Hiking in Japan
Here’s a long post with plenty of pictures! Hopefully the wait was worth it :)
So the past two weekends I went hiking on two Japanese mountains – Mt Tsukuba and Mt Fuji. And I’m going to call them Tsukabasan and Fujisan every so often throughout this post. In Japanese the san at the end of the name means mountain, so that’s what I’ve gotten used to saying over the past few months.
(Quick language note about san. Most of the time, -san is used at the end of a name to mean Mr./Mrs., so “Fujisan” sounds like you’re referring to Mister Fuji. The written name 富士山, pronounced Fujisan, has the character for mountain at the end, 山. Usually this is pronounced “yama”, but due to the magic of Japanese, characters can have more than one pronunciation. In this case, 山 can be pronounced like “san” or “yama”, depending on where it is used. This applies to a lot of characters and makes reading a pain in the butt sometimes.)
Anyway, at the beginning of the internship all three of us interns decided that we wanted to hike up Mt Fuji before the summer was over. We even managed to convince a few of our coworkers to come with us (probably because 1) there’s some strong Japanese pride in being able to climb Fujisan, and none of these coworkers had done it, and 2) because we were clearly simple foreigners who would probably die on the mountain without their help). One of my friends in the office, Satoshi, recommended that we try a smaller hike first to make sure we knew what we were getting into. Thus began our journey to Tsukuba.
Tsukuba
We had settled on July 23 for Fujisan, but Satoshi was feeling a little apprehensive about his/our hiking abilities. So on Friday the 15th he told us that he would pick us up the following morning at 7am for a practice hike. Sometimes Japanese people are really slow about planning events, and they love having ample time to set their schedule. This wasn’t like that. We had no idea where we would be hiking or for how long, and we had one day’s notice. We didn’t have any other plans so it worked out just fine.
Satoshi picked us up along with his friend Emi, who was in my department and had lots of experience hiking mountains. Of course up until this point we had no idea where we were going. I was expecting some local hills, maybe a park or something. Instead we drove 90 minutes to Mt Tsukuba. The mountain peak is around 870m, and the hike started at 0 elevation. Satoshi’s rationale was that climbing Mt Tsukuba would give us a sneak peek at the upcoming Fujisan experience, since the Fujisan hike has a 1600m elevation change and similar slopes.
It was cloudy, warm, and humid on Mt Tsukuba. As a result, everybody got drenched with sweat in the first 30 minutes, and we never really dried out. Without the weather, the hiking was nice and reasonable especially since most of it was in a forest with plenty of rocks, roots, and other easy footholds. The weather definitely made the experience more difficult, but still doable. Since this mountain hike seemed reasonable, Fujisan was still a go for July 23.
Fuji
Mt Fuji has 4 paths that all lead to the top. The most popular is called the Yoshida trail, due to it’s moderate slope and frequent rest stations. The rest stations are also known as mountain huts, and are numbered 5-9 as you go up the mountain. After station 9, the you’re basically at the summit. There are some stations at lower elevations, but the most common hike is to start from station 5 at 2000m elevation and then go up.
Departure: We left our dorm at 1pm with Satoshi and friends and drove toward Fujisan. We made a few stops along the way for food, drinks, dinner, and last minute supplies such as headlamps. The drive to Fujisan doesn’t take more than 3 hours, but the stops along the way took a lot of time.
Station 5: We reached this at about 7:30pm. It’s accessible by bus, so anyone can visit this area even if they don’t intend to climb Mt Fuji. We started the climb at 8pm on the Yoshida trail. This part was on an easy paved road and went through a forest, but we couldn’t see much of the wilderness because it was already dark at that point. Below is a picture of me with Satoshi at Station 5.
Station 6: We got here at 8:30pm, which felt really fast. We stopped to have a quick drink and some food. In terms of food, I stocked up on onigiri, which are those triangular rice balls with fish/meat in the middle. My friend brought some Calorie Mate, which is a cheap, dense chocolate graham cracker thing that fills you up, and other people brought nuts, chocolate, and energy drinks.
Between 6-7: Now it’s actually a mountain hike. A bit of a steeper slope, a zig-zagging trail, and less paved. This trail was mostly dirt and natural gravel, but still pretty firm and easy to walk.
Station 7: We got here maybe around 9:30? My memory is a bit fuzzy on the exact times. At this point our group of 9 had already split into a fast group and a slow group. I was in the fast group with 4 other people, but we kept waiting a while at each rest stop since we knew that we were way ahead of schedule. Sunrise was going to happen at 4:30am, and typical hikes up the mountain don’t last more than 5 or 6 hours. We specifically started at 8pm to allow extra time for the slower hikers in the group as well as account for any crowded and slow hiking near the top. More on that last part later.
Between 7-8: A bit more rocky over here. Large steps, boulders, and ropes/chains to help guide the way. It was surprisingly cold already, maybe 5 Celsius or so. I had brought two sweaters with me in case it got too cold, but I ended up wearing one and using the other as a scarf. The act of hiking was enough to keep me pretty warm. In fact, I got a little sweaty as I hiked, and every time we rested I would take off my backpack and let the air dry out my hot, wet back. Except it never dried, it just got cold and wet. Then I would put my backpack on again and experience a shocking, cruel, cold sensation. This happened at every rest stop.
