The particular volcano I was visiting that thursday evening was a stratovolcano, defined by their tall, conical shape, composed of alternating layers of lava and miscelaneous particles of crystal and older volcanic rock emitted through eruptions.
The bus pulled uphill, around hairpin turns, and everything went grey outside the windows while we passed through the clouds. The sky opened up around us and we all saw the sun for the first time that day. It was that time of day that photographers call the "magic hour" right near sunset, when colors seem so much more vivid and alive. Cameras clicked all up and down the left side of the bus, facing the sunset, taking it all in, knowing they wouldn't see daylight for a while.
The intercom clicked on and static noise filled the bus as the driver took a breath to speak. "Thank you for riding the Keio bus lines today, we will shortly be arriving at the fifth station, the terminal point of this bus. Take care to not leave any of your belongings in the bus when you leave. We look forward to you riding with us again". No matter where you go in this world, bus announcements never get any more interesting.
Mount Fuji. Its name is rendered most recently in characters that mean "abundance of warriors", a reference to a Japanese myth called the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, which is considered to be the oldest Japanese story known. In it, the emperor falls in love with a princess from the moon (bear with me), but she is eventually taken by a host of heavenly guardians back to the moon against her will. He then orders a host of his own soldiers to the tallest mountain in Japan in order to burn a letter from the emperor to the moon princess so that it may, by some conveyance I don't understand, reach her on the moon. Thus, an abundance of warriors.
Every year, an army of climbers, around two hundred thousand people, climb Mt Fuji, about a third of whom are not Japanese. Like visiting temples and ryokan (traditional Japanese inns), it is one of those traditional Japanese things that only non-Japanese people do. Most Japanese laugh about this if you bring it up, but in a nervous, titteringly embarrassed way, on account of they have no concept of irony, and instead take it as a point of shame.
The typical way to climb Mt. Fuji is to do it like we did, starting at the fifth station, about halfway up the mountain and hoof it from there. This is more difficult than it sounds.
I surveyed the more or less flat area that was station number five. There was a hotel, a few restaurants and a handful of souvenier shops. I found a janitor outside the information desk, which had been closed for about two hours at that point, and said "excuse me, where's the bathroom?", on behalf of a Belgian girl we had just met. "That way", he said, gesturing towards a building. "And there's no charge". Back home, that would be taken as in jest. In Japan, where the sense of humor doesn't stretch into those realms, it is to be taken quite literally.
Myself, my roommate Rob, Eleni, his Australian quasi-ex girlfriend, and four random strangers we met on the bus, began to climb Fuji at exactly 7:40 PM thursday evening. The sun had just retreated below the horizon, leaving us dependent on our flashlights to see the dirt path in front of us. After twenty minutes of flat, wide dirt road, the trail turned upwards.
The brown dirt road gradually dissappeared in favor of gravel, which in turn was replaced by stones about the size of melons. We reached the second mountain hut, station number seven, and rested while we had stamps burned into our walking sticks to prove what sore muscles and blistered feet couldn't. At every station, there are huts that, for a fee of two hundred yen, burn a stamp into the side of the octagonal walking stick that you can buy at the fifth station. The stamps indicate the altitude of the station at which you buy them, in this case two thousand, seven hundred meters above sea level. You pay a thousand yen at the bottom, but I got nine stamps (there are more huts open during the day, as well), which, when you take into account the "special price" of the summit stamp, comes to a total of one thousand, seven hundred yen in stamps. Fuji is nothing if not a tourist trap. The higher the altitude, the more higher the price of everything becomes, and nothing short of divine intervention or a helicopter will stop your wallet from emptying itself any more slowly. At two in the morning, five hundred yen for a dixie cup full of hot instant coffee starts to sound more an more reasonable in light of the rapidly dropping temperature and increasing wind chill.
By the time we had reached the halfway mark between the fifth station and the summit, Eleni had succcumbed to altitude sickness and had taken to vomiting every hundred and fifty to two hundred meters we climbed. Towards the end, even after sucking down three bottles of oxygen, Rob and I had to push her up the mountain one step at a time, past the radpidly increasng number of prone bodies on the sides of the path of the ones who couldn't be asked to spend a few thousand yen for a heated bunk.
