Mt Fuji and Itchiku Kobota Art Museum

Another adventure awaited us with Mie our host and Prof. Tsutomu Kambe, our driver and tour guide to Mt. Fuji. Tsutomo, who we saw for lunch at the beginning of our time here, offered to take us by car to Mt. Fuji which he visits frequently.

We met at 7:30 for our 2-hour journey, stopping after an hour on the highway at a rest stop. Now I've been to U.S. rest stops that had a bathroom, picnic benches and a snack bar. Nice. But this was Japanese-style: a huge building with a restaurant, cafeteria, dozens of food stalls, snack bars, gift counters, free hot green tea, etc. It was PACKED with people, too. What was everybody doing there at 8:30am in the middle of the week? The mind boggles.

After our break, we arrived at Mt. Fuji (3,776 meters/12,390 ft) the highest peak in Japan and no doubt the most well-known site. The mountain is open only in July and August for climbing and there are 10 stages. Climbers usually start at stage 5 and it takes about 5 hours to reach the top and most attempt to start at night and try to reach the top by sunrise. Mie said there are about 6,000 hikers a day in the summer and it's very crowded. It's hard to get to the peak by sunrise because of the crowds and the path is blocked. Frustrating.

View of Mt. Fuji from Stage 5 parking lot

We walked along a path at stage 5 for about 1/2 hour. The path is sandy with volcanic rock and can be quite a challenge higher up.

Mie, me, Tsutomo and Miles along the trail at stage 5

View above the clouds from the trail

Mt. Fuji from the road going back down to the valley

The whole region here is quite pretty with forests and 5 lakes and we drove to the nearby Narusawa Ice Cave. We climbed down a tunnel to a cave that is O degrees C. and used to be used to store ice that would be transported to the emperor in Tokyo to cool the palace. It's good to have servants!

Narusawa Ice Cave

We had lunch of delicious local wide-noodle udon soup overlooking Lake Shojin, the smallest of the 5 lakes in the area.


Tsutomo asked if we would like to go on a little walk to a lookout with a good view of Mt. Fuji. Of course! So we walked through a forest, up a hill and then he said, "Turn around". Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather, because there we saw Mt. Fuji bigger than life, RIGHT THERE!!! It took my breath away. And we were so lucky with the weather: clear, a few clouds, the peak was visible.

Wow! Like a postcard
And heeeerrrre's ...... Mt. Fuji!

You'd think things couldn't get any better, right? Well, they did. I had heard about an unusual art museum right by one of the lakes and we decided to check it out.

Itchiku Kubota, who died at 85 in 2003, was a textile artist who spent most of his life devoted to modernizing the ancient silk-dyeing technique called "tsujigahana"--dyeing fabric with multi-colored pictorial patterns. He built his own museum in 1994 near his beloved Mt. Fuji which is in itself a masterpiece of architecture: the entrance to the beautiful Japanese garden and museum is a huge ancient wooden gate from India (heavy and imposing, loaded with iron spikes, probably to scare away intruders).

Entrance gate to mueum

Garden with waterfalls and rocks

There was even a section of an outdoor courtyard that reminded us of Gaudi's Park Guell in Barcelona:

Gaudi-like "grotto" area

Unfortunately, there were no pictures allowed inside. DARN. The interior of the main exhibit hall is in a pyramid shape of 1000-year old cedar beams. Now for the art: here is his life-work consisting of 40 silk kimonos, all lined up along the perimeter of the hall, called "Symphony of Light" representing the four seasons and the universe. His vision was to have 80 pieces in these series. He died before he could finish and his family and apprentices are continuing his work.

Each kimono is a part of a whole picture like many parts of a mural. The striking thing is not only the exquisite colors produced with multiple dyeing stages, but the textures: he would stitch the fabric in such a way to "hide" the dye and then pull some of the strings to create lumps and bumps in the fabric, much like a topographical map. The texturing was quite varied and depicted nature scenes, especially Mt. Fuji. Another scene equally important to him was of the Siberian sunset. (He spent 3 years in Siberia as a POW during WWII and never forgot the impact of the sunsets there). Totally amazing and Itchiku wanted the kimonos fully exposed and not under glass like at regular museums, so visitors could look at each piece closely. Thank you, Itchiku! What a priviledge! It takes a year to complete each kimono-canvas and it seems like the most difficult and tedious process. He even said in the video, "I'm so short-tempered. Why am I doing this?" But what art! I know you want a picture, fortunately we found one on the web which illustrates this extraordinary beauty.

We then left beautiful Mt. Fuji and Itchiku's art and drove back to Tokyo. What a thrilling day.