We planned to climb to the Eighth Station by sunset, spend the evening in a mountain hut, and wake up at two a.m. to finish the climb so we would reach the summit by sunrise. We had reserved a space at a hut called Fujisan Hotel. From the sound of the name I thought maybe it was a luxury hut, but Mr. Watanabe rolled his eyes and assured me that all the accommodations on the mountain were more hut than hotel. “Do you know how silkworms live?” he asked. “They live on wooden shelves. That is what the huts are like—silkworm shelves.”
I was taken aback. “You mean the huts are infested?”
“No,” Mr. Watanabe replied, “the huts have shelves, and we are the worms.”
I walked a few feet behind him, stepping on and around nubbly black lava rocks and loose pebbles of red pumice. The terrain was sheer and treeless. On a sunny day it would have been beastly. Rock larks flittered around, and green weeds grew under some of the overhangs, but otherwise the mountainside was blank. After about an hour I started wondering where one would relieve oneself in such a lunar landscape. “We will be at the Sixth Station in just a few more minutes,” Mr. Watanabe said. He hesitated for a moment, pressed his finger to his lips, and then said, “There you will find a cozy adjacent hut.”
In a few minutes we did in fact reach the station, a big wooden lean-to hut with a cozy adjacent unisex hut beside it, both clinging to the mountainside like barnacles. Inside the big hut you could get your walking stick branded and buy crackers and souvenirs and any one of a dozen brands of beer, as well as a twelve-dollar canister of Mount Fuji Congratulations Do It Now Oxygen. About forty climbers were milling around, dripping and sweating and gobbling snacks. One delicate-looking older woman dressed in what looked like pajamas was taking gulps from a canister of oxygen, and the man with her alternated gulps of oxygen with swigs of beer. Four U.S. Navy enlisted men came into the hut. They seemed quite excited. “Hey!” one of them hollered. “Anyone got any sake?”
I went outside on the deck, where a bunch of Chinese students were eating dried fish and cookies and taking snapshots of one another. Two of them were speaking to each other on their cellular phones and were shrieking ecstatically. One of the Chinese girls came over to me and gasped, “We are wanting to speak Japanese! We are wanting to speak English! But our heads are filled with Japanese!”
Mr. Watanabe wanted to push ahead, so we soon left and plodded
up the jagged trail for another hour. By then the clouds had broken up, and below them we could see a big green patch that Mr. Watanabe said was a Japanese Self-Defense Forces training ground and some of the one hundred and seventeen golf courses that lie at the base of the mountain. I wanted to look at the view for a while, but the trail was getting clogged with other climbers, so we turned and continued. We beat the Chinese students to the Seventh Station and went in to get my walking stick branded. The stationmaster was a young man with bristly black hair and bright red cheeks. He motioned me over to a fire that was burning in the center of the hut and then pulled out a branding iron that had been heating in it. After I paid two dollars, he branded my stick with his symbol—some Japanese characters and a drawing of Fuji. Then he told me that he was the sixth generation of his family to run it. In the winter he works at a gas station. During the two-month-long climbing season, he leaves his wife and children in the flatlands and comes to the Seventh Station with his mother, and they don’t go back down until after the Yoshida Fire Festival, which marks the season’s close. On a busy day he brands the sticks of six hundred climbers. On a slow day, he said, he gets lonely.
Mr. Watanabe and I reached the Eighth Station two hours later. That is, we got to the first of the seven Eighth Stations. The seven Eighth Stations are strung out along about an hour’s worth of trail. All of the stations on Fuji are family businesses that have had the same owners for a hundred years or more, and they enjoy the spirited competition of the free market system. The first Eighth Station calls itself the Authentic Eighth Station; the second one calls itself Originator of the Eighth Station; the third is the Real Eighth Station. As it happened, our Eighth Station, the nonluxurious Fujisan Hotel, was the seventh of the Eighth Stations. By the time we wended our way past the preceding six stations it was dusky, and I was eager for dinner and the use of a cozy adjacent hut. The Fujisan stationmaster was a jolly guy with a mustache and tobacco-stained fingers. When we arrived he and a few friends were sitting inside the hut, watching the Yankees game in which Japanese pitcher Hideki Irabu made his debut. The television and a fire were the hut’s sole amenities. Otherwise it was outfitted with a couple of wooden benches in the main room and, in another, two levels of wooden platforms that formed a communal bunk bed—the silkworm shelves. Mr. Watanabe grinned when he saw me surveying the quarters. “On the mountain for women is very . . . harsh,” he said. “I believe the goddess of Fuji was said to be very jealous and did not favor women climbers.”
