For the Japanese, Mount Fuji has never been just a mountain.
It is an object of faith, a spiritual anchor, a symbol of Japan itself. The people of the Edo period felt something extraordinary about Fuji too — which is why Hokusai spent a lifetime drawing it.
1. Fuji as a Sacred Mountain
During the Edo period, popular devotion to Mount Fuji spread rapidly among ordinary people. Groups called fujikō — pilgrim associations dedicated to climbing Fuji — sprang up all over Edo, and the mountain drew a steady stream of devoted climbers.
But not everyone could make the journey. Too far, too expensive, too frail — for those who couldn’t go, Edo’s neighborhoods built miniature replicas of Fuji called fujizuka: small earthen mounds sculpted in the mountain’s image. Those who couldn’t climb the real thing could at least climb a small version near home and offer their prayers.
This was the world of Fuji devotion that Hokusai was drawing into when he created Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.
2. Why Does “Thirty-Six Views” Have Forty-Six Prints?
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji launched in 1831, exactly as the title suggests: thirty-six ways of seeing the mountain.
Then it became so popular that Hokusai added ten more. The final series ran to forty-six prints — but the title stayed the same.
There’s something rather charming about that, isn’t there? It simply got carried away by its own success.
The ten additions are sometimes called ura fuji (the “reverse Fuji” series), and they feature perspectives and compositions quite different from the original thirty-six.
3. Masterworks Beyond The Great Wave
The Great Wave off Kanagawa is the most famous print in the series, but there are others well worth your attention.
Gaifū Kaisei — known as “Red Fuji”
Fuji at dawn in early summer, floating in reddish air, still and powerful. Where The Great Wave is turbulent, Red Fuji is calm — a different kind of greatness.
Sanka Hakuu — known as “Black Fuji”
The summit in bright sunshine, while a thunderstorm rolls across the lower slopes. Weather in two registers at once — a showcase of Hokusai’s compositional intelligence.
The prints where Fuji almost disappears
Some works in the series show Fuji reduced to a tiny shape in the corner of the frame. There’s a kind of game in finding it — which might be exactly the joke Hokusai intended.
4. Hiroshige’s Fuji: A Different Vision
After Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views made its mark, Utagawa Hiroshige published his own Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Seeing the same mountain through two master artists is one of the great pleasures of ukiyo-e.
Hokusai’s Fuji is structural and dramatic — geometric, bold, designed for impact.
Hiroshige’s Fuji is lyrical and atmospheric — softened by haze, rain, distance, and a feeling of being somewhere on a journey.
Which you prefer is a matter of sensibility. But place them side by side, and the same mountain shows you two completely different faces.
5. Fuji Today
In 2013, Mount Fuji was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List — not as a natural site, but as a cultural one. That distinction speaks to how deeply this mountain is woven into Japan’s art and history.
Hokusai drew it. Hiroshige drew it. Contemporary artists are drawing it still. The act of depicting Fuji has never stopped.
6. A Journey to See Fuji Through Ukiyo-e Eyes
What if you compared the Fuji in the prints with the Fuji in front of you?
From Kawaguchiko in Yamanashi, or from Miho no Matsubara in Shizuoka, the views that Hokusai and Hiroshige captured in their prints are still waiting for you. When you arrive carrying those compositions in your head, the landscape looks different.
A Final Thought
Fuji changes its face depending on where you stand.
From across the sea, through the gap between buildings, breaking through a break in the clouds — the way each artist chose to frame the mountain tells you something about how they saw the world, and about the spirit of the age they lived in. Hokusai used forty-six prints and still didn’t feel finished with it, because Fuji is a subject that doesn’t allow itself to be completed.
The same artist who, in his seventies, gave us The Great Wave — kept coming back to this mountain. Whenever I look at Fuji now, that fact rises quietly to the surface.
References
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji — metmuseum.org
- Yamanashi Prefectural Museum, Fuji materials
- Henry D. Smith II, Hokusai: One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, Braziller, 1988
- Cynthia J. Bogel, Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave, Thames & Hudson, 2017
Image Credit
- Cover image: Katsushika Hokusai, Ejiri in Suruga Province (東海道江尻田子の浦略図), from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1831 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
