My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Orlean, Susan

  At the time, though, it was still spring: The rhododendrons were blooming, and the mist in the Paro Valley was as thick as goose down. The airport was blanked out, invisible. For days, no planes could come in or out of the country. It was as if Bhutan had once more withdrawn from the rest of the world. Anyone planning to travel to the country was turned back. Those who were already on their way when the airport disappeared were billeted in crummy airport hotels in Kathmandu and Calcutta until the mist cleared and planes could find Bhutan again.

  Do We Transcend Before

  or After We Purchase the

  Commemorative Eel Cakes?

  The smallest Mount Fuji I saw while I was in Japan was next to a Tokyo fire station and across the street from a grocery store where you can buy sake in a box and eighteen-dollar cantaloupes. The shrine is called Ono-Terusaki, and the little Mount Fuji in its backyard is called Fujizuko, and they are located in Shitaya, an unfancy low-rise neighborhood you would never visit unless you were looking for miniature mountains. I went to see Fujizuko on a blazing hot July Sunday, when the sky was the color of cement and the air was so thick that it felt woolly. The real Mount Fuji is only sixty miles from Tokyo, but the scrim of smog around the city cut off the view. No one was on the streets of Shitaya that morning; all the houses were perfectly still except for a few damp kimonos flapping on balcony clotheslines. I wandered around the neighborhood for half an hour before I finally found the shrine, a homely ninth-century building dedicated to a scholar of Chinese classics who died in AD 852 and was said to have enjoyed landscapes. I walked around to the back of the shrine, and there I came upon the mountain. It was made of blackish lava chunks and was shaped like a piece of pie propped up on its wide end, exactly like the real Mount Fuji, only this Fuji was about 16 feet high, whereas the real one is 12,388. Someone who really liked Mount Fuji built the mountain in 1828. The mountain was flanked by a pair of stone monkey-faced dog-lions, and there was a sign that said, FUJIZUKO IS A MINIATURE MOUNTAIN THAT AN IMITATION MAN MADE IN THE IMAGE OF MOUNT FUJI. THIS PRECIOUS MOUND IS PRESERVED ON GOOD CONDITIONS.

  I looked at the mountain for a while and rang a doorbell, and after a moment a student priest came out and gave me a look. He was dressed in a snowy white robe and slippers and had kissy lips and a grave, handsome face. He didn’t speak English and I don’t speak Japanese, so we just smiled at each other until a middle-aged gentleman who was also visiting the shrine said he would attempt to translate for the priest. The gentleman said that the priest said that there was a time when Japan was not in order and people felt a pain about the abuse of the land, and there were problems, lots of problems, with the gods, or maybe it was problems with the crops, but anyway then a man went climbing Mount Fuji and by climbing he tried to make the world in order and he prayed many crops or gods would come in good condition and then the world of Japan became in order and through his feelings he built the mountain. As the gentleman was translating, I felt a profound sense of mystery and confusion in my very own mind, but I also understood what he was trying to say. I then asked the gentleman to ask the priest if he had ever climbed the full-scale Mount Fuji. The priest giggled and shook his head, so I asked whether the priest planned to climb it anytime in the future. The two men chatted for a minute. At last the gentleman turned to me and shrugged and said, “I believe he says, ‘No way.’ ”

  The reasons people don’t climb Mount Fuji are various. Sometimes they just forget to do it. There is approximately one Japanese cabdriver in New York City, where I live, and he is one of the people who happen to have forgotten. He also happened to be the cabdriver who took me to the airport for my flight to Japan. He was driving a new, nice-smelling Honda minivan cab and had a silver Mount Fuji key chain swinging from the ignition. He became excited when I told him I was going to Japan to climb Mount Fuji. He said that he had always planned to do it himself but kept forgetting, and the next thing he knew he had moved permanently to the United States.

