Photo: Adobe Stock / LicensedChecked against official sources · updated · Takumi Yamada
Shimizu is the port district of Shizuoka City, on Suruga Bay, with Mt. Fuji across the water on a clear morning. It handles more frozen tuna than any other port in Japan, so lunch is the easy part. Ships berth at Hinode Pier beside the Dream Plaza mall, and the market, the water bus to the Miho pine grove and JR Shimizu Station are all within a waterfront walk.
Shimizu consistently lands more frozen tuna than any other port in Japan. The fish are not from this bay — they are from the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic and the far Pacific, caught by boats that stay out for a year and freeze at minus sixty on board.
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UNESCO listed Mount Fuji in 2013 — not as a natural site, but as a <em>cultural</em> one. The land above roughly the eighth station is the property of a Shinto shrine, and the mountain has been climbed as an act of worship, by organised congregations, for around five hundred years.
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Wasabi grows wild in cold mountain streams and is famously impossible to farm. Around 1600, in a valley called Utogi in what is now Shizuoka City, someone worked out how — and the terraced water-bed method they developed is still the only way it is done.
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If you have ever built a Tamiya kit, a Gundam, or a scale model tank, there is a very good chance it was designed or made in this city. Shizuoka produces the overwhelming majority of Japan's plastic model kits, and the reason goes back to Edo-period castle and shrine carpentry.
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Tokugawa Ieyasu became shogun in 1603 and resigned in 1605 — after two years — handing the title to his son. It was not a retirement. He moved to Sunpu, the town he had been a hostage in as a boy, and governed from there until he died, which is why the most important castle of the early Tokugawa period is not in Tokyo.
Read the storyCruise seasons run spring to autumn, but the port changes underneath them.
Cold, dry air. If your call is in winter, you have the best odds of seeing the mountain.
The spring run begins. Suruga Bay is the only commercial fishery for them in Japan.
The postcard combination, and comfortable walking everywhere.
The Kunozan coast greenhouses finish their season. Good ropeway weather.
Assume you will not see the mountain and plan the market and the museum instead.
The mountain is usually hazy from sea level. Sakura ebi return in autumn, not now.
Suruga Bay is exposed. Ships do occasionally skip this port.
The second shrimp season, and the haze starts lifting off the mountain.
Clear, mild, and Fuji visible on most mornings. Peak cruise season here for a reason.
Fewer ships, and the mountain at its most reliable. Go to Miho early.