Because of the lousy weather, the mountain was unusually quiet that night. Typically there would have been about a hundred people at the hotel, but instead there were only two young Sony employees from Nagasaki and three of the stationmaster’s friends. The Sony men went to sleep almost immediately. The rest of us ate a dinner of rice and then tried to warm up by the fire next to the television set. I stepped outside to see what I could see from eleven thousand feet up. It was a cold, black night, and the cloud cover was still cracked open; below I could see the little lights of Fujiyoshida and the carnival neon of the Fujikyu Highland Ferris wheel.
After I went back inside, Mr. Watanabe offered everyone refreshments: banana chips and cocktails of Johnnie Walker Black and Takara Multi-Vitamin water. “Very healthy,” he said to me, holding up a can of Takara water and a plastic cup. “It has many important minerals. Please, allow me to give you some.” The stationmaster’s friends introduced themselves as Boss-o Guide-o, Guide-o Carpenter-o, and Mr. Shinto Priest. Boss-o explained that he was in charge of all the guides working on Mount Fuji. After his second Scotch and Multi-Vitamin Water, he offered to make me an assistant guide next summer. Guide-o Carpenter-o was an assistant mountain guide in the summer and a carpenter in Fujiyoshida during the winter. He was the brother of Mr. Shinto Priest, who was a Shinto priest and also a part-time carpenter. Mr. Priest was a wild-eyed semi-bald-headed man who chain-smoked Virginia Slims Menthols and was wearing a padded coat, a terry-cloth towel around his neck, a wool beanie, and high-knee rubber boots, which had the combined effect of making him look like a cross-dressing Tibetan heavyweight boxer. He kept lighting his cigarettes with one of the station branding irons and then whipping off his beanie and rubbing his remaining hair while growling something crusty sounding in Japanese.
“That’s a joke!” Guide-o Carpenter-o yelled to me, pointing at Mr. Priest. “That’s a Japanese joke!”
Even Mr. Watanabe, who may be the most gracious and proper human on earth, was roaring at the priest. “To tell you the truth, I believe he’s quite crazy,” he whispered to me. By then we had all had lots and lots of multivitamins. Mr. Priest was getting sort of sentimental, and when he was done with his hair routine, he wanted me to sit on his lap or next to him and look at snapshots. I had my doubts, but they turned out to be pictures he’d taken of the shadow thrown by Mount Fuji at sunrise—a perfect sheer gray triangle cast across an ocean of clouds, as amazing a sight as I’ve ever seen.
By then there was no real point in going to sleep, since we were going to wake up in an hour to finish the climb. I lay down on my shelf and listened to the Sony men snoring and the rain as it started to dribble, then pour, then slam down on the tin roof of the Fujisan Hotel. At about two in the morning, I heard the rustling of ponchos. Some two dozen climbers had arrived at the hotel, rain running off them in rivers, and outside on the trail I could see a dotted line of lights zigzagging up the mountainside. Most of the climbers wore their lights on their heads, so for a moment the scene looked like a subterranean mining expedition rather than the final stretch of a mountain climb. We dressed in a rus
h, and then Mr. Watanabe warned me about the end of the climb. “What we have left is the heart-attacking final eight hundred meters,” he said, looking at me solemnly. “You must inform me before you become completely exhausted.” Climbers were materializing all around us in the dark mist, each with a Cyclops headlamp shining in the middle of his forehead. We took our places on the trail and began trudging up the final steep stretch.
