My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (27 page)

We left two days later on a bus that threaded through the steep hills and rice fields between Tokyo and Fujiyoshida, the town at the base of the mountain where we were going to spend our first night. The bus was full of vacationers carrying take-out
bento
-box lunches with overnight bags. Mr. Watanabe brought a big rucksack and was dressed in a long-sleeved shirt, a gray pin-striped vest, wool knickers, and hiking boots with bright red laces. The boots looked well-worn. He said that he managed to go climbing about ten times a year. I wondered whether he was going more often now that he had retired. “Yes, I have had the opportunity,” he said. He shifted in his seat. Everything he said sounded measured and elegant. “My plan now is to climb the highest peak on each continent. I would begin with Kilimanjaro, then Aconcagua, and then, of course, McKinley.”

“Will you start soon?”

He lifted an eyebrow and said, “Perhaps I’ll have the opportunity.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, I believe alone,” he said. “To tell the truth, Mrs. Watanabe has a problem because she becomes very . . .
tired.
She also walks a bit slower than a . . .
normal
person.” He paused again and then added, “I believe I should learn to be more patient.”

Entering Fujiyoshida, you pass a McDonald’s and a
pachinko
gambling parlor and then a Mount Fuji made of flowers—a mound of red salvia and impatiens in pink and white. Just beyond it was the famous Sengen Jinja shrine. The long pathway to the shrine was dim and unearthly and lined with stone lanterns and tall red trees. Mr. Watanabe said the trees were called
fujitarosugi,
which translates as “boy cedar tree of Fuji.” There are thousands of cedars encircling the mountain, forming what people call the Sea of Trees or the Forest of No Return. This forest is one of the most popular places in Japan to commit suicide—every year several dozen bodies are recovered in it—and it is one of the most popular places to headquarter a religion. There are almost two thousand officially registered religious organizations located around the base of the mountain, including a number of Nichiren Buddhist sects, the faith-healing Ho no Hana Sanpogyo group, and the ancestor-revering Fumyokai Kyodan religion. Until it was evicted recently, the subway-gassing Aum Shinri Kyo cult had its headquarters here, too.

We stopped at the Sengen Jinja shrine and walked under the boy cedar trees to the main structure, an ornate building made of reddish wood that had been slicked to a dull shine by the drizzle. The place was deserted except for a little boy who was studying his reflection in a puddle and a priest who was padding around in his white
tabi
socks, closing up for the day. The priest was in a hurry to leave, but he agreed to give us a condensed version of the traditional Shinto preclimb blessing. He motioned for us to stand in front of the shrine. As he chanted and banged on a small brass drum, the rain began to patter and a gust flicked the water in the trees onto the ground.

We finally arrived at our hotel, a Western-style high-rise building that had its own amusement park, called Fujikyu Highland, whose attraction included a Ferris wheel and the highest roller coaster in Japan. On the hotel grounds there is a perfect 1:200 scale model of Mount Fuji and the five lakes to the north; guests can climb the small mountain and also visit the Mount Fuji museum located inside the artificial peak. The enormous picture windows in the hotel lobby would have offered a staggering view of the real Fuji if the weather had been clear, but it wasn’t, so that night after dinner we sat in the lobby and gazed in the direction of the rain-shrouded Fuji, over the top of the scale-model Fuji, to an outline of Fuji made of neon glowing in the spokes of the Ferris wheel.

You can walk up Mount Fuji, or you can run up (the Mount Fuji Climbing Race has been held every year since 1948), or you can roll up in a wheelchair (first done in 1978), or you can wait until you’re really old (as old as Ichijiro “Super Grandpa” Araya, who climbed it when he was one hundred, or Hulda “Grandma Whitney” Crooks, who did it at ninety-one). Or you can ride a horse to the Seventh Station, the rental horse drop-off point, and then walk the rest of the way. The next morning, as Mr. Watanabe and I were sitting in a cold mist at the Fifth Station getting ready for the climb, a horse rental guy walked over and introduced me to his pony, Nice Child. The guy was wearing a Budweiser hat and rubber boots that had articulated toes. Nice Child looked like a four-legged easy chair, and I was really tempted to take the man up on his suggestion that I ride rather than walk. It was a lousy day to climb a mountain. Many of the pilgrims at the trailhead were wearing garbage bags, and the only scenery we could see was the Fifth Station gift shop and a cigarette vending machine that had the phrase
TODAY I SMOKE
printed on it at least a hundred times. “I believe only crazies will be climbing today,” Mr. Watanabe said, looking at a group of climbers who were eating rice balls and hot dogs and shouting at one another.

