FUJI

The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter is a tenth century Japanese folk tale about five princes who want to win the hand of Kaguya-hime (“radiant night princess”), the mysterious princess of the Young Bamboo, who was discovered by an elderly bamboo cutter inside the stalk of a bamboo plant when she was a baby. He takes the tiny child, who is the size of his thumb, home to his wife, and together they raise the beautiful girl as their own.

Kaguya-hime grows to be a beautiful woman. Five princes and the Emperor, Tenno, come to ask for her hand in marriage. But she refuses all of them, for it is not her destiny to stay on earth. Whenever Kaguya-hime would see the full moon her eyes filled with tears, knowing that one day soon she would have to return to her people on the moon.
Tennō places guards around her house to protect her, but when an embassy of heavenly beings arrives, the guards are blinded by the light they bring with them, and the entourage takes Kaguya-hime.

The forlorn Tennō dispatches an army of soldiers to climb the tallest mountain in Japan and burn a letter from the Tennō to Kaguya-hime with the hope that it would reach the now distant princess. That mountain was Fujisan.

The origin of the name Fuji is unclear. One of the earlier folk etymologies claims that Fuji came from the kanji “not” and “two”, meaning “without equal” or “nonpareil”. Another folk etymology claims that it came from “not” and “exhaust”, meaning never ending.

Perhaps the most popular folk etymology is the one that claims that the image of the innumerable soldiers of the Tennō's army ascending the slopes of Mount Fuji was immortalized by naming the great mountain "Fujisan" ("Mountain Abounding with Warriors"), written with the Chinese characters for “abundant” or “wealthy” and “warrior”.

It is thought that the first ascent was in 663 by an anonymous monk. A sacred mountain since ancient times, Mt. Fuji's summit was forbidden to women until the Meiji Era

Singer Kyu Sakamoto once had bearers carry a grand piano to the summit for a concert.

My own reckless plan to climb Mount Fuji had been in the works since I first flipped through my Japan travel guide eight months before I would arrive on a scorching hot August evening. My two roommates in Japan, Heizy and Angelique, and I had intended to climb Mount Fuji at some point before our final departure from Japan. It had always been discussed with zeal, but with the attitude you have discussing a big plan that seems so far in the future you can’t imagine it ever really happening.

But as the months flew by and our departure date sped towards us, that distant “eventually” became a “now or never”, and, as so often happens with things you want to do in theory but not necessarily in actuality (like laundry), we woke up one Saturday morning and said, “Today’s the day.”

Our spontaneity that humid and overcast morning brought on a surge of adrenaline that propelled what would otherwise have been sluggish feet out of our tiny apartment in downtown Nagoya and to the grocery store for supplies.

We planned to make it to the base by nightfall, climbing all night to arrive at the summit for what we envisioned (and were promised by friends who had already undertaken the journey) a spectacular sunrise. But it wasn’t so much the desire to see the sunrise from the top of the country, as it was as a need each of us had to make this trip symbolic. We saw the rising sun as representing the dawning of a new adventure, thus reminding us that our leaving Japan in a month wasn’t the end, but a new beginning, because with the closing of one chapter, another is opened. Angelique was going home to England to get a teaching degree. I was meeting up with friends spend two months backpacking around south-east Asia. The sun represented dreams soon to be fulfilled.