Station 8: We got here at….I don’t even remember. Let’s say 10:30pm. Station 8 is a little bit before the halfway point, and this is where we started to see an interesting feature of Mt Fuji: mountain hut sleepers! One of the options to see the sunrise is to climb some of the mountain during the day, sleep in a station hut for a bit, then resume the hike at night. The mountain hut costs some money, about $60-100 depending on which station you use. The closer you are to the top, the more money you have to spend for the sleeping arrangements. So at station 8 we saw big groups of people wake up from their naps and start their night hike. This made the trail a bit more crowded from here on. For some perspective, see the picture below. Those lights are all hikers.
Station 8-8.5: Ahh yes there’s a station numbered 8.5, whoops. I kind of lost count of these stations while hiking, but it felt like there were a lot more rest stations between 7 and 9 even though the map only showed stations 8 and 8.5. At each station there were folks napping in the huts, and they were just starting to hike as we arrived. Sometimes we would keep hiking without much rest just so that we weren’t caught in a big slow group. The trail was a bit more crowded from here on, and was more like the zig-zagging gravel trail from before. But this time the gravel was replaced with loose shale, which made the hiking quite a bit harder.
Station 8.5: We had a really long rest here. It was maybe 11:30pm when we arrived, and I don’t think we started hiking again until 1am. We knew we would have to wait a while anyway because we were ahead of schedule, and it was better to wait at a lower elevation where it’s warmer.
Between 8.5-9: It was really crowded now. I didn’t mention this earlier, but apparently hiking at night is a very popular thing to do for Fujisan. Everyone wants to see the sunrise. So maybe they start climbing at night, or they pay money to rest in a mountain hut, but either way the trail is crowded and gets worse with each passing mountain hut. On this stretch in particular it was stop and go traffic. At its worst we moved 1 meter maybe every 30 seconds or so. There was a sign at one point that said “Station 9 - 200m; Summit - 600m”, referring to the length of trail left. From that sign to station 9, it took a little over 1 hour. It probably should have been 20 minutes.
Station 9: This one was a bit depressing. When approaching all of the other stations you can clearly see their lights from below, which gives a nice indicator of how much further to go. Coming up to station 9 in a big, slow mass of hikers, I saw nothing up ahead except lines of headlamps inching further and further. Eventually we passed a wooden Shinto gate on the path and then a tiny wooden shrine thing (I’m not sure what it was exactly). A while after that we reached the summit so I can only assume that shrine was the legendary station 9. The path was very rocky and narrow and slow throughout this area. Also, because we kept stopping after each step we started to get rather cold and miserable.
Summit: We arrived at the summit around 3:45am, and it was below freezing. Sunrise was around 4:30 so we just sat around and waited at the first available spot. This happened to be on the steps in front of the shrine (more like gift shop). Lots of other folks had the same idea and sat near us on the steps. Most of the other hikers that sat with us were white foreigners, funny enough. So funny, in fact, that a news crew magically appeared out of nowhere and started filming us, and the guy with the microphone was saying things like “Here we are at the top of Fujisan, and this is where the foreigners sit to watch the sunrise.” Yes that actually happened.
The sun was supposed to rise at 4:38, and until then the sky was busy turning bright orange and yellow and purple and red. It looked great, especially with a sea of clouds below us and some wispy clouds still above. People were already taking pictures. Sunrise finally happened at 4:38 as advertised, everyone said sugoi (awesome), the Japanese flag was raised, and we shivered happily as we watched the sun peek over the clouds.
There are maybe 3 or 4 restaurants and 2 vending machines at the top of the mountain. The vending machines are about 4 times more expensive than anything at ground level, and the restaurants are about twice as expensive as normal food. We went into one of the restaurants and ordered some 900JPY vegetable soup, and some of us took a quick morning nap.
Then we went for a quick walk on the summit. We didn’t go all the way around the rim, we were way too tired for that. We just looked around and took a few pictures. It was all downhill after that.
The way down was much quicker, even though we kept stopping for one really slow person in our group. We took a different and steeper path down, made easier by the loose gravel and dirt that allowed us to kind of slide/ski a little bit with each step. I’d estimate that we started hiking down around 6am and we arrived back at station 5 (the very beginning) a little after 10.
Overall I’d say that it was a good experience, but to do it again I would need three things to happen.
1. Not on a Saturday night - Everyone climbs on Saturday night. All the tourists and all the Japanese. During the week lots of people are at work, so everything is a bit less crowded.
2. Better cold-weather clothes - I had two cotton sweaters and jeans. Most Japanese hikers on Fujisan wore thermal athletic undershirts, gloves, and nice jackets. I was quite cold at the top. They probably weren’t.
3. Better backpack - At the beginning my backpack was outrageously heavy, mostly because of the sheer amount of water that I brought. (It was all necessary though. I started with about 4L of water and 1L of coffee and by the end of the trip all I had was 0.5L of coffee left over.) Even though that got progressively lighter throughout the hike as I kept drinking, it still hurt my shoulders after 10 hours of use. And I think that’s because I didn’t have any waist/chest straps on my backpack, so I didn’t have anything to offload the weight from my shoulders. So next time I want a backpack with waist straps.
And that’s Fujisan in a nutshell. More pictures below (I didn’t take most of these, by the way. These were shared from all the people in our group):
