Mainichi reported that litter and other trash are piling up on Japan’s sacred Mount Fuji…
“If you look up from the forests at the foot of Japan’s Mount Fuji, the volcano’s graceful slopes rise into the distance and peak in a nearly symmetrical, snowcapped cone.
If you look down in the forests, however, you see something much less elegant: trash… lots of it. Just below the surface of leaves and topsoil are discarded microwave ovens, construction debris, broken office furniture, even rusting refrigerators.
Mount Fuji, the pride of the nation and symbol of the Japanese soul, is a huge garbage dump.”
Mount Fuji is one of the most iconic landmarks in Japan (probably around the world as well). Each year, about 200,000 Japanese and foreign tourists climb the 3,753m mountain, and many have found foul toilets at way stations and garbage scattered along the paths.
Government officials and activists agree that the problems along the paths are now largely under control.
The real problem, they say, is the trash dumped around the foot of the mountain by businesses and people who live nearby.
The sorry state of Mount Fuji might be a stumbling block in Japan’s campaign to get Mt Fuji listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
In the mid-1990s, activists and local officials asked officials from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to evaluate informally Fuji’s chances for joining the list, said Fujisan Club official Naoko Aoki.
“‘Not good’ was the answer, and trash management was one of the reasons,” she said.
That spurred some Japanese to action. The Fujisan Club (Fuji-san means Mount Fuji in Japanese) was formed in 1998 and now has about 1,100 members. The group organizes regular, all-day cleanups of the mountain.
“Picking it up is not enough, people have to learn not to create so much in the first place,” Ken Noguchi, mountaineer and environmental activist, told volunteers over the Internet in mid-April from Mount Everest, where he led an extensive cleanup campaign.
Despite the trash woes, Japan is stepping up its campaign to get Fuji on the UNESCO list. In January, the government announced it was adding Fuji to the list of tentative Japanese candidates for the World Heritage Committee to consider at a meeting this month in New Zealand.