As we packed our rucksacks and decided which bag of chips was likely to give us the most energy for our yen, we discussed how the grueling climb would also represent our individual struggles throughout our year in Japan. The mountain was the obstacle, an emotional or psychological issue that we would have conquered and overcome by reaching the top unscathed, to a view that would in the end make everything worthwhile. We would have overcome the trials and tribulations of living in a beautiful yet often frustrating country: the language barriers, the culture shock and frustration at social values that conflicted with our own, tackling relationships that had driven us to states of phone-throwing insanity, quitting terrible jobs, moving from one apartment because it was noisy and ramshackle, to a new one that seemed like a palace until we found we had to share our space with cockroaches like golf balls a cicadas the size of pigeons, learning to live in a foreign country where you are revered as a movie star as often as you are gawked at on the subway. We had certainly come out of all those problems stronger and more independent than we had been when we first arrived, and we were attaching the ‘whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger’ cliché onto this final journey, our final test of resolve, strength and character. And yes, people climb Mount Fuji all the time. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a less impressive feat than you might at first think. But for three girls who tended to spend their weekends lounging in the park reading Thomas Hardy poetry and gorging on pasta, chocolate and red wine, it was like tackling Everest.
Mount Fuji, at 3,776 meters, is Japan's highest mountain. The nearly perfectly shaped volcano has been worshipped as a sacred mountain, and experienced big popularity among artists and common people. Fuji is a dormant volcano, which most recently erupted in 1708, standing impressively tall on the border between Yamanashi and Shizuoka Prefectures, and can be seen from Tokyo and Yokohama on clear days.
The most popular period for people to hike up Mt. Fuji is from July 1 to August 27. About 200,000 people climb the mountain every year, 30 per cent of are foreigners.

But Saturday September 20, our climb-a-huge-mountain day, was not smiled upon by the Gods. To start things off on the wrong foot, the mountain had technically closed at the end of August, thus ending the official climbing season. We were informed by our guide books that all closed meant was the stations on the mountain were no longer open, so there would be no staff on site, so to speak. And while the woman at the Nagoya tourist information booth at Nagoya station told us unequivocally that we could NOT climb the mountain, there was no one there to prevent us from going. It’s not like the authorities rope it off, we scoffed.

You can take a bus or train from Nagoya to Fuji in just under two hours, but we were trying to leave Japan with a little savings, and opted for the long route: Nagoya to Fuji via local trains. It took four hours and seven trains. The last leg of the trip had us on a rickety old local, sparsely populated by bleary-eyed commuters intrigued by the three of us with our backpacks and jittery, nervous banter. We knew, as the train trudged on, that had it been light outside, we would have been able to see the mountain lurking in the distance. But because night had fallen we couldn’t see anything except our own reflections in the rain-streaked windows. In our minds Fuji became this monster, a living entity that was out there somewhere in the rain and darkness, looming huge and waiting for us. Invisible, yet powerful and almost predatory.

When we finally arrived at the last station, Fujinomiya, it was pouring rain. We hailed a cab and drove through the trees, and for a while I felt like I was back in Canada, winding up a narrow road that cut through a dense black forest with tall, dripping evergreens reaching up into the black night and leaning, high above the road, over our tiny car. We drove higher and higher, on this mountain that we never, in the darkness, actually got to catch a glimpse of.

The ascent can take anywhere between 3 and 7 hours, and is divided into ten stations, but there are paved roads to the fifth which, at about 2,300 meters above sea level, is where most people start, and is considered the base. We reached the fifth station at around 9:30, exchanged phone numbers with the cabbie and told him we’d call him when we got back to the base the next morning. Armed with a map and two flashlights, we began our hike.

When we hit the gravel it was raining, but not too badly, and we were kept dry by our rain gear and warm by walking. The fifth and sixth stations were quite close together, but we weren’t used to climbing and were winded quickly. It took a good hour to adjust and find our rhythm and breath. It wasn’t until our descent hours later that I realized the path between those first two stations were the flattest part of the mountain. And yet they were the hardest to climb.

We got to the sixth station in what seemed like no time, and were relieved to find a little building, dimly lit from within, in which an old man sat cross-legged on a tatami mat, surrounded by Fuji souvenirs and walking sticks. Worried about the life span of the batteries in our flashlights, we asked through the window if he had any that we could buy, only to be shooed us away grumpily. Dejected, we trudged on, and promptly got lost in the darkness, venturing off what had been a clear and well-lit. Suddenly we were on what felt like the dark side of the moon, half crawling and half climbing up the face of the mountain on small crumbly rocks with no sign of a trail or scrub in any direction.

Having had the pleasure of being lost in the woods at night with no provisions or light in northern Ontario one summer, I knew we had to go back to the sixth station while we could still find it, and re-assess the situation. When we got back, the man in the shack was waving his arms at us and pointing in what proved to be the right direction. We had actually been climbing a random piece of the mountain, and it hadn’t taken us long to get lost.

