Mt. Fuji

Arakurayama Sengen Park Observatory: 500+ steps, worth every one

We took a bus from Shinjuku station early in the morning. The whole of Japan was cold that January and the area around Fuji was colder still. It was the kind of cold that makes you rethink every clothing decision you made that morning.

Arakurayama Sengen Park Observatory is where we went for the view. The climb is more than 500 steps from the bottom. It takes a while. At the top, Fuji fills the entire frame with nothing in front of it to indicate scale. Every photograph of it understates what it actually looks like when you are standing in front of it. After we took the boat out on Lake Kawaguchiko, the reflection of the mountain on the water was the kind of scene that exists in a thousand woodblock prints and is still completely different in person.

We were back in Tokyo by evening. Cold, satisfied, and carrying more photographs of one mountain than any of us had planned to.