Mount Fuji is Japan's highest and holiest mountain, a 3,776-metre volcano so symmetrical that it looks drawn, standing alone above the plain southwest of Tokyo and visible, on a clear day, from the capital's towers. Its shape is the reason for everything else: it appears in a thousand years of Japanese painting, on the back of the thousand-yen note, and in the frame that every visitor tries to make at Chureito Pagoda, where 400 steps above the Arakura Sengen Shrine put the five-storey red pagoda in front of the snow-capped cone, with cherry blossom in the foreground for a week or two each April. The mountain is a Shinto shrine in itself. The one on the summit belongs to Konohanasakuya-hime, the goddess of blossoms and of volcanoes, who is believed to keep the fire at rest, and for most of its history the peak was closed to women, a rule lifted only in 1872.
Fuji hides behind cloud more often than it shows, and the cold, dry air of winter is what clears it most reliably; on a still winter morning at Lake Kawaguchi the whole cone stands upside down in the water, the reverse Fuji that photographers wait for. The lake is one of five along the mountain's northern foot, and the quieter ones, Sai and Shoji, are cycled around with the summit slipping in and out of view between the pines. The climb is a summer event. In July and August the trails open, and most climbers walk up the Yoshida Trail to a mountain hut, sleep a few hours, and set off in the dark to reach the crater rim for goraiko, the sunrise seen from above the clouds, with the sky turning red over a sea of white. Under its smooth outline Fuji is three volcanoes stacked one on another, the oldest buried under the two that came later, and the last eruption was in 1707. The mountain that looks like a drawing is still, officially, active.