The trail wasn’t well-marked, and with nobody else there, there was nothing to follow but our own instincts. We continued to lose the trail several times after the sixth station, realizing we were off course when the terrain became loose and difficult to climb. Each time we immediately turned around to the last definite point of the trail, and shone the flashlights in each direction until we all agreed which way to go. Sometimes it took us five or ten minutes to get it right, so hard was it to distinguish path from desolate Fuji landscape. The last thing I wanted was for us to get lost, hours before sunrise, with no one else on the mountain to help, being forced to sit in the rain and wait for light. I had to entertain the possibility of spending the night in the open wilderness once before, and the combined humiliation and fear that I nearly had to resign myself to made me determined not to let this story end in that way.

I tried to be positive, but once the sixth station with its surly sole inhabitant was out of site, Fuji was creepy. Not only did it look like we were on the moon – desolate and rocky, no vegetation or signs of life, no moon light, just howling wind and barren darkness – but there was nobody there. No other flashlights and no comfort in the knowledge that other people were also trudging through the howling darkness with us. We were entirely alone on a huge mountain, climbing into the night sky towards the highest peak in the country. And we were doing it alone, in the pitch black.

After a short time we were all so engulfed in the climb, in the act of putting one foot in front of the other, concentrating on our precarious footing, that we weren’t talking anymore. It’s hard to talk when you are constantly puffing, and being cold and wet and tired makes you sullen. Not that we were in bad moods. We realized we were doing something epic, especially since it was off-season and we were by ourselves. It was exhilarating, despite being exhausting physically and psychologically.

We all fell into place right away. I stayed in front with a flashlight, setting the pace, picking the path, making route decisions and yelling out obstacles. I was happy with the role, but it was also hard to be responsible. When we got off track it was because I lost the track. I knew the terrain before the others and had to find the best path and footing. I was the one reminding myself, “The Von Trapp family climbed a mountain RANGE. The Von Trapp family climbed a mountain RANGE… Old ladies do this. Old ladies do this…”

My mind also wandered to thoughts of less realistic yet often more frightening perils. If an alien or fujimonster were to jump out at us, I would be the first to go. These were often of greater concern to me than the thought of us running out of water, or getting lost, or someone falling off a cliff or breaking an ankle and having to be carried down, or any other legitimately dangerous scenario.

On top of all that, our matching rain gear had plastic see-through visors that stuck up a bit like K.K.K. outfits, and we looked like the NASA guys in E.T. who turned Elliot’s house into a one big plastic bubble. We were officially in outer space. I kept imagining that we were scientists scoping out some unchartered part of the Antarctic or perhaps even outer space, on some ridiculously expensive government-funded expedition. For a while we were members of the Von Trapp family escaping the Nazis in gortex two-pieces and speaking (in my head, of course) in a German accent. None of this lasted long.

The distance between the sixth and seventh station felt like a lifetime, and it was getting to be impossible to envision ever reaching an end. I’m glad there were stations, even though they were boarded up, because it gave you something to work towards. Those eerie, dark shacks, which would have been welcome respites from the rain had they been open, aglow with light and smelling like green tea and hot ramen, were proof of progress, and an opportunity to stop. When we got to the seventh station we rejoiced. But it was a short-lived joy. The station was completely shut-up and offered no shelter from the incessant rain. There wasn’t even a flat surface for sitting. After stopping for thirty seconds we were immediately penetrated by biting cold and started to shiver violently. We moved on quickly.

Frustratingly, the next station, a million feet further up the mountain, was also called the seventh station. There seemed to be TWO. Mentally, that brought me right back down the mountain. It was like the past several hundred vertical meters hadn’t happened, and we hadn’t actually been walking up, but were on the mountain’s cruel joke of a stair master, as sort of mount-o-conveyor belt. We didn’t linger around there for very long either.

