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Chichibu-Tama-Kai NP, Tokyo / Saitama / Yamanashi
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2017 was Kumotori’s perfectly matched year: its summit is 2,017 m high, so neighboring Tabayama declared a “Kumotori Year.” Tokyo and Saitama even made their new summit marker exactly 201.7 cm tall.
Three survey stones share Kumotori’s summit: an original triangulation marker inscribed 1882, its auxiliary point and a later first-order point. The original is one of just 3 known survivors of its type in Japan.
Tabayama bottles Kumotori no Shizuku (“Dew of Kumotori”) from water filtered through the mountain’s soil and drawn from a well about 120 m underground. The village also keeps it as emergency drinking water.
In 2017, Kumotorisansō caretaker Arai Koichi told Tokyo park rangers he had watched a rare Hoteiran orchid for 14 years before its first bloom; that year, 4 plants flowered. Mountain nature rewards remarkable patience.
About 50 years ago, a slope near Kumotori was photographed blanketed in Shimotsukesō meadowsweet. Park rangers say it no longer blooms there: deer grazing helped clear it, while deer-avoided Maruba-dakebuki now dominates.
Rangers list 3 origins for “Cloud-Catcher”: clouds within reach, valley mist clinging below, or a summit often hidden in cloud. A 1738 document writes 雲鳥山—“Cloud-Bird Mountain.”
Kumotorisansō opened in 1928. A hut-family recollection says 70 people stayed that August, though the first shelter had no futons or blankets—guests passed the night around a fire on its dirt floor.
Tomita Jisaburo, an early hutkeeper behind the Tomita Shindo route, was nicknamed Kama-sennin (“Sickle Hermit”): he cut the trail with his sickle. A small relief near the summit keeps his story on the mountain.
A 2019 survey near Kumotori’s summit confirmed Japanese lesser shrew-moles and yachi-nezumi voles, tiny mammals seldom seen by hikers. Both were classed as Near Threatened in Tokyo’s 2010 Red List.
Tokyo has managed Tama River headwater forests as drinking-water source forests since 1901. Its archive even preserves a glass-plate photo of water commissioners at Kumotori’s summit survey point on October 25, 1933.
Built in 1956 as a national-park designation project, Kumotori’s summit emergency shelter began as a stone hut with a chimney. It was rebuilt as a log cabin in 1991; the old shelter let winter drafts straight through its gaps.
