One climbing Mount Fuji story

One climbing Mount Fuji story

It was during the summer time approved period. Mount Fuji can get pretty cold and snowy in the winter.

We approached the top from the north east side vicinity of the Lake Yamanako area. I had earlier even done some orphanage work there. We even took the bus up as far as we could, which was around 5,000 feet as I recall. The volcano is over 12,000 feet in height. On a clear day one can see the sunrise to the East, and see the Rising Sun, like on the war flag the Japanese have. On this day, it was very foggy and I couldn’t see very far at all. One usually climbs through the night on the hope they can see the rising sun.

Now as we climbed then, there were “way stations” every so often, mostly for we common citizens to take a break, and in my case slug down some sake, and even eat rice cakes and other such foods. We even exchanged five toe socks for chocolate bars, too.

So, just like in the “Ugly American” scenario, my wife took offense at the local guys climbing with us who wrote some Kanji (Japanese writing) on her Fuji flag, and she assumed it was something sexually insulting in nature. After all, they were guffawing. So she wrote back “American girls like it on top” on their flag. Later we got the two flags translated in Tokyo, and the other party said something like “we are accountants from so and so”. Oh well.

So we proceeded to the top of the mountain, and of course could not see much at all on that day. Now they did have warm flavored coffee at the top, which could be resupplied by a bulldozer pulling up a cart of supplies.

So, being a typical American male, I declared that I knew where I was, and would lead us down the mountain. By then we had paired up with some others. And I was wrong, and ended up leading us the wrong way until I recovered, and then we had to make up the difference in order to catch a bus to take us back to Tokyo.

End of story.