It was after the second seventh station that the weather really started to get bad. Up until then it had been raining constantly, but it suddenly got a lot colder all at once, as if we’d suddenly crossed a weather threshold. The rain was now coming in sideways. The sound of howling wind was stronger, which made everything feel worse even if they were just sound effects. It made us feel colder, and smaller, and further away from life and warmth and safety. I started imagining how scary it would be to be on the moon and to see the earth in the distance, cold and unattached to anything around it, floating in the darkness like an embryo in an infinite womb.

The hike had suddenly gone from being a difficult but wicked adventure to a dangerous, very uncomfortable burden that might not actually end with a summit after all. And then what would have been the point? Still, we pushed on.

Everything went by in a bit of a blur. One wet, soggy, black volcanic moonrock (or fujirock) is not that different from another. One hour spent climbing UP in the black spikey rain is no different from another hour spent climbing UP in the black spikey rain. Thigh burn is thigh burn. Huffing and puffing is huffing and puffing. And black endless darkness is black endless darkness, spreading from my flashlight in every direction to infinity. I had established a rhythm. Climb climb climb pull the visor back from my eyes, squeeze the rain out of my mitts. There were no more German-accented thoughts going through my head. My thoughts were purely (in a Canadian accent): one step, two step, one step, two step, breathe, puff, breathe, puff, inhale, exhale, “Biiig rock guys!!”, exhale, is the light looking dimmer??, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, one step, two step, one step, two step, I can’t feel my fingers, one step, one step, one step, please be close to sunrise, please please pleeeeeeeease be close to sunrise, one step, one step… And this goes on for four hours. If they didn’t have rope to help guide the path, and to pull myself up with, I would never have made it past the sixth station. Thank god for that rope.

Just below the eighth station we had three group meetings within a fifty meter distance. We figured we had about another three hours of climbing ahead of us, and the same amount of time until the sun came up. One flashlight was dead and the other emitted the light as a key chain flashlight. We could make it to the top but when we got there the chances of there being a sunrise were slim. We had made it really high up, and hadn’t gotten out of the clouds. All our dry clothes were sopping. Our map had disintegrated into a paste in my bag. My phone was dead. If we had jumped head first into a lake we wouldn’t have been any wetter. And the temperature was hovering at about one degree Celsius. It was only going to get colder, and if we were going to try and make it to the top, that meant there were still at least eight more hours of being wet and cold ahead of us. Was it worth risking getting really sick? We discussed. We trudged on.

Thirty seconds later, another group meeting. The rain had gotten twice as hard in the past few minutes. It was now completely horizontal. We were climbing into the storm rather than out of it. Our feet were lakes. We continued on.

Twenty seconds later. I brought the party to a halt. The wind was actually blowing us over. And then, in the distance, a flash. We froze. I thought maybe it was a camera. For the past few hours we had seen flashlights coming up behind us. Then another flash. Was it lightning? Two seconds later, a third flash. That one was DEFINITELY lightning. There were no more group meetings. Angelique was not REMOTELY happy with the lightning factor. I took my place in front, this time lower than Angelique and Heizy, and we started booking it down the hill.

I don’t know exactly how I felt at that point. It was now official: we weren’t going to make it to the top. There were no trees on the mountain and there was no way I was going to get hit by lightning. I was actually contemplating slithering down on my stomach to stay low. I was disappointed beyond words. But at the same time, I had a stronger, more Darwinian sense of relief surging through my body.

The whole time we had made decisions based first on safety and second on comfort and sentiment and pride. This was the ultimate test, and proved to be the ultimate example of our sanity and evidence of our survival instincts. We weren’t defeated. The mountain hadn’t defeated us. We hadn’t been defeated by fear or pain or weakness or hunger of cold or wet or thirst or fatigue… or even laziness. We had been defeated by horrendous weather.

I noticed, as we slowly and carefully made our way out of the typhoon, that the lights that had been trailing us were now descending ahead of us. These strangers, who for some time I had secretly hoped would catch up with us, were taking the low road too.

The descent was so much slower and more perilous than the climb. But we were actually talking again, and cracking jokes. I guess, subconsciously, I had known that things were getting bad. I hadn’t spoken for ages, keeping fears and doubts in my head, making plans and strategizing and thinking about worse case scenarios. Now that one of the scenarios had finally come I was relieved. Now I was a member of the Argentinean soccer team that crashed in the Andes Mountains and had to hike out to get help.

