Mount Omuro Crater Walk was added to Your Favorites!
Fuji-Hakone-Izu NP, Shizuoka
Claim this place to tell your story your way.
The crater floor is not empty: it holds an archery range with 8 targets. The roughly 1-km “Ohachi-meguri” loop circles above this unexpected sporting ground.
Mount Omuro’s summit crater was not the main lava outlet. Much of the eruption poured from lower vents at neighboring Iwamuroyama and Moriyama, helping build Izu Kōgen and Jōgasaki Coast.
The crater rim looks out over eastern Izu’s volcanic landscape, a field of about 100 small volcanoes. Its most recent eruption was offshore at Teishi Knoll on July 13, 1989—not at Mount Omuro.
Inside the crater, a small Asama shrine honors Iwanaga-hime, elder sister of Konohanasakuya-hime, worshipped at many Asama shrines. Behind it, a lava slab remains from the eruption’s final phase.
The mountain burn is said to date back about 700 years: it once encouraged useful thatch and controlled pests. When thatch faded from daily use, residents of Ike district kept the tradition alive as a local event.
On burn day, crews first set fire to the crater interior, leaving a cleared refuge before the outer slopes are lit. That second blaze can race up the mountain and burn it in about 40 minutes.
A local history account says that until the end of World War II, children woke before dawn for the July 8 shrine festival, climbed the mountain to pray, and usually had no more school after returning.
Eight Jizō statues on the summit recall coastal fishermen’s prayers for safe seas. Before modern navigation equipment, local fishers also used Mount Omuro as a landmark to find their fishing grounds.
The regularly burned grassland is also a home for wildflowers: early summer and summer blooms include fringed pink (kawara-nadeshiko), great burnet, and balloon flower (kikyō).
Ike residents distinguished short kogaya, used for thatched roofs, compost, and livestock, from longer tawaragaya, woven into charcoal bales. The charcoal was shipped from Yahata port toward Edo.
Before the lift, cut grass was brought down the mountain on improvised bamboo sleds. The lift operator’s history of the burn tradition even includes a reconstruction drawing of this practical hillside transport.
Researchers radiocarbon-dated a partly charred tree trunk found beneath Mount Omuro’s ash and lava to 3,700 ± 100 years BP. Calibrated, that evidence places the eruption about 4,000 years ago.
After sunset, cold air can slide down the crater’s inner slopes and collect at the bottom, forming a “cold-air lake.” Geographers studied Mount Omuro’s crater to understand this small-scale nighttime climate.
