Mount Fuji
Japan’s highest mountain, 3,776 metres, worshipped as a sacred mountain since at least the eighth century and drawn and painted for nearly a thousand years. UNESCO lists it as a sacred place and source of artistic inspiration.
Meaning
Kokugakuin University’s Encyclopedia of Shinto describes Fuji as long worshipped as a sacred mountain, named in two eighth-century works, the Man’yōshū and the Hitachi no kuni fudoki. The mountain itself is the kami, and the kami enshrined there is Konohanasakuyahime. Fuji has erupted eighteen times in recorded history; to calm it the court gave it a court rank and worshipped it as Sengen Ōkami, and the first Sengen Jinja shrine is thought to date from the Heian period. UNESCO inscribed Fuji as a World Heritage Site in 2013 as “Fujisan, sacred place and source of artistic inspiration”: 25 sites, among them the pilgrim routes and crater shrines of its upper slopes and the Sengen-jinja shrines, Oshi lodging houses, lakes, springs and waterfalls revered as sacred around its base. UNESCO calls the worship of Fuji a living cultural tradition.
Origin and history
In the twelfth century, UNESCO notes, Fuji became a centre of training for ascetic Buddhism with Shinto elements. The Encyclopedia of Shinto names one ascetic, Matsudai Shōnin, who climbed the mountain several hundred times and built a temple, Dainichiji, on the summit. In the years 1317–19 the priest Raison began a practice called Fujigyō that brought ordinary people up the mountain, and later confraternities of Fuji pilgrims (Fuji kō) in the Kantō region used painted Fuji Mandara to explain the pilgrimage. The most recent eruption Chamberlain knew of in 1905 ran from 16 December 1707 to 22 January 1708 and raised the hump on the southern slope called Hōei-zan.
Fuji in art
Fuji has been painted since the eleventh century, UNESCO says. From the fourteenth century artists made large numbers of images of it, and from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century its shape became a motif in painting, literature, gardens and crafts. Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock prints, the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji among them, made the mountain known in the West as the symbol of Japan. Henri Joly, cataloguing Japanese art in 1908, adds Hokusai’s Hundred Views of Fuji and names the commonest Fuji subjects of his day: the poet-monk Saigyō gazing at the snow-capped peak, and dragons crossing the mountain or its clouds.
A dream of Fuji
To dream of Fuji, Joly records, is “the omen of greatest luck”.
The elixir of life
A story Joly gives has Xu Fu (Jofuku), sent by the Chinese emperor to find the elixir of life, climb Fuji and find monks from the island of Hōrai brewing it there. The Encyclopedia of Shinto also mentions traditions linking Fuji with immortality-seeking wizards in the Daoist sense.
Fuji in poetry
Basil Hall Chamberlain, in 1905, quotes the poet Kada no Azumamaro, for whom Fuji’s peak was “higher to climb than I had heard, than I had thought, than I had seen”, and notes that medieval poets, when Fuji still smoked, liked to compare the fire of their love to the flame on its summit.
Read next
- Next in Japanese symbolsJapanese dragon (ryū)The dragon (ryū, or tatsu) of Japanese art and belief: a scaled, serpent-bodied creature from China that rules water, rain and the sea. Japanese art usually gives it three claws on each foot.
- The same shape in Andean and Inca symbolsNazca linesGiant drawings scraped into the desert of southern Peru between about 500 BC and AD 500: straight lines and trapezoids several kilometres long, and outlines of animals and plants. UNESCO lists them as the Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa.
See also
Torii (shrine gate), Komainu (guardian lion-dogs), Amaterasu (the sun kami), Raijin and Fūjin (thunder and wind), Kamon (family crests) and the mitsudomoe, Chrysanthemum seal (imperial crest).
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Fujisan, sacred place and source of artistic inspiration, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Fujisan, sacred place and source of artistic inspiration” (inscribed 2013), list entry 1418, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Description; Brief synthesis; criteria (iii) and (vi)
- Fuji shinkō (Encyclopedia of Shinto), Encyclopedia of Shinto, Kokugakuin University, “Fuji shinkō” (Suzuki Masataka), Kokugakuin University, entry text
- Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese (1905), Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan, fifth edition, London: John Murray, 1905, John Murray (Internet Archive, University of Toronto copy), pp. 191–193, “Fuji”
- Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art (1908), Henri L. Joly, Legend in Japanese Art: A Description of Historical Episodes, Legendary Characters, Folk-lore, Myths, Religious Symbolism Illustrated in the Arts of Old Japan, London: John Lane, 1908, John Lane (Internet Archive, University of Toronto copy), no. 204, “Fuji Yama”
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from triangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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