After pushing Eleni around the corner of a steep, gravelly incline, a mountain hut appeared. "We gotta stop, Eleni needs to adjust some, lets get a cup of tea and warm up" I said to Rob. I opened the sliding glass door to the hut, and a lanky old man with short grey hair stopped me and said "you order, twenty minute only!" I forgive the Japanese for not being big on plurals, but not for being assholes. "I was wondering, where can I order? Do I have to go to the kitchen window?" I said in Japanese, hoping he'd be less ornery if I made a token effort to be multicultural and polite. He wasn't. Pointing in the general direction of the door, he once more made an angry mockery of my language "you go there! out!". And I did.
?"What'd he say?" Rob asked. "Dunno. He's an asshole. Either we can't order, or we have to do it outside. To hell with this, I'm cold, I'm just going in there" I said in mid stride towards the door once more.
In my rudest Japanese, I said to the man "Hey, get us three cups of tea, we're gonna sit down at this here table". I have a theory about Mount Fuji's customer service, and it goes something like this: Somewhere hidden away, there is a blacklist of Japanese employees who just plain don't know how to deal effectively with people, and somehow they all get shunted to Fuji, where management seems minimal and they can be as rude as they like, because a lot of the people who climb Fuji are foreigners, and everyone knows people born outside Japan don't have feelings anyway. Call it damage control.
"You want three cups?" he asked. "Yeah, that's what I said. Weren't you listening?" I snapped back. "Hai!" he said back. The way some people say it, the Japanese word for "yes" sounds like the verbal equivalent of a soldier doing his snappiest salute. "One moment, I'll bring it shortly". My tactic worked, and I was back to the level of customer service I'd become accustomed to over the last seven months. For a while, anyway.
"You twenty minutes, now go please. You let's go!" he said while walking towards our table. The last three words came out machine-gun style, slurred into one.
Without the sun, the numbers on your watch don't mean a lot. Everything is smothered equally by a swathe of darkness, so shadows don't change, except in response to a jostled flashlight. Without a sense of time, the winding path up solid rock offers no sense of distance. Just endless steps forwards seen through the slit between the hood of my poncho and the bandana pulled up over my nose, desperado-style in an attempt to keep my face from going numb. Fuji. Its name was formerly rendered in two Chinese characters meaning "not" and "exhaust", or "neverending".
At about half three in the morning I had walked on ahead of Rob and Eleni, hoping to arrive at the last station before the summit and get a bit of shut eye before the last push to the top. Ahead of me was a wide, flat area covered in sand and pebbles. A faded sign with paint peeling off in ragged strips indicated a toilet was to be found fifty meters ahead of me, and it was about that time. The wind was even stronger this far up, cutting through my poncho, sweatshirt, long sleeve cotton shirt, thermal long sleeve shirt and cotton teeshirt like a bullet through butter.
A sign printed in dark, pine green letters posted on the door of the restroom boasted of the eco-friendlyness of composting toilets in three languages. I slid the unfinished wooden (therefore more eco-friendly-looking) door aside, to find four bodies huddled inside to keep warm, and recognized the faces of the Belgian girl and her American friend. "Jesus jumping Christ it's cold out there" I said, "And we still got one more station before the summit, eh". "We are at the top already, no?" replied the Belgian girl.
"No way. But, I thought there were ten stations. This is the ninth"
"Yes, the tenth is the top of the crater, this is the summit station though".
I let out a whoop of joy, and had the most satisfying piss into a hole into the ground I have, and will likely ever have experienced.
"It's here! It's here!" Someone called in Japanese. People crowded out of the restaurant on the summit to catch the first rays of the sunrise. A group of people wearing identical yellow raincoats stood on the crater around a world war two Japanese battle flag, and sang a song I couldn't understand, but inferrered was likely something rather nationalist. Some people clapped. Everyone shivered. Clouds mulled thousands of feel below in a thick carpet, and smaller mountain peaks thrust through the cloud cover like islands in a roiling sea. The perpetual roar of the wind was joined by a chorus of shutters snapping and clicking like a tapdancing convention. What I saw that morning was worth the cold, the injured knee, and fatigue. It was glory, and I can't draw analogy to it. I took pictures, but that doesn't tell the whole story. Fuji. It's said it was once written as "not" and "two", or "without equal".
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