visible in the single light that shone like a dim lighthouse beacon from the top of the hut. It sped along in thick ghostly wisps, and looking down the mountain from where we were we could see a line of hikers, visible only by their lights, coming through up the mountain slowly through the mist. It was the absolute dead of night and they climbed in silence. There were many, at different levels on the slope, but from up there we could see everyone, just little lights cast over heads and shoulders, and the cloud that swallowed them all, winding their way through the darkness. It was haunting and had a lonesome beauty all its own.
After we got back, before finally drifting off to sleep, a thunderous sound, like a hurricane suddenly hitting the building, began. Lily and I suspected it wasn’t wind though, it was rain—torrential rain, its thunder intensified by a large, glorified cabin at 2800 meters on Mt. Fuji. And that’s what it was, on and off for nearly half an hour. It may have continued for longer but around that time I finally lost consciousness for a while.
When I awoke, the hut was filled with a curious gray light. Sandy and Lily were just coming to. I fished out my cell phone from wherever it was in my bag and saw that it was 4:30. They didn’t wake us! Hold on, hold on, there had to be a reason—and that’s when I recalled the insane rain we’d heard last night. We walked out into the main chamber and I saw the hut workers.
“Warui tenki desu ka?” (“Is it bad weather?”), I asked, hesitant to hear the obvious answer.
“Hai,” the man answered, his face decidedly grim.
I slid open the door and saw… and saw… gray. Nothing but gray. We were inside the thickest, blackest imaginable storm cloud. There was no sun to speak of—it dimly lit the grayness but nothing else; even the orb indicating its presence somewhere over an invisible horizon was absent. In fact, very little was even slightly visible. But hey, NO deterrence. So we hadn’t been able to see sunrise, we were still going to the top.
Right?
Well, Lily was feeling pretty bad altitude sickness. She was nauseous and felt like she might throw up. She was able to buy a little tank of oxygen (which was accordingly insanely priced). I don’t know if huffing the oxygen actually did anything, but after about 20 minutes we decided that we’d all try to go for it. From the look of the view, starting to go up the mountain was like going into some backwards Dante’s Inferno—Abandon All Faith kind of stuff. The mountain stretched above us in jagged lava rock, the wind and cloud beat our faces, so thick that it was like rain battening us, and the view was an angry swirling storm of intense mist. Just visible was the ghost outline of a wooden torii gate, silhouetted in the gray. Half an hour later Lily said she was feeling better and we decided that maybe it had been lying down that brought the headaches and nausea. Now all three of us were determined— nothing on hell or earth was going to keep us from the top of that mountain. At the 9th station there was a sign that said we had 65 more minutes of foot; it was a little more than 1,370 vertical meters to the top. Sometime after the 9th station, snow became visible on the sheer mountain face next to the path we were on, down a small drop but close enough to throw a rock onto. We’d reached the remains of the snow cap.
We passed people coming down as we ascended. Something about hiking in Japan is that almost everyone will give you a “Konnichiwa!” as you pass. Here, even in the cold, undernourished air, through slippery, treacherous rocks and people’s exhaustion, it was the same. Except now there were lots of “Ganbatte!” thrown in (“Go for it!”). It gave us all the encouragement you could need.
And we kept going.
Then suddenly the top loomed and we passed through another set of weather beaten torii to come upon the summit of the mountain. The wind blew in billowy, wet gusts and the perpetual cloud obscured our surroundings. At the top is a small wooden sengen shrine (Fuji is of great importance to the Shinto religion). There’s also a post office—a novelty service so that you can send a postcard from the summit. It’s open for one month of the year, for six hours a day. I don’t know exactly how that post office works because I was soaking wet and didn’t want to go inside around paper and such. It didn’t exactly appear open for business that morning anyway, and in fact I highly doubt it was. We walked to the edge of the crater itself, or where we surmised it to be—a yawning, barely defined chasm where the gray faded into darker gray.
We went into a little lodge type place near the shrine, thankful to get out of the weather for a few minutes. There was food available there: cup noodles or Miso soup. That was about it… not easy to cart food up the mountain. It was, as I had read, ridiculously overpriced, but hey, when would we ever get to eat another 800 yen cup of instant noodles? They were hot, that was the main thing, and the three of us sat down to the best tasting instant ramen we’d ever had. I swear to whatever gods may be that there was even a miniscule piece of shrimp in my cup and some sort of mystery meat. Practically a balanced meal.
Then we were off down the hill and, similar to our reward of the hot, salty food, it seemed like the easiest downhill climb ever.
We got a nice surprise on our way: the Osakan school kids were finally on the way up the mountain after a night’s sleep. We went off to the side of the path and waited as the 160 of them passed. We waited specially for our friend from the New 7th station and, just when we were beginning to think that we must have missed her, she came into view, waving and beaming a huge smile. We wished her a big “ganbatte!” and she marched determinedly on. After that we went down rapidly and when we got out of the rockiest territory and back into mostly cinder we were flying down the mountain a slip-slide pace. The reappearance of plant life on the mountain side was a welcome sight. The descent took us half the time of the ascent.
And so we had conquered Fuji. By noontime we were already on the bus back, having been on top of Japan that very morning and by early afternoon would be back to near-sea level Shizuoka city. We went to my favorite local Onsen, as I had promised beforehand, and soaking in the hot water there had never felt so relieving. And that was that. We ate dinner at the Onsen and then returned to the city. A little while later Sandy and Lily got back on the train to head off home. I had been pretty out of it all evening and still was that night, having not slept more than an hour or two since the morning of the previous day, but I was excited and satisfied that finally, finally I had gone to the top of that place of such profound mythos, that watches over all Shizuoka-ken.
In the end, I didn’t see the sunrise, but I don’t feel in the least disappointed. In fact, I haven’t really thought about it until right now as I write this. If I had seen the sunrise it meant that the sky would have remained clear, if the sky was clear there would not be so much cloud and rain and wind. If there wasn’t such a battening of the elements that morning it would have been a whole different experience. Instead I had half my climb clear, and half in the mist and wind. It's shouganai and I’m happy with that. Every climber after me will have their own story, as did every climber before, and fate will simply dictate the way they experience the mountain. In valuing that experience as our own, as one which could have turned out a hundred different ways—on a different day, a different hour, a different year—it becomes apparent just how special the hike to that summit is, just like anything else we choose to put effort into in our lives.
I went to sleep, woke up, went to work, and the day after Fuji began.
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