After Mr. Watanabe talked me out of renting Nice Child, I put on my pack and tightened my laces and went into the gift shop and bought a traditional pilgrim’s walking stick—plain and squared off, with jingle bells hanging from the top to ward off evil spirits and plenty of room for
yakiin,
the brands you can get burned onto your stick at each station along the way to the top. I also wanted to buy the Fuji-shaped cookies or cheesecakes or bean-paste patties or jellies, or the Milk Pie biscuits in a box that said,
FUJISAN: NATURE IS A GREAT EXISTENCE. IF YOU BECOME ANGRY OR NERVOUS HOLD COMMUNION WITH NATURE
. The trouble was I’d already picked up some eel jerky and some octopus jerky at a 7-Eleven near the hotel.

We planned to climb to the Eighth Station by sunset, spend the evening in a mountain hut, and wake up at two a.m. to finish the climb so we would reach the summit by sunrise. We had reserved a space at a hut called Fujisan Hotel. From the sound of the name I thought maybe it was a luxury hut, but Mr. Watanabe rolled his eyes and assured me that all the accommodations on the mountain were more hut than hotel. “Do you know how silkworms live?” he asked. “They live on wooden shelves. That is what the huts are like—silkworm shelves.”

I was taken aback. “You mean the huts are infested?”

“No,” Mr. Watanabe replied, “the huts have shelves, and we are the worms.”

I walked a few feet behind him, stepping on and around nubbly black lava rocks and loose pebbles of red pumice. The terrain was sheer and treeless. On a sunny day it would have been beastly. Rock larks flittered around, and green weeds grew under some of the overhangs, but otherwise the mountainside was blank. After about an hour I started wondering where one would relieve oneself in such a lunar landscape. “We will be at the Sixth Station in just a few more minutes,” Mr. Watanabe said. He hesitated for a moment, pressed his finger to his lips, and then said, “There you will find a cozy adjacent hut.”

In a few minutes we did in fact reach the station, a big wooden lean-to hut with a cozy adjacent unisex hut beside it, both clinging to the mountainside like barnacles. Inside the big hut you could get your walking stick branded and buy crackers and souvenirs and any one of a dozen brands of beer, as well as a twelve-dollar canister of Mount Fuji Congratulations Do It Now Oxygen. About forty climbers were milling around, dripping and sweating and gobbling snacks. One delicate-looking older woman dressed in what looked like pajamas was taking gulps from a canister of oxygen, and the man with her alternated gulps of oxygen with swigs of beer. Four U.S. Navy enlisted men came into the hut. They seemed quite excited. “Hey!” one of them hollered. “Anyone got any sake?”

I went outside on the deck, where a bunch of Chinese students were eating dried fish and cookies and taking snapshots of one another. Two of them were speaking to each other on their cellular phones and were shrieking ecstatically. One of the Chinese girls came over to me and gasped, “We are wanting to speak
Japanese
! We are wanting to speak
English
! But our heads are filled with
Japanese
!”

Mr. Watanabe wanted to push ahead, so we soon left and plodded
up the jagged trail for another hour. By then the clouds had broken up, and below them we could see a big green patch that Mr. Watanabe said was a Japanese Self-Defense Forces training ground and some of the one hundred and seventeen golf courses that lie at the base of the mountain. I wanted to look at the view for a while, but the trail was getting clogged with other climbers, so we turned and continued. We beat the Chinese students to the Seventh Station and went in to get my walking stick branded. The stationmaster was a young man with bristly black hair and bright red cheeks. He motioned me over to a fire that was burning in the center of the hut and then pulled out a branding iron that had been heating in it. After I paid two dollars, he branded my stick with his symbol—some Japanese characters and a drawing of Fuji. Then he told me that he was the sixth generation of his family to run it. In the winter he works at a gas station. During the two-month-long climbing season, he leaves his wife and children in the flatlands and comes to the Seventh Station with his mother, and they don’t go back down until after the Yoshida Fire Festival, which marks the season’s close. On a busy day he brands the sticks of six hundred climbers. On a slow day, he said, he gets lonely.

