Japan’s holy cone last erupted while Edo still ruled
Mount Fuji, an active stratovolcano on Honshu, rises 3,776.24 metres—Japan’s highest mountain, Asia’s second-highest island volcano after Sumatra’s Kerinci, and Earth’s seventh-highest island peak. Its last eruption burned from 1707 to 1708, yet the symmetrical, snow-capped cone still defines the skyline about 100 kilometres southwest of Tokyo.
Counted among Japan’s Three Holy Mountains with Tate and Haku, Fuji joined UNESCO’s World Heritage list as a Cultural Site on 22 June 2013 for centuries of pilgrimage and art; twenty-five related cultural properties are recognised, including the Fujisan Hongū Sengen Taisha shrine. Snow cloaks the summit about five months a year, though in 2024 the cap did not form until 6 November, the latest date since records began in 1894. After 1600, when Edo became capital, Tōkaidō travellers made the cone a national visual obsession.
Kanji 富 and 士 were applied by sound long after the name Fuji existed; folk tales link it to “immortal,” “without equal,” or “never-ending,” while Vovin suggests Eastern Old Japanese “fire master.” An old claim that the name comes from an Ainu word for fire is rejected by modern scholars. The summit was long closed to women, yet Tatsu Takayama climbed it anyway in the autumn of 1832, forty years before a government edict of 4 May 1872 abolished such exclusions. Sir Rutherford Alcock made the first ascent by a foreigner in September 1860.
The mountain sits where the Eurasian, North American and Philippine Sea plates meet, with the Pacific Plate diving beneath all three. Geologists recognise four building phases, from a buried andesite core found in 2004 through Old Fuji, formed about 100,000 years ago, to the New Fuji cone of roughly the last 10,000 years. The main crater is 780 metres across and 240 metres deep, and more than 100 parasitic cones line up through the summit.
The Hōei eruption began on 16 December 1707, blasted out a new crater and a secondary summit called Mount Hōei on the southeast flank, and dusted provinces as far as Musashi with ash before stopping around 1 January 1708. Nothing has erupted since, but a magnitude 6.2 quake struck just south of the mountain on 15 March 2011. In 1966 lee-wave turbulence downwind of the peak tore apart BOAC Flight 911, killing all 124 people aboard.
Source: Mount Fuji
