The summit
has no official address.

The claim that "everything above the 8th station on Mount Fuji is privately owned by an individual (or corporation)" sounds so bold it's often dismissed as urban legend — but it's actually a legal fact settled by Japan's Supreme Court. During the Edo period, the shogunate (the Tokugawa family) is said to have donated the summit area to Fujisan Hongu Sengen Taisha, the shrine at the mountain's foot. Even through Meiji-era modernization and postwar land reorganization, the question of ownership was never fully resolved, and the land remained unregistered for a long time.

From the 1970s onward, litigation continued between the state and Sengen Taisha over ownership of the summit area. After 17 years of dispute, the Supreme Court in 2004 ruled — upholding the first and second instance decisions — that the summit was "land necessary for the shrine's religious activities," affirming the shrine's ownership. In other words, legally, the broad area above the 8th station on Mount Fuji remains the private property of Fujisan Hongu Sengen Taisha to this day.

Surprisingly, no official border has actually ever been drawn between Shizuoka and Yamanashi Prefectures in the area above the 8th station. The two prefectures have never reached agreement on fixing this boundary, so the summit region remains, administratively, in limbo — belonging to neither prefecture.

For the same reason, the Mount Fuji summit has no official address or lot number. Because the "lot number" identifying land location is undetermined, even facilities built at the summit, such as the former Mount Fuji Weather Station, are technically buildings with no registered address. That such a famous national symbol's summit has neither address nor prefectural border is one of the most "connoisseur-grade" facts about Mount Fuji.

Since the 1980s, a theory circulated among some independent researchers and occult-leaning books and sites holds that "Mount Fuji isn't a natural mountain, but a giant artificial pyramid built by an ancient super-civilization," and that "Takamagahara" — the setting of Japanese mythology — lies hidden in ruins at Fuji's foot. Proponents often point to the old 1,000-yen note, which depicted Mount Fuji and Lake Motosu on its reverse, as evidence that "even the currency hides the secret."

Katsushika Hokusai's celebrated print "Fine Wind, Clear Morning," popularly known as "Red Fuji," made widely known the phenomenon where the mountainside glows reddish-brown in the early morning light from summer into autumn. This is no supernatural event — it's a well-defined atmospheric and optical phenomenon that occurs under specific conditions: when the slopes are bare of snow with exposed bare rock, and light hits at a certain angle during the low-sun hours near dawn. Because the timing and season are limited, photography enthusiasts read the conditions and gather at the mountain's foot when "today looks promising for red Fuji" — a genuinely connoisseur-grade shooting target.

Equally popular among photographers is "Diamond Fuji" — when the summit aligns with the sun (at sunrise or sunset) so the peak glints like a diamond. Because the location and date/time can be calculated fairly precisely through astronomical prediction, it has become a pilgrimage circuit of sorts, with photographers checking the calendar ahead of time and gathering at the right viewing spots. "Pearl Fuji," when the moon aligns with the summit instead, offers a similarly rare celestial-meets-terrain spectacle.

As covered on the "Lava Caves" page, Hitoana is a World Heritage-registered sacred site where Fuji-ko founder Kakugyo practiced austerities. But locally, it has also long carried folklore rooted in awe — that misbehaving inside the cave invites a curse, or that its depths lead to another world. Edo-period records even include an anecdote of a samurai's attendant who entered Hitoana and was never seen again, hinting that the cave was regarded not merely as a tourist site but as something to be feared.

An ascetic who died fasting, a woman who climbed in disguise, a foreign diplomat who first summited the mountain — the next page traces the real lives behind Mount Fuji's most astonishing figures.