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Mount Fuji
Japan's sacred symmetrical volcano
Mount Fuji is at once Japan's highest mountain and its most enduring symbol, a near-perfect volcanic cone rising to 3,776 metres in solitary grace southwest of Tokyo. On clear days its snow-capped summit is visible from the capital, and for centuries it has been the subject of pilgrimage, poetry, and some of the most famous images in art, including Hokusai's thirty-six views. Both sacred and active, it stands as a national emblem and a living geological force.
Fuji is a stratovolcano built up over hundreds of thousands of years where three tectonic plates meet beneath central Honshu, its smooth slopes the product of repeated, relatively fluid eruptions. Its last eruption, the Hoei event of 1707, blanketed Edo - modern Tokyo - in ash and opened a crater on the southeastern flank. The mountain remains classified as active, monitored closely for signs of renewed life, and its symmetry is so complete because no later peak has grown to mar it. The summit crater is rimmed by jagged peaks and dusted with snow for much of the year.
Fuji has been climbed by pilgrims for more than a thousand years, originally as an austere ascetic practice and now by hundreds of thousands of visitors each summer during the official climbing season. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2013, recognised not as a natural wonder but as a cultural one - a source of artistic and spiritual inspiration. Shrines ring its base, and its image saturates Japanese visual culture, from woodblock prints to the modern banknote.