Climbing as prayer

Fuji erupted repeatedly through recorded history, most recently in 1707, and the earliest shrines to it were built to appease it. Sengen shrines — about 1,300 of them across Japan — are dedicated to the mountain's deity, and the head shrine is Fujisan Hongu Sengen Taisha at Fujinomiya, on this side of the mountain.

The shrine that owns the top

The land above around the eighth station is held by that shrine, confirmed by a Japanese court ruling in the twentieth century after a long dispute with the state. There is an inner shrine at the summit, staffed in season, which stamps pilgrim books.

This is not symbolic. Fuji's summit is legally shrine property, and the crater rim is treated as sacred ground.

For most of its history, women were forbidden to climb Fuji. The ban was formally lifted in 1872; before that, a woman named Takayama Tatsu had climbed it disguised as a man in 1832.

Fujiko

From the sixteenth century, lay confraternities called Fujiko spread through Edo and the surrounding provinces. Members pooled money so that a few could make the pilgrimage each year on behalf of everyone, wearing white, chanting, and climbing at night to reach the summit for sunrise.

For those who could not go, hundreds of miniature Fuji — fujizuka, artificial mounds built from Fuji lava — were constructed in Edo. Climbing your local one was held to confer the same blessing. Dozens still exist in Tokyo, in ordinary shrine grounds, and almost no visitor knows what they are.

What that means for you

The sunrise from the summit has a name — goraiko, "the honourable coming of light" — and the point of climbing at night is to receive it. Around 200,000 people still climb each year in the July-to-early-September season.

You are not doing that on a port day, and no honest guide will suggest it. What you can do is treat the mountain as the object of worship it is: the Sengen shrine at Fujinomiya, the Oshino and Shiraito spring sites fed by Fuji's snowmelt, and the fifth station on the mountain itself.