MOUNT FUJI JAPAN

             
                 Mount Fuji, located on the island of Honshū, is the highest mountain in Japan, standing 3,776.24 metres. It is also the second-highest volcano located on an island in Asia after Mount Kerinci in Sumatra and seventh-highest peak of an island on Earth. It is an active stratovolcano that last erupted from 1707–1708. Mount Fuji lies about 100 kilometres south-west of Tokyo and can be seen from there on clear days. Mount Fuji's exceptionally symmetrical cone, which is snow-capped for about 5 months a year, is commonly used as a cultural icon of Japan and it is frequently depicted in many arts and photographs, as well as visited by sightseers and climbers.
Mount Fuji is one of Japan's Three Holy Mountains, along with Mount Tate and Mount Haku. It is also a Special Place of Scenic Beauty and one of Japan's Historic Sites. It was added to the World Heritage List as a Cultural Site on June 22, 2013. According to UNESCO, Mount Fuji has inspired artists and poets and been the object of pilgrimage for centuries. UNESCO recognizes 25 sites of cultural interest within the Mount Fuji locality. These 25 locations include the mountain and the Shinto shrine, Fujisan Hongū Sengen Taisha, as well as the Buddhist Taisekiji Head Temple founded in 1290, later depicted by Japanese ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai. The current kanji for Mount Fuji, mean wealth or abundant and a man of status respectively. However, the name predates kanji and these characters are ateji, meaning that they were selected because their pronunciations match the syllables of the name but do not carry a meaning related to the mountain.

The origin of the name Fuji is unclear, having no recording of it being first called by this name. A text of the 9th century, Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, says that the name came from "immortal" (fushi, fuji) and also from the image of abundant (fu) soldiers (shi, ji) ascending the slopes of the mountain. An early folk etymology claims that Fuji came from 不二 (not + two), meaning without equal or nonpareil. Another claims that it came from 不尽 (not + to exhaust), meaning neverending.

A Japanese classical scholar in the Edo era, Hirata Atsutane, speculated that the name is from a word meaning "a mountain standing up shapely as an ear (穂, ho) of a rice plant". A British missionary John Batchelor (1854–1944) argued that the name is from the Ainu word for "fire" (fuchi) of the fire deity (Kamui Fuchi), which was denied by a Japanese linguist Kyōsuke Kindaichi (1882–1971) on the grounds of phonetic development (sound change). It is also pointed out that huchi means an "old woman" and ape is the word for "fire", ape huchi kamuy being the fire deity. Research on the distribution of place names that include fuji as a part also suggest the origin of the word fuji is in the Yamato language rather than Ainu. A Japanese toponymist Kanji Kagami argued that the name has the same root as wisteria (藤, fuji) and rainbow (虹, niji, but with an alternative reading, fuji) and came from its "long well-shaped slope".

Modern linguist Alexander Vovin proposes an alternative hypothesis based on Old Japanese reading |puⁿzi|: the word may have been borrowed from Eastern Old Japanese 火主 meaning 'fire master'In English, the mountain is known as Mount Fuji. Some sources refer to it as "Fuji-san", "Fujiyama" or redundantly "Mt. Fujiyama". Japanese speakers refer to the mountain as "Fuji-san". This "san" is not the honorific suffix used with people's names, such as Watanabe-san, but the Sino-Japanese reading of the character yama (山, "mountain") used in Sino-Japanese compounds. In Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki romanization, the name is transliterated as Huzi.

Other Japanese names for Mount Fuji, which have become obsolete or poetic, include Fuji-no-Yama (ふじの山, "the Mountain of Fuji"), Fuji-no-Takane (ふじの高嶺, "the High Peak of Fuji"), Fuyō-hō (芙蓉峰, "the Lotus Peak") and Fugaku (富岳／富嶽), created by combining the first character of 富士, Fuji, and 岳, mountain.

Mount Fuji is an attractive volcanic cone and a frequent subject of Japanese art especially after 1600, when Edo (now Tokyo) became the capital and people saw the mountain while traveling on the Tōkaidō road. The mountain is mentioned in Japanese literature throughout the ages and is the subject of many poems. One of the modern artists who depicted Fuji in almost all her works was Tamako Kataoka.

It is said, that the first recorded ascent was in 663 by an anonymous monk. The summit has been thought of as sacred since ancient times and was forbidden to women until the Meiji Era in the late 1860s. Ancient samurai used the base of the mountain as a remote training area, near the present-day town of Gotemba. The shōgun Minamoto no Yoritomo held yabusame in the area in the early Kamakura period.

The first ascent by a foreigner was by Sir Rutherford Alcock in September 1860, from the foot of the mountain to the top in eight hours and three hours for the descent. Alcock's brief narrative in The Capital of the Tycoon was the first widely disseminated description of the mountain in the West. Lady Fanny Parkes, the wife of British ambassador Sir Harry Parkes, was the first non-Japanese woman to ascend Mount Fuji in 1867. Photographer Felix Beato climbed Mount Fuji two years later.

On March 5, 1966, BOAC Flight 911, a Boeing 707, broke up in flight and crashed near the Mount Fuji Gotemba New fifth station, shortly after departure from Tokyo International Airport. All 113 passengers and 11 crew members died in the disaster, which was attributed to extreme clear air turbulence caused by lee waves downwind of the mountain. There is a memorial for the crash a short distance down from the Gotemba New fifth station.

Today, Mount Fuji is an international destination for tourism and mountain climbing. In the early 20th century, populist educator Frederick Starr's Chautauqua lectures about his several ascents of Mount Fuji 1913, 1919, and 1923 were widely known in America. A well-known Japanese saying suggests that a wise person will climb Mt. Fuji once in their lifetime, but only a fool would climb it twice. It remains a popular symbol in Japanese culture, including making numerous movie appearances, inspiring the Infiniti logo and even appearing in medicine with the Mount Fuji sign.

In September 2004, the manned weather station at the summit was closed after 72 years in operation. Observers monitored radar sweeps that detected typhoons and heavy rains. The station, which was the highest in Japan at 3,780 metres, was replaced by a fully automated meteorological system.

As of 2011, the Japan Self-Defense Forces and the United States Marine Corps continue to operate military bases near Mount Fuji.

Mount Fuji was added to the World Heritage List as a Cultural Site on June 22, 2013. However, the inscription became controversial after two professors at the Mt. Fuji World Heritage Centre, Shizuoka, were forced to quit their jobs due to academic and racial harassment by officials of Shizuoka prefecture government in March 2018 and comments on social media called for the cancellation of Mt. Fuji's World Heritage inscription.