A trip to Japan's Sacred mountain: Mt. Fuji

No visitor to Japan can say that he has been to Japan but never got to see Japan’s most revered mountain whom the Japanese fondly call Mt. Fuji-san. This near-perfect cone is Japan’s national symbol depicted in so many great paintings and art and it is perhaps the most photographed volcano in the world. On a clear day, you’ll get a glimpse of Mt. Fuji from any tall building from downtown Tokyo, which is about a hundred kilometers away.

While most Japanese tourist guides say that the best way to see Mt. Fuji is from a distance, the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park is really the best place to see Mt. Fuji. Here you can get a picture perfect photograph of Mt. Fuji, that’s if you’re lucky, because most of the time Mt. Fuji hides behind a veil of clouds or fog even during the daytime. But for thrill-seekers, you can actually climb the slopes into the summit of Mt. Fuji.

As Japan’s must-see tourist destination, a sightseeing trip to Mt. Fuji is as easy as getting a hotel brochure and calling any of the tourist companies that provide you with a coach and a tour guide. Or you can go to Hakone by train like what my brother Rene, my sister Adela and her husband Yuki did, by going to the Shinjuku Odakyu Station, which is a short walk from our hotel in Shinjuku and take a Odakyu “Romance Car” for the hour-and-a-half train ride to the City of Odawara.

From Odawara Train station, we took a taxicab to the Hotel Green Plaza in Hakone, Kanagawa Prefecture some 12-kilometers up a mountain similar to our Transcentral Highway that costs ¥5,000 or around P2, 500. The hotel is actually an exclusive club/hotel that recently opened to the public. This hotel has a hot-spring spa in the basement, which has three separate hot-spring pools, which gets hotter and hotter. During the day, if Mt. Fuji appears, you can see her view from the hot-spring pool.

Thick fog greeted us in Hakone. But aside from the view of Mt. Fuji, right beside the hotel is the Ubako Station of the Hakone Ropeway, where we took a cable car ride to Ôkwadani Station, the site of an explosion crater that still emits hot steam from its many cracks and fissures. A famous delicacy and a favorite snack of tourists is black eggs, cooked in the hot steam. From Ôkwadani Station, we again took the cable car to Sôuzan Station, and then go on board the funicular railway, which is a cable railway down the mountain slope all the way to the town of Gõra to see the Hakone Open Air Museum. There we also visited the Hakone Glass Forest, a Venetian glass museum that is very classic European. Just imagine a tree made of glass.

Early morning the following day, Mt. Fuji appeared cloudless in all her splendor, beauty and majesty, but only for a couple of hours quite timely for a photo opportunity. She was a perfect sight, snow-capped with a blue-sky and cloudless. Then a couple of hours later, fog covered her summit and eventually the volcano was totally shrouded with clouds.

Again, we walked to the Ubako Station and took the cable car to Tõegendai Station along the shores of Lake Ashi. This lake is actually another crater, a possible twin volcano of Mt. Fuji. There we took a tourist boat decorated like a Pirate Ship to the other side of the Crater Lake, seeing the beautiful sites along its shores, like the Imperial Rest house and a Tõri a red gate along the lakeshore and a restored Samurai era Checkpoint.

It was a very short three-day visit to the Hakone area, but call me blessed that Mt. Fuji dropped her foggy veil for my waiting camera. I also learned from this trip that Japan is the most disabled-friendly nation. Their tourist facilities, from the trains to cable cars were all handicapped friendly. While I have been to Japan many times in the past, it was during my last visit to Hakone when Mt. Fuji allowed me to take her photos. I can now say that I’ve truly visited Japan!