Walking Fuji

A personal reflection on a majestic mountain

(Part one of my walk to Fuji is here: From Ashikina to Fuji)

One of the best memories from my childhood was seeing Mount Fuji when I was twelve, from outside a pachinko parlor, drunk on Saki, and dizzy from having been cooked too long in a Japanese hot tub.

Really though, I should say it was one of the best experiences of my childhood, because that’s what my father claimed all our family trips were — experiences.

And they were, given how we traveled. Which was often, for multiple months at a time, to odd parts of the world, on the cheap, and with whichever of us seven kids hadn’t aged out into college or a job. These trips were nominally about his job as a political science professor, but were really reasons for him, and consequently us kids, to experience as much of the world as possible, as cheaply as possible.

Experiencing as much of the world as possible, at every level, was what my father (and mother) believed was the best form of education, something they happily told skeptical school administrators when they dragged us out of school for months on end.

As my older brother Tim recounts¹, my parents would say the same thing to us, if we complained:

Tim: Hey Dad, tomorrow, I’m supposed to start eleveth grade but we’re leaving for three months to India and Nepal tomorrow. What about school?

Dad: It’s okay, you will learn more on this trip than in school.

I am going to torture you by over using the word experience because that’s what my father did to us on these trips. Whenever we were in the middle of something arduous, dangerous, or especially weird— which happened a lot on these trips— and expressed any annoyance, fear, or confusion, he’d gleefully remind us, “It’s an experience!”

He told us “It’s an experience!” so often, it became my family’s sarcastic phrase whenever bad things happened to us. “Oh shit, I think my collar bone’s broke. What an experience though!”

I was the youngest of the seven, and so by the time the time I was twelve, it was just me and one brother, Peter, that went on the East Asia trip, tracing a path of experiences through Korea, Taiwan, Philippines (to visit another brother in the Peace Corps), and then finally Japan.

It won’t surprise you that we traveled a lot like I travel now, to the less touristy parts rather than the fancy parts, which was driven as much by my parents being cheapskates as by their ideology.

The weekend I saw Mount Fuji was a rare exception. My father had been invited to give a talk at a nearby university and the school put us in a fancy place, a traditional retreat, with traditional Japanese things like hot baths and long meals with lots of drinking.

The retreat was supposed to be in the shadow of Mount Fuji, but when we arrived there was no shadow because Mount Fuji was encased in gloomy low hanging clouds, a disappointment, since I was excited about finally seeing in the flesh what had been on every book cover on Japan I’d read before our trip.

After checking in, we immediately were taken to a lunch by professors from the university, where there was lots of bowing, followed by lots of weird food and shots of saki. My father’s quirky parenting included an overly broad and stubborn sense of inclusion and equality, so when the saki bottle was passed around, he insisted on filling me and my brother’s cup, because no one should be denied that experience, even a super skinny twelve year old.

I hated it, but I pretended I didn’t, and tried my darnedest to keep up with all the toasting, until my mother finally intervened.

An hour later, feeling especially giddy and experiential, I joined my father in the sauna for a traditional Japanese hot bath, which in retrospect was far more dangerous for a twelve year old than getting buzzed on saki.