-->
In the land of Yamato,
It is our treasure, our tuletary god.
It never tires our eyes to look up
To the lofty peak of Mt. Fuji
--Manyoshu
While many man-made
monuments have taken on the role of national icon—think Big Ben, or the Taj
Mahal—it is quite unusual that a natural object has assumed the same role.
The earliest Fuji
customs date back to the Heian period.
The mountain was often celebrated in verse, and was rendered extensively
in the Manyoshu, Japan’s earliest poetry anthology, dated to the 8th
Century. Fuji is presented as
landscape, as a religious object, and as the source of artistic and aesthetic
appreciation. It was an idealized
mountain, and as such Fuji was best viewed from afar.
Mt. Fuji’s true notoriety
rose with the rapid growth of Edo (known today as Tokyo) in the 17th
Century. The Tokugawa Shogunate’s
victory at Sekigahara ushered in a power shift to the east. The center of true political control
was no longer to be found in the old capital of Kyoto, but in a former fishing
village on the Kanto plain.
In 1635, the
third Tokugawa shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu created sankin-kotai , or system of
alternate residence duty. This required the daimyo, feudal lords, to reside for
several months each year in the capital Edo. When the lords returned to their domains, they were required
to
leave their
wives and heirs in Edo, essentially a form of hostage keeping designed to
ensure their continued loyalty to the shogunate. The daimyo had to use highways
designated by the shogun, the best known of these being the Tokaido and the
Nakasendo.
The Tokaido
connected Kyoto with Edo, running along the seacoast of eastern Honshū. The daimyo who traveled the highway did
so accompanied by enormous retinues, as befitting their status. A prominent feature of the Tokaido
would have of course been Mt. Fuji, whose distinct shape would have accompanied
the processions over a number of days.
With their
elaborate road systems, the Tokugawa had also created a “culture of movement.” Pilgrims followed the Tokaido back and
forth to the pilgrimage sites of Ise.
This led to a rise in travel literature, both in the form of travel
guides and woodblock prints (ukiyoe).
Hiroshige has come down to us as the name most associated with the
Tokaido, and his work The
Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō stands as the best sold series of ukiyo-e prints. It is said
of Hiroshige that he was “perhaps less an artist of Nature than of
the culture of nature.” His
colorful images helped place Mt. Fuji at the center of the Japanese
consciousness.
As Edo grew, so did Fuji’s reputation. Helping promote this were the many Fuji
pilgrims and pilgrimage associations. Along with the prerequisite temples
associated with these groups, they also constructed artifices know as
Fujizaka. These miniature Mt.
Fujis were constructed from rocks and plants taken from the mountain itself. Soil from the summit of the actual Mt.
Fuji was placed on the summit of the fujizaka, in order to harness some of the
spiritual power of the volcano.
Many pilgrims no longer had to go to the mountain, as the mountain had
now come to them. At the height of
the Edo period, there were over two hundred fujizaka, and none have been
constructed since the 1930s. Fifty
six survive today, including those at Teppozu Inari shinto shrine and Hatomori shrine.
During their stay in
Edo, the daimyo lived in large estates across Edo, many of which had extensive
grounds. More than one daimyo had
a small hill built upon the grounds in which to climb and observe mount Fuji,
called Fujimizaka. Since earliest times, mountains had
been climbed in to order to survey
the land. These viewings were
ritualistic, but also had certain politic motives, as it was a symbolic controlling
or pacifying of the land. A very fine example is at the Hama Rikyu garden in
Tokyo. The term Fujimizaka is also
shared by many of the hills around the city. Meaning literally ‘hill from which to see Fuji,’ these spots had traditionally offered
the best views of the mountains.
Sadly in modern Tokyo, these views have been relegated to mere glimpses,
with the coming of the modern high-rise.
The final possible view of the mountain, albeit a modest section of
Fuji’s northern slope, is about to be lost to yet another construction
project.
Along with the fujiko
and their Fujizaka, ukiyo-e served as the third form of media that led to the
urbanization of Fuji. Hiroshige’s contemporary, Hokusai, found the mountain to
be his greatest muse, publishing two great works of the subject. His One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji set
the mountain as a common feature across the Edo landscape—on the horizon,
between buildings, through a window-- emphasizing the relationship between the
lair of the gods and the Shogun’s city.
The face of Hokusai’s Fuji
is seen from every angle, with the commonality between them all being Hokusai,
and the viewer.
With the fall of the
Shogunate and the end of the feudal period, “Westernization” came into vogue,
and traditional Japanese arts and crafts were considered old-fashioned and
hackneyed. Ukiyo-e had lost their value
to the point that they were used as packing materials. In this way, they came into possession
of Europeans, and served as a source of inspiration for the Impressionist, Cubist,
and Post-Impressionist art movements. Claude Monet was particularly influenced
by the strong colors and lack of perspective, and Vincent van Gogh was known to
have owned a copy of Hiroshige’s 53 Stations of the
Tokaido Road.
Mt.Fuji as a common
motif of ukiyo-e was thus exported through these prints to become an understood
icon of Japan. European travelers
of the period longed for their first shipboard view of the mountain, which no
doubt signified the end of a long sea voyage. Isabella Bird wrote a fine example of this at the beginning
of her travel classic, Unbeaten Tracks in
Japan:
For
long I looked in vain for Fujisan, and failed to see it, though I heard
ecstasies all over the deck, till, accidentally looking heavenwards instead of
earthwards, I saw far above any possibility of height, as one would have
thought, a huge, truncated cone of pure snow, 13,080 feet above the sea, from
which it sweeps upwards in a glorious curve, very wan, against a very pale blue
sky, with its base and the intervening country veiled in a pale grey mist. It
was a wonderful vision, and shortly, as a vision, vanished. Except the cone of
Tristan d'Acunha--also a cone of snow--I never saw a mountain rise in such
lonely majesty, with nothing near or far to detract from its height and
grandeur. No wonder that it is a
sacred mountain, and so dear to the Japanese that their art is never weary of
representing it. It was nearly
fifty miles off when we first saw it.
Travelers today –
Japanese and foreign alike – still thrill at the sight of the mountain. As the Shinkansen Bullet Train races
past at over 270 kph (167 mph), all heads turn for a glimpse of Fuji, her
brilliant snow-covered crown rising almost ephemerally above the land that she
best represents.
On the turntable: Natalie Merchant, "Leave Your Sleep"