  Sometimes the reasons people have for not climbing are more existential than forgetful. When I first got to Tokyo I went to visit Kunio Kaneko, an artist who makes wood-block prints of Mount Fuji. At his studio, every wall was hung with pictures of the mountain—in indigo blue, in orangy red, covered with gold leaf, outlined with silver ink. There were drawers filled with Fuji prints and racks of note cards of Fujis and one wall with pictures of kimonos and happi platform sandals that make you walk as if you’re drunk. Kaneko is in his late forties and has longish hair and broad shoulders, and he was wearing beat-up khakis and green Converse sneakers. He spread out his pictures for me to see and told me that he divided his life into two: the years before 1964, when the air was still see-through and Fuji was always visible from his backyard in Tokyo, and the post-1964 years, when pollution got so bad that he almost never saw Fuji except on rare stainless winter days. Kaneko said that he thought about the mountain all the time. Since he seemed slightly outdoorsy and had devoted so much of his work to the mountain, I assumed that he had climbed it, maybe even several times. When I asked him about it, he looked bashful and replied, “No, I have never climbed it.” He shuffled together some of his prints and slid them into a drawer. “I always stay at a distance at the bottom so I have a perfect view,” he said. “I don’t climb it because if I were on the mountain, I couldn’t see it.”

  There are lots of reasons the Japanese do climb Mount Fuji. They climb it because it’s tall and pretty and has a grand view, because some of them think God lives inside it, because their grandparents climbed it, or because climbing Mount Fuji has been the customary Japanese thing to do for as long as anyone can remember. In a way, the enduring attraction of a Mount Fuji pilgrimage is a remarkable thing. The Japanese have always revered their landscape and scenery, but they seem perfectly at peace with fake nature, too—only in Japan can you surf at an indoor beach and ski on an indoor slope and stroll through exhaustively manipulated and modulated gardens of groomed pebbles and dwarfed trees and precisely arranged leaves. Sometimes it seems that the man-made Japan has eclipsed the country’s original physical being. Still, the symbolism and reality of Mount Fuji remain. The mountain may have pay phones on the summit and its own brand of beer, but otherwise it persists as a wild and messy and uncontrollable place—big, old-fashioned, and extreme. That is, nothing like what I expected Japan to be. I wanted to go to Mount Fuji because I imagined it would be a trip to the un-Japan, a country I wasn’t even sure existed anymore except in nostalgic dreams.

  It was a terrible year to climb Fuji, really. The official climbing season opens July 1 with a ceremony at the base of the mountain in the Sengen Jinja shrine, and usually thousands of climbers would attend the ceremony and ascend the mountain that day. Some would be dressed in traditional pilgrim costumes: white kimonos and pants, straw waraji sandals, a mushroom-shaped hat, a walking stick. Most of the rest would be in Gore-Tex and T-shirts saying MOUNT FUJI: THE MOST HIGHEST MOUNTAIN IN JAPAN and WELCOME TO MELLOW VILLAGE and JOYFUL MY SCENE MORNING BUNNY MOUNT FUJI. In Tokyo that same day, less ambitious climbers hold another ceremony at the Ono-Terusaki shrine and scramble up all sixteen feet of the miniature Fuji: Similar observances would take place at each of the forty or so other miniature Mount Fujis in greater Tokyo. But this was the summer of ghastly weather in Japan. In the weeks before opening day, two typhoons passed through; the first one hit Tokyo and raked across Fuji, covering the climbing routes with snow and filling access roads with mud and rocks, while the tail end of the second typhoon added to the mess on the mountain. The opening ceremony was held but was sparsely attended, and access to Fuji itself was postponed until July 10, then postponed again for another twenty-four hours. The day I arrived in Japan, the tanker Diamond Grace had run aground and was bleeding crude oil into Tokyo Bay. In the south yet another storm struck, and on the island of Kyushu mud slides killed almost two dozen people. In Tokyo a heat wave jacked the temperature above one hundred degrees, and everyone walked around looking broiled and stoic, dabbing their for
eheads with washcloths and flapping lacquer fans. I was so hot that I had to hide from the sun every afternoon in my hotel room. I would fall in a heap on my futon and crack open a Kirin beer and turn on a Japanese program called Jungle TV, which was hosted by two guys who did things like race each other on rowing machines while wearing business suits and teach themselves to cook bouillabaisse while being harassed by a pet monkey. I started wondering why exactly I wanted to climb Mount Fuji, but I did, and even after an earthquake bounced me around my hotel room, I was still good to go.

