Courting Fuji

From Courting Fuji

… Mount Fuji is visible from Tokyo, and on most mornings, particularly during the winter, I can see it from my office window towering over the surrounding hills. It's like the big kid in every class photo—hulking in the background and looming above its contemporaries. Mount Fuji is much more than just a mountain in Japan. It dominates Japanese culture as much as it dominates the landscape; the quintessential image of Japan (for foreigners and Japanese alike) is a picture of Mount Fuji covered in snow with a bullet train and/or cherry blossoms in the foreground. In addition to being an active volcano and a national icon, Mount Fuji is also a massively popular tourist destination. During the height of summer, hordes of Japanese in enormous conga lines inch their way to the top of the mountain with hopes of watching the sun rise. This is to be expected, I guess, in the land of the rising sun: climbing the nation's highest mountain to watch the sun rise has a certain cultural symmetry to it.

For snowboarders living and working in Japan's endless grey urban sprawl, Mount Fuji's height and geometric perfection offers something more. On a clear winter's day, a snow covered Mount Fuji glitters on the horizon like a mirage of some unattainable snowboarding nirvana.…