The line of the climbers’ lights now reached up to the summit and down to the seventh Eighth Station, where it vanished into the fog. The rain was falling in gobs, coming down harder and harder, and the fog was building up into a solid white wall; I would never have known we’d reached the summit except that Mr. Watanabe said we’d reached the summit and should stop at a shelter and have something to eat. The crater was there but I couldn’t see it, and the whole of Japan was spread out underneath us but you’d never know it, and there were scores of people all around us but I couldn’t make them out even though they were probably just a few feet away. I didn’t really care. I was completely thrilled just to be on the summit. I was the highest thing in Japan! I wanted to run around the crater, but the wind had picked up to about sixty miles an hour, which would have meant running sideways, if at all.
It is traditional for climbers to mail a letter at the Mount Fuji post office on the summit and to hike around the crater to each of the two shrines on the rim before descending. Mr. Watanabe suggested we should skip the post office and the shrines and simply head down right away. I wanted to stay. We held a vote and it was a tie, but then the wind punched me so hard that I changed my mind. I got the official summit brand burned into my walking stick and then started down into the fog, sliding heel first into the loose pumice, the sheets of rain in my face.
FOR A WHILE, everyone who saw Mount Fuji wanted to write a poem about it or tell a story or make pictures of it. It was described by a writer in the eighth century as “a lovely form capped with the purest white snow . . . reminding one of a well-dressed woman in a luxuriously dyed garment with her pure white undergarments showing around the edge of her collar”—in other words, like a lady with her bra straps showing. Unquestionably, the consummate Fuji artist was the nineteenth-century printmaker Katsushika Hokusai, who made pictures of the peak for seventy years. Hokusai often called himself a crazed art addict and sometimes used the name Hokusai the Madman. Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a collection of his prints, was published around 1823 and was a huge hit in Japan. Hokusai depicted Fuji covered with snow, half-covered with snow, bare, hidden by mist, capped with an umbrella cloud, in nice weather, with pilgrims climbing, with storks bathing in front of it, as seen from the bow of a boat, and viewed from a bridge in Tokyo. In some of the pictures the mountain fills up most of the space, whereas in others it is just a pucker on the horizon while the foreground is dominated by geisha girls loafing around or a guy building a barrel or someone trying to talk his horse into walking over a bridge. A few years later, when Hokusai was seventy-four and worried about his career, he recharged it by publishing a new collection, One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji. It was another huge hit. Hokusai was an inconstant man who moved ninety-three times in his life and changed his name twenty times, but for the seventy years he made pictures of Fuji, his image of the mountain never changed; it was always steep sided, narrow peaked, wide bottomed, solitary, and simply the loveliest mountain you could ever hope to see.
When we got to the bottom of the mountain, Mr. Watanabe apologized for the weather and said he very much wanted me to come back so I could see Mount Fuji on a good day—that is, so I could see Mount Fuji at all. I told him that I wasn’t the least bit disappointed and that anyway this seemed like the Japanese way of seeing the mountain, less with my eyes than with my mind’s eye. I was a material climber, but I had been won over to the conceptual side.
If we wanted a view, I told him, we could always go back to the Ferris wheel at Fujikyu Highland. “I suppose,” Mr. Watanabe said. “However, I do not believe we will have the time or opportunity to ride such a vehicle.” He was right, so we just blotted our soaked clothes and kicked the pebbles out of our boots and caught the next bus back to Tokyo, and before I left Japan I bought myself a copy of Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.
Game Plan
Millie, a spiny anteater with Betty Boop eyes, is the homeliest of the Olympic mascots and also the least athletic. I went to see a real Millie the other day at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo and waited an hour for it to exert itself—to run or walk or do rhythmic gymnastics or even to lap up an army of ants with its tongue, which is what spiny anteaters do best, even though ant lapping is not yet a recognized Olympic sport—but this Millie wasn’t moving. The Summer Olympics were only a few weeks away, but it was still sharply cold in Sydney, and most of the animals at the zoo had their noses tucked under their tails and their backs to the snappy wind. Even in the finest weather, though, spiny anteaters (or echidnas, as they are properly known) are clumsy-looking mammals the size of bowling balls, who toddle around like little drunks and roll up, spines bristling, when they get upset. They are not what you would call “sporty.” The other two official Olympic mascots, Syd the platypus and Olly the kookaburra, are much more athletic than Millie but just as peculiar. Kookaburras are small, husky king-fishers that laugh hysterically at absolutely anything. Platypuses, with their big beaks, furry bodies, flat tails, and webbed feet, look like what mothers always warn you will happen if you buy separates rather than a nice outfit. However un-Olympian Millie, Syd, and Olly may be, they are plastered all over Sydney in what has been described as the biggest Olympics marketing effort in history; you cannot walk down a Sydney street without encountering an Olly stationery set, a Syd bumbag, a Millie sunvisor, or a sheet of stickers showing Olly playing basketball, Syd swinging a bat, and Millie—sluggish, nearly immobile Millie—gaily tapping a Ping-Pong ball. “I’m a typical Australian,” Millie says in a children’s book explaining her Olympic career move. “I’m tough, clever and occasionally a bit spiky. I’m an expert at my chosen occupation, namely digging, and I really like my food.”
