With an incessant flow of visitors hiking up and down all hours of the day, Japan’s Mount Fuji is no longer the peaceful pilgrimage site it once was
Japanese authorities have had enough. The number of hikers trekking up the Mount Fuji—night and day—is dangerous and an ecological embarrassment.
“Mount Fuji is screaming”, the governor of the local region said recently.
Hailing its religious importance and its inspiration to artists, in 2013, Unesco added the “internationally recognised icon of Japan” to its World Heritage List.
But as has happened in places such as Bruges in Belgium or Rio de Janeiro’s Sugarloaf Mountain, the designation has been both a blessing and a curse.
Visitor numbers more than doubled between 2012 and 2019 to 5.1 million, and that’s just for Yamanashi prefecture, the main starting point.
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Day and night treks to Mount Fuji
It’s not just during the day that a stream of people trudges through the black volcanic grit on their way up the 3,776-metre mountain.
At night, long lines of people—on their way up to see the sun rise in the morning—trek upwards with torches on their heads.
The main starting-off point is a car park that can only be reached by taxi or buses that take a couple of hours from Tokyo, around 100 kilometres away.
Greeting visitors is a complex of restaurants and shops selling souvenirs as well as snacks and drinks for walkers before they set off.
They are powered by diesel generators and the thousands of litres of water they use has to be brought up in lorries. Trucks also take all the rubbish down.
“I saw a lot of food waste and empty bottles of drinks lying around the hand-washing area of the toilet,” complained Japanese hiker Yuzuki Uemura, 28.