Mount Fuji Joins UNESCO's World Heritage List

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On 22 June 2013, at the 37th session of the World Heritage Committee, Mount Fuji was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List under the name Fujisan, Sacred Place and Source of Artistic Inspiration, recognized under cultural criteria iii and vi.

The listing covers twenty five component sites across a core area of more than 20,000 hectares, among them Fujisan Hongu Sengen Taisha, the shrine at the mountain's base dedicated to the goddess Konohanasakuya hime, together with pilgrim routes, crater shrines and volcanic features that pilgrims and mountain ascetics had long treated as sacred before any listing named them.

UNESCO's own record describes the mountain as the center of an ascetic Buddhist practice that from the twelfth century incorporated Shinto elements, naming Fuji a destination of pilgrimage and a source of artistic inspiration for centuries before the 2013 listing gave that history an international designation.

What the 2013 inscription changed for Shinto's standing was placing a mountain already centuries deep in pilgrimage, Buddhist ascetic practice and Shinto shrine worship onto a list that speaks to the whole world rather than to Japan alone, recognizing twenty five component sites together rather than the peak in isolation.