Climbing Through the Night to Meet the Sunrise

Ever wonder why thousands of people climb this mountain every year — and choose to do it in the dark?

Mount Fuji is an active volcano, three thousand seven hundred seventy-six meters high — on a clear day, you can see it from Tokyo, some hundred kilometers away. But this isn't really a story about height, or geology. The mountain legally belongs to a Shinto shrine, Hongu Sengen Taisha — that's not a figure of speech or a tourism slogan. The summit is officially recognized as sacred ground. In Shinto tradition, the mountain itself is home to a goddess, Konohanasakuya-hime.

Devotion to Fuji became a mass movement in the Edo period. Believers formed groups called fujiko. Those who couldn't make the actual climb built miniature versions of the mountain right in their cities — and climbed those instead. A pilgrimage without the mountain. Women, for their part, weren't officially allowed to climb the real Fuji until the year eighteen hundred.

Climbing through the night to catch the sunrise isn't about sport. In Japanese tradition, watching the sun rise from the summit is a sign of luck and renewal. The ascent takes anywhere from three to eight hours, which is why mountain huts — called yamagoya — line the trails. The climbing season is short too: open only from early July to the end of August. And today, there's a daily cap of no more than four thousand climbers.

In two thousand thirteen, UNESCO added Fuji to its World Heritage List — not as a natural wonder, but as a sacred site and a wellspring of artistic inspiration.

Even now, the sunrise at the summit has to be earned by climbing through the night to reach it. And maybe that's the whole point: the mountain doesn't reveal itself to anyone who's only willing to look at it from below.

If you leave with more questions than you came with, that was the idea. The answers and the map live at moygid dot online.