Mr. Watanabe and I reached the Eighth Station two hours later. That is, we got to the first of the seven Eighth Stations. The seven Eighth Stations are strung out along about an hour’s worth of trail. All of the stations on Fuji are family businesses that have had the same owners for a hundred years or more, and they enjoy the spirited competition of the free market system. The first Eighth Station calls itself the Authentic Eighth Station; the second one calls itself Originator of the Eighth Station; the third is the Real Eighth Station. As it happened, our Eighth Station, the nonluxurious Fujisan Hotel, was the seventh of the Eighth Stations. By the time we wended our way past the preceding six stations it was dusky, and I was eager for dinner and the use of a cozy adjacent hut. The Fujisan stationmaster was a jolly guy with a mustache and tobacco-stained fingers. When we arrived he and a few friends were sitting inside the hut, watching the Yankees game in which Japanese pitcher Hideki Irabu made his debut. The television and a fire were the hut’s sole amenities. Otherwise it was outfitted with a couple of wooden benches in the main room and, in another, two levels of wooden platforms that formed a communal bunk bed—the silkworm shelves. Mr. Watanabe grinned when he saw me surveying the quarters. “On the mountain for women is very . . .
harsh,
” he said. “I believe the goddess of Fuji was said to be very jealous and did not favor women climbers.”

Because of the lousy weather, the mountain was unusually quiet that night. Typically there would have been about a hundred people at the hotel, but instead there were only two young Sony employees from Nagasaki and three of the stationmaster’s friends. The Sony men went to sleep almost immediately. The rest of us ate a dinner of rice and then tried to warm up by the fire next to the television set. I stepped outside to see what I could see from eleven thousand feet up. It was a cold, black night, and the cloud cover was still cracked open; below I could see the little lights of Fujiyoshida and the carnival neon of the Fujikyu Highland Ferris wheel.

After I went back inside, Mr. Watanabe offered everyone refreshments: banana chips and cocktails of Johnnie Walker Black and Takara Multi-Vitamin water. “Very healthy,” he said to me, holding up a can of Takara water and a plastic cup. “It has many important minerals. Please, allow me to give you some.” The stationmaster’s friends introduced themselves as Boss-o Guide-o, Guide-o Carpenter-o, and Mr. Shinto Priest. Boss-o explained that he was in charge of all the guides working on Mount Fuji. After his second Scotch and Multi-Vitamin Water, he offered to make me an assistant guide next summer. Guide-o Carpenter-o was an assistant mountain guide in the summer and a carpenter in Fujiyoshida during the winter. He was the brother of Mr. Shinto Priest, who was a Shinto priest and also a part-time carpenter. Mr. Priest was a wild-eyed semi-bald-headed man who chain-smoked Virginia Slims Menthols and was wearing a padded coat, a terry-cloth towel around his neck, a wool beanie, and high-knee rubber boots, which had the combined effect of making him look like a cross-dressing Tibetan heavyweight boxer. He kept lighting his cigarettes with one of the station branding irons and then whipping off his beanie and rubbing his remaining hair while growling something crusty sounding in Japanese.

“That’s a joke!” Guide-o Carpenter-o yelled to me, pointing at Mr. Priest. “That’s a Japanese joke!”

Even Mr. Watanabe, who may be the most gracious and proper human on earth, was roaring at the priest. “To tell you the truth, I believe he’s quite crazy,” he whispered to me. By then we had all had lots and lots of multivitamins. Mr. Priest was getting sort of sentimental, and when he was done with his hair routine, he wanted me to sit on his lap or next to him and look at snapshots. I had my doubts, but they turned out to be pictures he’d taken of the shadow thrown by Mount Fuji at sunrise—a perfect sheer gray triangle cast across an ocean of clouds, as amazing a sight as I’ve ever seen.

By then there was no real point in going to sleep, since we were going to wake up in an hour to finish the climb. I lay down on my shelf and listened to the Sony men snoring and the rain as it started to dribble, then pour, then slam down on the tin roof of the Fujisan Hotel. At about two in the morning, I heard the rustling of ponchos. Some two dozen climbers had arrived at the hotel, rain running off them in rivers, and outside on the trail I could see a dotted line of lights zigzagging up the mountainside. Most of the climbers wore their lights on their heads, so for a moment the scene looked like a subterranean mining expedition rather than the final stretch of a mountain climb. We dressed in a rush, and then Mr. Watanabe warned me about the end of the climb. “What we have left is the heart-attacking final eight hundred meters,” he said, looking at me solemnly. “You must inform me before you become completely exhausted.” Climbers were materializing all around us in the dark mist, each with a Cyclops headlamp shining in the middle of his forehead. We took our places on the trail and began trudging up the final steep stretch.