Descending did, however, take a lot of concentration. It was more grueling and with one fading flashlight it was hard to see and easy to trip over rocks and wipe out. Every boulder was now a figure huddling by the path waiting to leap out right as I got close enough. My wild imagination, now on over-drive, was terrified by the lights, previously below us, that had recently disappeared altogether of late. And now a new set were coming down the mountain from above us at an alarming speed. “I hope they aren’t psychopaths,” said Angelique, mirroring the thoughts now racing through my mind in a German accent.

We hadn’t noticed the lights during our ascent, and now they appeared out of nowhere, as the other set disappeared into the night. Where had they come from? To up the creepy factor, the lights appeared to be floating in the air, not displaying the same bumpy motion you see when lights are being held by people. Heizy and Angelique kept hesitatingly asking if maybe we shouldn’t stop and wait for them, to which I replied, “Nah. Let’s keep moving. It’s cold, and with the speed their traveling, they will catch up with us soon anyway.”

Your mind plays crazy tricks on you when you’re highly stressed and in a state of mild shock. Secretly I was afraid of the inevitable encounter. I didn’t know what the hell they were. And I still felt like I was in outer space, so there was an element of Event Horizon weirdness going on. Like in war or sci-fi movies when the dude with the bit role is sitting in front of a bunch of fancy clashing controls and blinking monitors, and he announces in panicked surprise, “Captain, something has shown up on radar!” And the captain bends over the blinking whatnot and furrows his brow, and people gather around, and a lot of buttons are pushed and levers are pulled and brows are furrowed, and the captain says, “What can it be?” And nobody knows, but everyone is worried. Blink, blink, blink.

Eventually the floating moon demons did catch up, and they weren’t ghost warriors or fuji monsters. They were four very friendly, very wet Japanese people, about our age, with head lamps (which explained the smooth motion of the light and the speed of their descent). And they spoke English. And so we had companionship, and continued down the typhoon-ravaged mountain in a group of seven.

We only strayed off the path once the entire way down, but it was the single most horrendous part of the entire journey. We started going down the face of the mountain, like when we first went off the path back at the sixth station. Only this time we went a long way, mostly because everyone was talking. By the time we had realized our mistake we had a long way to climb back up. It was the hardest thing I have ever had do to in my life. It was like scurrying up slippery, crumbling, tennis ball-sized marbles that were three feet deep. You couldn’t make any progress, and it was straight up at about a 50 degree angle. I almost suffocated trying to breathe, and it took every last piece of energy to make it back up the path. Everyone nearly died, and when we made it back to the path we lay starfish in the stinking dirt and mud, our veins pulsing from all the blood our hearts had been pumping through us in an effort to provide oxygen. I never regained my energy. That was everything I had been storing like a camel to get me through the next several thousand meters down, all used up in five minutes of struggle.

The next few hours were marked by the following: one step, two step, one step, two step, ow, owwww!! THIS IS HORSESHIT!!! Followed by a scurry and a slip and a small landslide as someone hit the turf and acquired yet another spectacular bruise (all of which we compared enviously later on when we had our humour back). One step, two step, one step, to stub, slip slip stumble bail, one step huff puff huff puff human landslide and everyone gets taken out like dominoes.

My descent went something like this: “I can’t believe how much water is in my shoes. I wonder if I squeezed them out, if the water, combined with the sock water, would fill a pint glass. Who am I kidding? Of course it would… I wonder if it would fill TWO pint glasses. OH GOD they’re cold. Don’t think about it. You’ll start to cry. One step two step one step two step breathe breathe breathe go to your happy place why in the hell won’t the sun come up already, is this the apocalypse? I expected less cold and rain and more fire and general scorching. Happy place happy place rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens, something and something and warm woolen mittens (my woolen mittens feel like lead on my hands) brown paper packages tied up with strings, warm bed. Oh I could be asleep right now. I want to be dead. I want to be dead. I want to be dead. Slip wipe out OW.