Everyone I met in Australia seemed awfully cranky about the Olympics. Maybe sour moods are typical in cities about to host events that are expensive and complicated and guaranteed to tangle traffic for weeks, but Australians seem to have brought cynicism to record-breaking new heights. One of the few things anyone raved about to me was the fact that Air New Zealand was offering a special, all-time-low round-trip airfare out of Australia during the two weeks of the Games. Another was an acidly satirical television series called The Games, about the machinations of the local Olympic committee. Otherwise, attitudes seemed to span the range from indifference to despair. This summer, a new website, www.silly2000.com, was launched to further skewer Sydney 2000; its motto is “Keeping You Sane Through the Games,” and the site includes a countdown to the end of the Olympics and mock stories on equestrian hooliganism and where to buy guns and fast food in Sydney.
I had arrived in Australia expecting—dreading, actually—Olympic delirium, since Australians are usually portrayed as unironic enthusiasts. Once I got over my surprise at their cynicism, though, it struck me as perfectly appropriate; this is, after all, a post-Salt-Lake-City-scandals Olympics. What was going around was a distaste for the local Olympic Committee, antipathy toward the corporate nature of the Games, annoyance at the logistics of the thing, and a bit of anticipatory defensiveness about whether Sydney can actually pull it off.
“We’re probably going to be reading a lot of nasty stories about Sydney now,” a talk show host said to me, sighing heavily. Nasty stories about Sydney, one of the most beautiful, pleasant cities on the planet?
“Ha-ha,” I answered, assuming he was kidding.
He sighed again and said, “Well, I guess we have it coming.” (There have, it seems, been goof-ups. The Sydney medals, for example, appear to depict the Colosseum in Rome rather than the Parthenon in Greece, the birthplace of the Games. “The Australians,” sniffed
Avriani, a Greek daily, “have confused a sports arena with a public execution arena.”)
Even children in Australia are being inoculated against Olympic fever. I figured that Kokey Koala, the main character in Kokey Koala and the Bush Olympics, would embody heroics and prowess, until I turned the book over and read, “Watch Kokey’s disasters as he participates in the Bush Olympics.”
The general grumpiness about the event meant that it was still possible, four weeks before the opening ceremonies, to get tickets to just about anything you wanted—that is, unless Australian postal workers went on strike, as they were threatening to do, and refused to deliver any Olympic tickets unless they got a special bonus.(Sydney hotel workers, keeping pace with the post office, staged a walkout for an Olympic bonus as well.) “We were glad when we got it, so let’s get into it!” one radio campaign scolded.
My first night in Sydney, I flipped on the television and saw a commercial that showed an elderly man sitting in a stark white room, talking mournfully into the camera. At first, I thought it was one of those public service ads urging you to wear seat belts or quit smoking, because the man looked so depressed. “No, I didn’t go to the Olympics in 8217;56,” he was saying, referring to the last time Australia hosted the Games, in Melbourne. And, he went on, his life had been a welter of regret ever since. “Rarely do you get a second chance in a lifetime,” he said. “Why would you pass up that opportunity?” Which of course meant, “You will never, ever outlive the remorse and sorrow that I guarantee you if you don’t at least go to a water-polo match or something.” Maybe the ads will work eventually, but for the moment, the Sydney Morning Herald’s “Holiday Accommodation” classified section still listed apartments far from Sydney, under the headline ESCAPE THE OLYMPICS!
My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere Page 21
