Mount Fuji (富士山, Fujisan, IPA: [ɸɯꜜ(d)ʑisaɴ] (About this soundlisten)), located on the island of Honshū, is the highest mountain in Japan, standing 3,776.24 m (12,389.2 ft). However, the name predates kanji, and these characters are ateji, meaning that they were selected because their pronunciations match the syllables of the name but do not carry a meaning related to the mountain. The origin of t
he name Fuji is unclear, having no recording of it being first called by this name. A text of the 9th century, Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, says that the name came from "immortal" (不死, fushi, fuji) and also from the image of abundant (富, fu) soldiers (士, shi, ji) ascending the slopes of the mountain. An early folk etymology claims that Fuji came from 不二 (not + two), meaning without equal or nonpareil. Another claims that it came from 不尽 (not + to exhaust), meaning never-ending. Hirata Atsutane, a Japanese classical scholar in the Edo period, speculated that the name is from a word meaning, "a mountain standing up shapely as an ear (穂, ho) of a rice plant". British missionary John Batchelor (1854–1944) argued that the name is from the Ainu word for "fire" (fuchi) of the fire deity Kamui Fuchi, which was denied by a Japanese linguist Kyōsuke Kindaichi on the grounds of phonetic development (sound change). It is also pointed out that huchi means an "old woman" and ape is the word for "fire", ape huchi kamuy being the fire deity. Research on the distribution of place names that include fuji as a part also suggest the origin of the word fuji is in the Yamato language rather than Ainu. Japanese toponymist Kanji Kagami argued that the name has the same root as wisteria (藤, fuji) and rainbow (虹, niji, but with an alternative reading, fuji), and came from its "long well-shaped slope
Modern linguist Alexander Vovin proposes an alternative hypothesis based on Old Japanese reading */puⁿzi/: the word may have been borrowed from Eastern Old Japanese */pu nusi/ 火主 meaning 'fire master', see wikt:富士 3. Variations
In English, the mountain is known as Mount Fuji. Some sources refer to it as "Fuji-san", "Fujiyama" or, redundantly, "Mt. Japanese speakers refer to the mountain as "Fuji-san". This "san" is not the honorific suffix used with people's names, such as Watanabe-san, but the Sino-Japanese reading of the character yama (山, "mountain") used in Sino-Japanese compounds. In Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki romanization, the name is transliterated as Huzi. Other Japanese names for Fuji Mount, which have become obsolete or poetic, include Fuji-no-Yama (ふじの山, "the Mountain of Fuji"), Fuji-no-Takane (ふじの高嶺, "the High Peak of Fuji"), Fuyō-hō (芙蓉峰, "the Lotus Peak"), and Fugaku (富岳／富嶽), created by combining the first character of 富士, Fuji, and 岳, mountain. History
Fine Wind, Clear Morning woodblock print by Hokusai, 19th century
Mount Fuji is an attractive volcanic cone and a frequent subject of Japanese art especially after 1600, when Edo (now Tokyo) became the capital and people saw the mountain while traveling on the Tōkaidō road. Byron Earhart, "in medieval times it eventually came to be seen by Japanese as the “number one” mountain of the known world of the three countries of India, China, and Japan".[15] The mountain is mentioned in Japanese literature throughout the ages and is the subject of many poems. The summit has been thought of as sacred since ancient times and was forbidden to women until the Meiji era in the late 1860s. Ancient samurai used the base of the mountain as a remote training area, near the present-day town of Gotemba. The shōgun Minamoto no Yoritomo held yabusame in the area in the early Kamakura period. The first ascent by a foreigner was by Sir Rutherford Alcock in September 1860, who ascended the mountain in 8 hours and descended in 3 hours.427 Alcock's brief narrative in The Capital of the Tycoon was the first widely disseminated description of the mountain in the West.[17]:421–27 Lady F***y Parkes, the wife of British ambassador Sir Harry Parkes, was the first non-Japanese woman to ascend Mount Fuji in 1867. Photographer Felix Beato climbed Mount Fuji two years later. On March 5, 1966, BOAC Flight 911, a Boeing 707, broke up in flight and crashed near the Mount Fuji Gotemba New fifth station, shortly after departure from Tokyo International Airport. All 113 passengers and 11 crew members died in the disaster, which was attributed to the extreme clear-air turbulence caused by lee waves downwind of the mountain. There is a memorial for the crash a short distance down from the Gotemba New fifth station. Relief map and animation realized with SRTM data
Today, Mount Fuji is an international destination for tourism and mountain climbing.[21][22] In the early 20th century, populist educator Frederick Starr's Chautauqua lectures about his several ascents of Mount Fuji—1913, 1919, and 1923—were widely known in America.A well-known Japanese saying suggests that a wise person will climb Mt. Fuji once in their lifetime, but only a fool would climb it twice. It remains a popular symbol in Japanese culture, including making numerous movie appearances, inspiring the Infiniti logo, and even appearing in medicine with the Mount Fuji sign. In September 2004, the manned weather station at the summit was closed after 72 years in operation. Observers monitored radar sweeps that detected typhoons and heavy rains. The station, which was the highest in Japan at 3,780 metres (12,402 ft), was replaced by a fully automated meteorological system.[30]
Mount Fuji was added to the World Heritage List as a Cultural Site on June 22, 2013.[7] However, the inscription became controversial after two professors at the Mt. Fuji World Heritage Centre, Shizuoka, were forced to quit their jobs because of academic and racial harassment by officials of Shizuoka prefecture government in March 2018.[31]
Geography
Mount Fuji seen from Fuji, Shizuoka
Arakurayama Sengen Park and the Chūrei-tō pagoda in Fujiyoshida, Yamanashi
Mount Fuji is a very distinctive feature of the geography of Japan. It stands 3,776.24 m (12,389 ft) tall and is located near the Pacific coast of central Honshu, just southwest of Tokyo. It straddles the boundary of Shizuoka and Yamanashi Prefectures. Four small cities surround it: Gotemba to the east, Fujiyoshida to the north, Fujinomiya to the southwest, and Fuji to the south. It is surrounded by five lakes: Lake Kawaguchi, Lake Yamanaka, Lake Sai, Lake Motosu and Lake Shōji.[32] They, and nearby Lake Ashi, provide views of the mountain. The mountain is part of the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park. It can be seen more distantly from Yokohama, Tokyo, and sometimes as far as Chiba, Saitama, Tochigi, Ibaraki and Lake Hamana when the sky is clear. It has been photographed from space during a space shuttle mission