Reaching the fifth station was like heaven on moon. I couldn’t believe I was still alive. My legs were Jell-O, and we huddled in the parking lot and slurped hot ramen (courtesy of our new best friends), shivering like mad and trying to figure out how we were going to get home. My phone was dead and the taxi driver’s business card had liquefied in my bag. Some deity’s idea of a sick joke. The Fuji gods. I didn’t laugh. Or maybe I did. If I did it was one of those crazed hysterical lunatic laughs, those really spooky toothy ones where the laugher’s eyes have rolled back in their head and it’s all whites, and then it’s followed by uncontrollable sobbing, and then a few bits of laughter mixed in just to freak people out even more. Anything was possible at that point.

Before I could start crying the group called directory information and ordered us a cab, which proceeded to take an entire hour to arrive. In that time I saw my life flash before my eyes seven hundred times. I was honestly at that point where I couldn’t envision an end to the horror, like a horrible nightmare from which I would never awake. We still were so very far away from home. We had so much distance to travel, all in a state of miserable cold and wet. There were no dry clothes to change into. My back weighed fifty pounds more than when I had first put it on. I was beyond feeling. I breathed and blinked and reacted to basic stimuli, but I was somewhere else. The sky went from black to charcoal to dark grey. That was the sun coming up. When the cab finally arrived at five o’clock the sky was an ashy colour. If death had a colour, that was it.

I pulled myself off the wet picnic table on which I had become comfortably numb, and we got in the cab, soaking everything. I sat there praying for warmth, stewing in my own excessive moisture, and fell into a delirious non-sleep. I was awoken once when the cab evidently hit a big puddle in the middle of the road, skidded, went over a bump, and momentarily became airborne. This little tidbit of excitement, which I really didn’t need, was followed by the driver’s “Gomen nasai!” All I could think was, we should be apologizing to you. I’m sorry for the wet. Too bad you don’t accept tips! Back to unconsciousness.

We had the cab driver take us to the nearest shinkansen station. There was no way on earth we were taking locals home, with seventeen hundred transfers, and we were quite happy to fork over a small fortune to take a one-hour bullet train straight to Nagoya station. We handed the poor taxi driver liquid money, everybody (including the driver) bowed profusely with apologies and thanks, and we slunk into the tiny station. It was 6:10, and the first shinkansen train was at 6:20. We went into the washroom to see if there was anything that could be done. Any sort of adjustment that would help the situation. There was nothing. I caught a glimpse of my horrific appearance in the mirror: blue lips, chattering teeth, soggy hair, mishmash of clothes, a sopping fleece scarf, rain pants, a stinky brown wool sweater. I felt like vomiting. None of us had any money left after the hundred and twenty dollar cab ride, so Angelique said she’d put the tickets on her Visa. She sauntered into the ticket booth, looking and smelling like a dead river rat, and requested three tickets for the next train to Nagoya.

The men behind the counter snorted. Cash only. They were indifferent to our plight. I sobbed into my fleece scarf, controlling the urge to rock in the fetal position on the floor. Ange and Heizy left me propped up against a cement pillar in the station while they hitch hiked to a 7-11 that had a cash machine, got money, came back, bought tickets for the next train, and together we climbed a death-defying thirty steps to the train platform Within an hour we were on a glorious, spacious, comfy bullet train speeding towards Nagoya. We slumped in our seats, saturated in warm wetness, and emanating a nasal assault that kept curious passengers at bay.

When we finally got to Nagoya it was 9:00 on Sunday morning. People were everywhere, looking dry and normal, and out we walked, sauntering through the crowded station like escaped mental patients who had gone for a little dip for a week in a swamp. We were a sight, with our half matching outfits and our soggy everything. And I announced, as we slopped through the station, that I would simply DIE if I ran into anyone I knew. The mountain wouldn’t have killed me. Seeing people I knew would have.

When we got home we stripped, did several loads of laundry, had long hot showers, drank a pint of hot tea, compared injuries, dried out money, inspected our trench foot, and went to sleep.