Mount Fuji sea to summit
“A man is a fool not to climb Mount Fuji once,” the Japanese saying goes, “and a fool to climb it twice.”
I pondered the epigram as I made my way up Japan’s highest peak for the second time, the day after Fuji had delivered a lesson in hubris that prompted my ignominious retreat.
During the traditional climbing season in July and August, more than 200,000 attempt the mountain, which is no more than a long steep hike. But when I arrived in April, the snow reached far below level of the car park on the Fujinomiya route and a 6m wall of snow stood where the trail headed up the mountain.
The snow was frozen hard when I left at dawn for my first attempt, necessitating the use of ice axe and crampons right from the car park but I must admit approaching the ascent without my usual combination of humility. Fuji was just a volcano, I figured, so I took a line straight up the mountain. After all, how difficult could it be?
At first my choice of route was fine and then I realised that no matter how symmetrical a cone Fuji appears in all the postcards, it has its bumps and protuberances like everything else. The wind began to increase too.
The Fujinomiya route went to the left of the parasitic cone nearest the camera.
About half way to the summit, I found myself standing on a steep slope of hard ice into which the points of my crampons were digging in by only about 5mm. Around me were dotted chunks of rock sticking free of the snow and which diminished the prospects of a successful ice axe arrest if I fell.
And falling was on my mind because by then the wind had increased to about 100kmh or so and was coming in sudden gusts which regularly forced me to hunker down over my ice axe to stop being blown over. Whenever that happened, I would be sandblasted by pebbles picked up and hurled by the wind. With the windchill, the temperature would have been about -20degC.
The final straw was the hip belt from my pack, the end of which was being blown around in the wind and, to be precise, was flailing my nether regions in a way that I imagined would normally cost hundreds of dollars in one of the seedier Tokyo clubs and be adminstered by a woman in black leather.
I turned back.
Most people climb Fuji as an overnight trip but I’d set off for the mountain six days earlier, dipping my toes in the Pacific Ocean at the town of Odawara and then walking inland towards the Haya River gorge.
I immediately walked under the enormous elevated motorway that takes the masses of traffic along Japan’s most populous transport corridor but I was seeking the 19th Century equivalent of the motorway: the tokaido, a 500km route which used to connect the traditional capital of Kyoto with its replacement Edo, which is now known as Tokyo.
For 250 years until the 1860s, the ruling clan attempted to quell dissent by forced all the various regional chiefs to keep their wives and families in Edo and to visit them once a year. The tokaido (“east sea road” in Japanese) was the most famous route for this.
I was hoping to find remnants of the ishidatani, the cobblestone path on which generations of Japanese noblemen had trod or, more likely, been carried in sedan chairs. Despite 60 years of Japan’s headlong modernisation, a remarkable amount of the route still exists, thanks mostly to the Japanese preference for building from scratch next to existing infrastructure rather than improving the original.
At first, on the lowlands, the route of the tokaido had simply been paved over but as the valley constricted towards the hot spring town of Hakone Yumoto, the first few stretches of original path began to appear. As the route steepened on the ascent to Hakone pass and the modern road could not match the grade, the ishidatani re-emerged.
In most places, it had been rebuilt in the early 20th Century but for one brief 150m stretch in the middle of the forest, a sign told me I was walking on exactly the same stones once trod by samurai and noblemen. That sounds more appealing that it is, and I soon realised that 200 years of traffic had made the rocks as slippery as an ice rink.
Soon after that the tokaido took a dead straight path along a corridor of massive stately cedars planted during the original route’s heyday, a moment brought into perspective when almost immediately I emerged at Hakone, quite possibly Japan’s tackiest tourist town.
Compared to the essentially solitary time I’d had walking the old tokaido, now the streets were full of holidaymakers flocking around shops selling tourist tat while waiting to take tours on a spectacularly ugly fake pirate ship plying the waters of Lake Ashi.
I left the tokaido here, leaving Hakone as quickly as I could to take a quiet lakeside path towards the northern end of the caldera which cradled Lake Ashi, where I crossed into a truly ginormous caldera formed by Mount Fuji.
A day later, I trudged up to the enormous car park for the Fujinomiya route, the highest of the four usual starting points for the mountain.
Aoraki-Mount Cook is only 22m lower than Fuji but the highest you can drive up the flanks of New Zealand’s highest peak is less than 1000m above sea level and after that it’s either mountaineering or a ski plane just to reach the climbing hut at 2200m.
On Mount Fuji, you can drive to 2400m and plenty of Japanese were doing so when I was there, so they could take photos in the snow and buy Fuji-inspired gifts and keepsakes from a shop which seemingly had been established as a repository for wares deemed too kitsch by the vendors of Hakone.
In the climbing season in July and August, a huge industry caters to the needs of those attempting Fuji. The route to the summit about 1400m above was dotted with about half a dozen huts which would supply meals, water and even bottled oxygen for the summit hopefuls.
In April, the huts are snowbound and closed so their only benefit to me was to serve as waymarks for my ascent when I set off at dawn for my second attempt at the summit.
As a route guide, I’d bought a tourist postcard which I checked from time to time. This is one of the finest traditions of mountaineering, although doing so on Fuji made a lot more sense than the most famous example of mountaineering postcard use, which had been on one of the early ascents of the north wall of the Eiger in Switzerland.
This time I looked at the mountain with humbler eyes and picked a more conservative route that linked a series of snow basins and avoided the difficulties. The weather remained in my favour too, being warmer and less windy than the day before, and it took a little over two hours to reach the torii – the Shinto shrine-gate where the track meets the caldera rim.
Being able to plug first steps through unblemished snow to a summit is always a bonus in climbing and a rare experience on Fuji but the wilderness experience was somewhat tempered by the presence of an enormous meteorological station that blocked access to the very highest point on the mountain.
There is something inherently human too about the pleasure of achieving something which had seemed unattainable.
Below me, everything was covered in a cloud inversion but to the west I could see the line of the snowclad Japanese Alps along the spine of Honshu, Japan’s biggest island. To the south, I could just make out the mountains of the island of Shikoku.
After half an hour on the summit, I headed back down towards the land of thick air, cold beer and hot showers.