Fuji no yama
- Kobayashi, Issa
I should have known better. What hotel would locate six hours up an arduous mountain trail, at sickness-inducing altitude? Even so, I was a little disappointed to discover that the Fuji Hotel was nothing more than a grandly named mountain hut, a place to grab a few hours’ rest on a communal sleeping platform before continuing on to reach the summit of Fujisan, Mount Fuji, to watch the sun rise from the highest point in Japan.
Guess I wouldn’t be checking in after all.
Outside the hut, a full moon threw Fujisan’s shadow onto the dark treetops of the Aokigahara, the so-called Forest of Suicides, 3400 meters below. 376 meters above us, out of sight and still a couple of hours away, waited the summit.
The finicky god of the mountain had graced our last-minute, off-season “dangan-tozan” bullet climb with unseasonably mild and stable weather, a Harvest Moon to light our path, and clear skies all the way to Tokyo Bay. Even in my sleep-deprived and altitude-addled frame of mind I knew that there would never be a better chance to summit. I just had to keep moving upwards.
I had, in fact, planned to climb Fujisan once before, and had even announced my intentions to my girlfriend’s parents, who took an interest in the plans of this potential son-in-law.
One thing led to another, however, and then on my 42nd birthday I entered what the locals call “yakudoshi,” my year of calamities. Despite several pre-emptive visits to shrines and temples, I started the new year with a slipped disc in my back and bum knees, the legacy of an active-not-athletic lifestyle and, perhaps, youth vigour taken too much for granted.
My girlfriend’s father stopped asking when I was going to climb Fujisan, but he blessed our marriage anyway.
“Use It or Lose It,” the sign in Sam’s waiting room said. Sam was my physiotherapist. He was also a third dan blackbelt and title holder in shinkyokushin karate. Under his disciplined guidance, I started to replace bad habits with good. I greeted the dawn in proud warrior pose; I walked the long way to the commuter train station. I lunged across an empty classroom. I learned to reactivate my transverse abdominus, the muscle at the core of all my problems, Sam assured me.
I felt great every time I left Sam’s office. Once again Fujisan, and an active lifestyle, seemed within reach. Until, that is, in an inattentive moment I bent too far under the sneeze guard at a salad bar, or unthinkingly overextended while taking down laundry. Then, I would be laid up on the couch for a week, a corset velcroed around my midsection.
Nevertheless, I kept at it, and — to the surprise of many, not least myself — adapted to this ascetic daily regimen. I stopped partying, drinking, and smoking. Weekends, instead of sleeping it off, my wife and I started going to movies and art galleries again, as we had done in on our first dates, and for short hikes in the mountains outside Tokyo.
I also learned to slow down, to stop looking for quick fixes. I put Rodney Yee’s Power Yoga back on the shelf and settled instead for Peggy Cappy’s Yoga for the Rest of Us. I learned to be patient with myself — and, not incidentally, with my wife, friends, and students. I was growing stronger, more energetic, and more relaxed all at the same time. Perhaps, after all, I could maintain an active-not-athletic lifestyle into the second half of life.
To find out for sure, I needed some kind of test. And so this September, two weeks after the close of the official climbing season, I would finally attempt Mount Fuji. Together with a couple of friends, David and Naomi, we would follow the popular Yoshida route first used by shugendomountain-worshipping priests and pilgrims and now by most of the 300,000 visitors a year who climb the mountain. We aimed to climb through the night, the notorious dangan-tozan “bullet climb” from the Fifth Station parking lot to arrive at the summit in time for sunrise.
As we continued our climb above the seventh station, my already slow pace slowed to a crawl as we tried to keep a clear head in the thinning oxygen. Each time, however, we rested for a few minutes by the side of the trail, then continued climbing.
The Fuji Hotel had been a test, I knew, and I had passed. There was no way I was gonna quit now — I never wanted to have to come back here to climb this damn hill again.
It was also after the eighth station that we noticed for the first time a line of headlamps snaked out of sight below us. We had been lucky to have the trail mostly to ourselves this far, but we would not be alone at the summit.
After eight hours of near-constant climbing, we finally passed a small white torii gate and stood amid the shuttered buildings at the top of the highest mountain in Japan and watched an orange-red dawn, the goraiko
“honourable arrival of light,” break over Tokyo.
It had only taken 13 years to get here. And, now that I was here, the best part was, I’d never have to do it again. After all, “You are wise to climb Fuji once but a fool to climb it twice.”
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