Mt. Fuji

is a mountain that only came to symbolize Japan after the emergence of an international self-consciousness that sprouted due to the country's opening in the mid-nineteenth century.

Kawata (2008, 7) who argues that Mt. Fuji only came to symbolize Japan after the emergence of an “international self-consciousness that sprouted due to the opening of [Japan]” in the mid-nineteenth century. p.256

is a mountain that, until modern times, was not central to Japan. In fact it was a peripheral symbol, a boundary marking the outer limits of the emperor's civilizing influence and the eastern limit of ethnic and cultural “Japan.”

Mt. Fuji's status as national symbol, however, is neither so timeless nor so natural as the mountain itself . . . the construction of Mt. Fuji as a core symbolic site of Japanese national identity is a relatively recent, and ongoing, process. Before the seventeenth century, when both formal cultural production and its largely elite audience were centered in Kyoto and the capital region, the distant Mt. Fuji, though recognized as a “sacred mountain” (reizan), was essentially a peripheral symbol, a boundary marking the outer limits of the emperor's civilizing influence and the eastern limit of ethnic and cultural “Japan.” Use monogatari, an early Heian poem-tale of the culture hero Ariwara no Narihira, sets Mt. Fuji as backdrop to Narihira's “decent into the [barbarous] east” (azusa kudari). Mt. Fuji was at the limits of Japan, rather than central to it.

Ron P. TobyThinkers

Ron P. Toby