Mount Fuji stands alone on a plain southwest of Tokyo, 3,776 metres of almost perfect cone with nothing near it tall enough to spoil the outline. That isolation is why the shape is famous. Hokusai's woodblock prints carried this exact silhouette out into the world, and it is still the one image everyone recognises as Japan. But the country knew it as a holy mountain long before it was a view. The shrine on the summit belongs to Konohanasakuya-hime, goddess of blossoms and of volcanoes, and she is the one held to keep the fire underneath at rest. For most of its life as a sacred peak the mountain was closed to women, held to be ritually impure on holy ground, until 1872. The fire is not a metaphor. Three volcanoes are stacked inside that smooth profile, two of them buried under the one you can see.
You meet Fuji from a distance, which is how it was meant to be met, and on many days you do not meet it at all. It sits under cloud more often than not, and cold dry winter air clears it best, usually in the first hour after dawn. The places to stand are at its northern foot, around the Fuji Five Lakes. Four hundred steps climb from Arakura Sengen Shrine to the Chureito Pagoda, five red storeys that line up with the snow on the cone behind, and for a week or two each April the cherry trees close a pink frame around it. On a still morning Lake Kawaguchi holds the mountain upside down on the water. Quieter Sai and Shoji are better by bicycle, the summit appearing and disappearing between the pines. Then there is the one night that turns all of this around. Climbers on the Yoshida Trail sleep a few hours in a hut high on the route, then walk the last stretch in the dark to reach the crater rim for goraikō, sunrise seen from above a floor of cloud. It is the only place in Japan where you have Mount Fuji and cannot see it.