  Mount Fuji is the highest mountain in Japan. Its peak is nearly two and a half miles above sea level, and its base has a circumference of seventy-eight miles and spans both Yamanashi Prefecture and Shizuoka Prefecture. The mountain is a ten-thousand-year-old volcanic cone that last erupted in 1707. Scientists believe it is dormant rather than extinct. A nearby mountain named Yatsugatake used to be higher than Fuji, but then the jealous and bellicose Fuji goddess Konohanasakuya-hime decided to knock over the Yatsugatake so Fuji could be supreme. The first documented ascent of the mountain was made by a Shintoist pilgrim named En no Ozunu in the eighth century; the first Westerner to climb was Sir Rutherford Alcock, the British consul, who ascended in 1860 with his Scottie dog Toby. The world’s oldest mountain-climbing picture, painted in the fifteenth century, depicts monks climbing Mount Fuji. Only religious pilgrims were allowed to climb until the nineteenth century; women were not allowed at all until 1871.

  Fuji’s six climbing routes are divided into stations; the route I planned to take has ten. The Fuji Subaru highway to the Fifth Station was opened in 1965, and with it came millions of visitors by tour bus and subsequently tons of trash and erosion problems that continue to threaten the mountain. Mount Fuji is so pretty and so weirdly symmetrical that people have always believed it was supernatural and sanctified. The most fervent Fuji worshippers are the Shintoist sect Fuji-ko, whose founder, the sixteenth-century monk Fujiwara no Kakugyo, supposedly climbed Fuji one hundred and twenty-eight times and lived to be one hundred and six years old. Fuji-ko pilgrims stay in special shrine lodges at the base of the mountain, wash themselves in the purifying water of the five lakes nearby, get blessed by a priest, and then time their ascent so that they arrive at the summit at sunrise. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as many as ten thousand Fuji-ko would climb each year, but these days they are far outnumbered by ordinary Japanese and tourists.

  Before I left for Japan, I obtained an introduction to a man in Tokyo named Fumiaki Watanabe, who was going to have me over for dinner as part of an official international friendliness program. All I knew about him was that he recently retired from his position as an internal auditor at an Exxon subsidiary. The minute he heard from our intermediary that I was planning to climb Fuji, he proposed skipping the dinner and instead going with me on the climb. This to me was a huge surprise. I kept being told that every year half a million people drive to the Fifth Station of Fuji and two hundred thousand climb to the summit, but so far I hadn’t managed to find a single person who had done either. I was starting to wonder how much of the Japanese devotion to climbing Mount Fuji is abstract and conceptual and how much of it involves the material experience of putting on shoes and walking. It turned out that Mr. Watanabe was a materially experienced climber. He had climbed Fuji more than ten times, had skied into its crater and down its side, and was seventy percent of the way to his goal of climbing the hundred highest peaks in Japan.

  It was decided that Mr. Watanabe and I could climb together but that our dinner would go ahead as planned, and one evening I rode the subway to the southern edge of Tokyo, where he and his wife and son live. He met me at the station and almost without a word gestured toward the exit. He walked quickly, pushing his bicycle, which like every Japanese bicycle I saw was low-built and sturdy, like a fifties Schwinn, and had a plastic bag wrapped around its seat. Mr. Watanabe was low-built and sturdy himself, with a baldish head and bright eyes and a small, solid body. In the very best possible way, he looked a little like Jiminy Cricket. That night we spoke about the beautiful dinner Mrs. Watanabe had made for us, about the differences between Americans and Japanese, about how tradition in both countries is melting away. Mrs. Watanabe was wearing Western-style casual clothes, but she decided to show me the formal kimono that she said she hardly ever wears anymore. Once she brought it out, she decided to dress me in it. The kimono was cool and silky and as heavy as water. It required special underwear with multiple belts and bows and had a wide sash tied over a pillow that sits in the small of your back. It took about fifteen minutes to get the whole thing on. Then, as I sat there trussed up like a fancy turkey, Mr. Watanabe began laying out his plans for our climb.

  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 v
iew 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.