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Fuji-Hakone-Izu NP, Yamanashi / Shizuoka
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In 1895, Itaru Nonaka built a summit hut with his own money to record winter weather. His wife Chiyoko joined him; illness forced them down after 82 days, but their trial helped establish the case for summit observations.
The land above Fuji’s eighth station was granted to Sengen Taisha by a shogunate ruling in 1779. The state later made it public land; after a 1974 Supreme Court decision, it was returned to the shrine in 2004.
Fuji’s summit is a crater rim: the opening is about 780 m across and roughly 200 m deep. The path around its edge is about 3 km long, and its highest point is Kengamine.
The peaks around the crater were once understood as a Buddhist sacred world: pilgrims circled them as a pilgrimage through a mandala. After the Meiji-era separation of Buddhism and Shinto, many Buddhist peak names were changed.
Pilgrims once collected water seeping from snowmelt at summit wells called Kinmeisui (“Golden Water”) and Ginmeisui (“Silver Water”). Their sites are among the remains of Fuji’s sacred pilgrimage landscape.
In the summer climbing season, a post office opens beside the summit’s Asama Shrine. You can mail a postcard—even overseas—and request a special postmark featuring Mount Fuji and the post office.
Built in 1964, Fuji’s summit radar could detect typhoons up to 800 km away. It closed in 1999; after the weather station became unmanned in 2004, researchers began using the observatory as a summer science base.
A monitoring plot at 3,776 m found grasses, sedges and alpine moss on Fuji’s mostly bare summit. Researchers also reported plants appearing there that had not been seen before, and set out to track the small changes.
Fuji’s famous 3,776 m height refers to its summit, not the nearby survey marker. Japan’s mapping agency gives the marker’s elevation as 3,775.56 m and confirms that the summit lies higher.
