Mount Fuji

Fuji was inscribed by UNESCO in 2013 as a cultural site. The reasoning is the interesting part.

The rejected nomination

Japan had previously sought listing as a natural site. That attempt did not succeed, and one substantial reason was litter: Fuji had a serious waste problem on its trails and slopes, and its condition would not support a natural inscription.

The successful 2013 nomination changed the argument entirely: Fujisan, sacred place and source of artistic inspiration.

What was actually listed

Twenty-five component parts, and the mountain is only one of them. The others include:

• Shrines, principally Fujisan Hongu Sengen Taisha and its subsidiaries.
• Lava tree moulds and caves used for ascetic practice by the Fuji-ko confraternities.
• The pilgrim routes up the mountain.
• Lake Kawaguchi and the pine grove at Miho no Matsubara, some forty-five kilometres away, included because it is the viewpoint from which Fuji was painted.

That last inclusion is the clearest statement of the logic. A pine grove nearly fifty kilometres from the mountain is part of the World Heritage Site because of the pictures made from it: the site being listed is the mountain as seen and represented, not the volcano.

The case rested on Fuji's place in worship, poetry and printmaking: the Manyoshu, Hokusai's Thirty-six Views, Hiroshige, and the mountain's function as the most recognisable emblem of Japan.

The shrine

Everything above the eighth station is the sacred precinct of Fujisan Hongu Sengen Taisha, head of some thirteen hundred Sengen shrines, with a shrine at the summit.

The mountain enshrines Konohanasakuya-hime, a blossom princess associated with volcanoes and with childbirth, who in the mythological account proved her fidelity by giving birth inside a burning hut.

Shrine tradition places the founding in legendary antiquity; records confirm it only from the early ninth century, and the shrines at the foot were established substantially to pacify a mountain that erupted: Fuji was an active and dangerous volcano before it was a picturesque one, last erupting in 1707.

Women

Women were barred from the summit until the Meiji government abolished such exclusions by edict on 4 May 1872.

Two qualifications. The edict's wording addresses remaining practices rather than instituting a clean single-year change. And a woman named Tatsu Takayama had already climbed it in 1832, dressed as a man, with the help of a Fuji-ko group, so the ban was neither absolute in practice nor lifted cleanly.

The crowds

Around three hundred thousand climb in the short official season of July and August, in a queue that runs through the night so walkers reach the top for sunrise.

Yamanashi Prefecture introduced a charge, a daily cap and an overnight closure on the Yoshida route in 2024. The terms have been revised since, and any specific figure needs dating to be useful.

Fuji is an active volcano that Japanese religious tradition once let only men climb, and both facts shaped who could approach it and how.

Still capable of erupting

Fuji's last confirmed eruption, the Hoei eruption of 1707 to 1708, threw ash as far as Edo, modern Tokyo, more than 100 kilometres away, and formed the secondary peak visible on its southeastern flank. It has not erupted since, but volcanologists classify it as active, and contingency planning for a future eruption is a standing concern for the densely populated region around it.

Climbing as devotion, and who was barred

Pilgrim confraternities called Fujiko organised structured ascents from the Edo period onward, treating the climb itself as a religious practice culminating in prayer at the summit's Sengen shrines, dedicated to the goddess Konohanasakuya-hime. Women were formally barred from climbing above certain stations, on grounds tied to ideas about ritual impurity, a restriction that persisted until it was lifted following the Meiji Restoration in the 1870s, after which women climbers were recorded reaching the summit for the first time.

A mountain kept scenic rather than pristine

When Fuji was proposed for World Heritage status as a natural site, UNESCO's advisory body rejected the nomination over litter, development and erosion from mass tourism, which is part of why the successful listing that followed recognised it for its cultural and artistic associations instead.