Japan’s Favorite Snowy Mountain Finally Has Some Snow

Mount Fuji, the country’s tallest summit, is revered for its snowy peak. A snowfall reported on Wednesday ended its longest snowless period in 130 years.

Mount Fuji looms large as Japan’s tallest mountain and one of its most enduring national symbols. Its snowy peak has inspired countless paintings and poems over the centuries, and more recently been featured on travel brochures and merchandise.

But this year, Fuji went without its snow cap for the longest period since records began 130 years ago. While smatterings of snow usually begin to appear in early October, the mountain’s peak remained bare into November. The first observable snow on Fuji was reported early Wednesday morning, the local news media said.

The mountain has long been revered as a spiritual, political and cultural symbol, in part because its snowy cap — which often remains even as smaller mountaintops thaw — is said to lend it an eternal quality. As October turned to November, many Japanese found its bare peak disquieting.

“This is the first time we haven’t seen snow on the mountain in November,” said Takefumi Sakaki, an official from Fujiyoshida City, at the foot of the mountain. “Everyone feels strange not seeing snow in November.”

At 12,389 feet tall, Mount Fuji is an active volcano that is covered in snow for most of the year. But for about two months between July and September, climbers are allowed to trek on its conical slopes.

On average, the first snow falls on Mount Fuji on Oct. 2. If Nov. 6 is officially confirmed as the first-snowfall date, it would be the latest since the Japan Meteorological Agency’s records started in 1894.

For the past month, officials in Fujiyoshida City have woken up every day at 5 a.m. and peered out their windows, hoping to glimpse the first snow of the season so they could announce it, Mr. Sakaki said.

Snow appeared to have fallen on Mount Fuji overnight on Wednesday, Mr. Sakaki said, but cloud cover prevented local officials from making a definitive confirmation. The local news media published photos showing a dusting of snow on the mountain’s peak.

This year, which tied 2023 for the hottest summer on record in Japan, unseasonably warm weather stretched deep into autumn. Tomoki Tanaka, a researcher at a meteorological office about 20 miles north of Fuji, said that while many factors likely contributed to the delayed snowfall, climate change undeniably played a role.

Mount Fuji has long been seen as a symbol of immortality in Japan’s Shinto and Buddhist traditions. In the country’s oldest known anthology of poems, the Man’yoshu, compiled in the 8th century, the poet Yamabe no Akahito described Fuji as a divine peak that had stood “since the parting of heaven and earth.”

In Japan’s ancient capitals, Kyoto and Nara, few people would have seen Mount Fuji for themselves, over 150 miles away.

But people of that era told stories of a mountain that, unlike those around Kyoto that changed with the seasons, had snow on its peak nearly all the time, said Timon Screech, an art historian at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto.

“Fuji was seen to be bigger than anything else — magisterial and standing outside the normal passage of the seasons, which gave it a kind of immutability,” he said.

When Japan moved its capital to Tokyo in the 1600s, residents there could see Mt. Fuji, just 60 miles away, on clear days. Depictions of the mountain became more realistic, and many artworks showed Mount Fuji in its snowy state.

In the 1830s, Katsushika Hokusai’s “36 views of Mount Fuji,” series, which included the famous “Under the Wave off Kanagawa,” helped to popularize the image of the mountain abroad.

Over the centuries, the mountain was occasionally depicted with little or no snow. But it was generally not shown without its snowy cap, said Radu Leca, an assistant professor at Hong Kong Baptist University’s Academy of Visual Arts.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the expression “summer Fuji” was used to describe something or someone that was bare or naked, such as Kabuki theater actors seen without their traditional full-faced makeup, Dr. Leca said.

“Think of it as a person without clothes,” he added. “It’s a bit embarrassing.”

Over the years, Fuji has also been fashioned into a political symbol.

During the Edo period, which ran from the 1600s to the 1800s, the shoguns, the military leaders who ruled in Tokyo, promoted the peak as a symbol of the stability of the country under their reign, Professor Screech said.

In the early 20th century, Fuji was used as a nationalist symbol to invoke Japanese uniqueness and superiority, he said. And after Japan’s loss in World War II, its meaning shifted again to become a symbol of Japan’s cultural continuity.

The prospect of such a symbol being altered drives home the impact of climate change, he said.

“When something that’s supposed to be an icon of eternal Japanese selfhood is being altered because of climate change," he said, “it’s kind of like, ‘Wow, something’s really changing here.’”

Judson Jones contributed reporting.

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