Climbing Mount Fuji: Routes, Season, Permits and What It Actually Takes

Mount Fuji is 3,776 metres high, which makes it a serious mountain by any measure, and it is also a walk-up with no technical climbing at all, which is why roughly two hundred thousand people a year get to the top. Those two facts sit awkwardly together and they explain almost every problem climbers run into: people arrive treating it as a long staircase and discover that a long staircase at nearly four thousand metres, in weather that changes by the hour, is a different proposition entirely.

The mountain is an active stratovolcano. Its last eruption, in 1707, is known as the Hoei eruption; it blew a crater into the southeast flank that you can still see from the Gotemba side and dropped ash on Edo, a hundred kilometres away. It has been quiet since, but it is monitored, not retired. In 2013 UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site under the cultural criteria rather than the natural ones, recognising the mountain's role in Japanese religion, pilgrimage and art rather than its geology. Fuji has been climbed as an act of worship for centuries, and the summit shrine, the stone huts and the counting of stations up the slope are all inherited from that tradition.

The official climbing season runs roughly from early July to early September. Outside it, the huts are shuttered, the toilets are closed, the buses to the fifth stations mostly stop, and the mountain becomes a genuine winter mountaineering objective on hard ice with severe wind. Prefectural authorities strongly discourage off-season attempts, and people die on Fuji in the shoulder months most years. This guide assumes you are climbing in season.

The Yoshida route on the Yamanashi side is the one most people mean when they say they climbed Fuji. It starts from the Fuji Subaru Line 5th Station at around 2,300 metres, has by far the highest concentration of mountain huts, the most first aid provision, and separate ascent and descent trails for much of its length. It is also the busiest, and in peak season the final switchbacks above the eighth station can back up into a slow-moving queue before dawn. If it is your first big mountain, or you are climbing without a guide, this is the sensible choice, and it is the easiest to reach from Tokyo.

Subashiri starts lower on the east side and spends its first few hours in forest, which is a real pleasure after the bare cinder of the other routes, then breaks out above the treeline and merges with the Yoshida trail high up, around the eighth station. It is quieter than Yoshida but shares its crowded upper section. Its descent includes a long run of soft volcanic sand that is much faster than a rocky path once you trust it.

Gotemba is the longest and starts the lowest, at roughly 1,450 metres, which means the most vertical gain and the fewest huts. Its reward is solitude and the Osunabashiri, the Great Sand Run, a descent through deep ash where you can cover ground startlingly fast. The Prince Route, a variant that starts higher at Fujinomiya's fifth station and traverses across to join Gotemba, is a common way to get Gotemba's quiet descent without its punishing ascent. Fujinomiya on the Shizuoka side is the shortest in distance and the steepest in gradient, starting from the highest fifth station at around 2,400 metres. Short does not mean easy: it is a single narrow trail used in both directions, rockier underfoot, and the high start gives your body the least time to adjust.

For most of its modern history Fuji was free to climb, with a voluntary conservation donation collected at the fifth station. That changed after years of overcrowding and a rising accident count. Yamanashi Prefecture introduced a mandatory climbing fee on the Yoshida route along with a daily cap on the number of climbers and a gate that closes overnight to stop people starting a night ascent without a hut booking. Shizuoka Prefecture subsequently brought in fees for the Subashiri, Gotemba and Fujinomiya routes.

The amounts, the cap number and the gate hours have all been revised between seasons, so treat any figure you read on a travel blog with suspicion, including this one. What has stayed consistent is the shape of the system: you reserve and pay online in advance where reservation is offered, you carry proof, and if you intend to pass the gate late in the day you need a confirmed hut booking to do it. Reserve early. The Yoshida cap is reached on the busiest summer weekends.

There is a separate, older payment you will still be asked for at the trailhead in some seasons: a conservation contribution, historically around a thousand yen, which funds trail maintenance and rescue. It is worth paying regardless of whether it is framed as voluntary.

The single most common reason people turn back is not fitness. It is altitude sickness, and the mistake that causes it is made at the bottom, not the top. Bus passengers are lifted from near sea level to a fifth station at 2,300 to 2,400 metres in about two hours, then start walking immediately. That is a rapid gain by any standard, and it is why headache, nausea and dizziness are so common above the seventh station.

The standard mitigation is dull and effective: spend at least an hour, ideally two, at the fifth station before you start walking. Eat something. Drink steadily, well before you feel thirsty. Then climb deliberately slowly, slower than feels natural, and treat any pace that leaves you breathing hard as too fast. Sleeping a few hours in a hut at the seventh or eighth station gives your body a further several hours at altitude and is the best acclimatisation available on a one-night climb.

Canned oxygen is sold everywhere on the mountain. It relieves symptoms briefly, but it does not acclimatise you and it is not a fix. The only reliable treatment for altitude sickness is descent, and descending a few hundred metres usually resolves it quickly. If your headache is not responding to rest and fluids, or if anyone in your group becomes confused or unsteady on their feet, go down. The summit will be there next year.

Mountain huts run from roughly the fifth station to the ninth, thickest on the Yoshida route. What you are buying is a place in a communal sleeping platform, usually a mattress space in a row with a shared blanket, plus a hot meal, typically curry rice, and a slot to leave at an ungodly hour. They are not comfortable, they are not private, and they are close to essential if you want a decent chance at the summit sunrise without wrecking yourself. Book weeks ahead for weekends.

Bullet climbing means climbing straight through the night from the fifth station to the summit without a hut rest, timed to hit the top at dawn. It is popular because it saves a night's cost, and it is the single behaviour the prefectural authorities have campaigned hardest against. You are ascending 1,400 vertical metres, in the dark, in the cold, with no sleep and no acclimatisation stop, and the accident and rescue statistics reflect it. The overnight gate closure on the Yoshida route exists specifically to stop it.

If your schedule genuinely cannot accommodate a hut night, the safer alternative is a full daylight climb: start early in the morning, summit in the early afternoon, descend, and accept that you will not see the sunrise from the top. You will see Fuji's shadow and a great deal more of the mountain than you would in the dark.

Goraiko is the word for the sunrise seen from the summit, and it carries religious weight; the term comes from the arrival of a divine presence. In practice it means standing on a cold, wind-scoured rim, in a crowd, waiting for the sun to come up over the Pacific and the cloud sea below. It is genuinely worth the effort, and it is genuinely miserable if you are underdressed. It can be near freezing at the top in August with wind on top of that.

Ohachi-meguri is the walk around the crater rim, ohachi meaning the bowl. The circuit takes roughly an hour to ninety minutes and takes you past the summit shrine, the old weather station buildings, and the highest point. Almost everyone skips it because they are cold and tired at dawn, which is a shame, because the crater itself is the most interesting thing on the mountain and looks nothing like the smooth cone you see from below.

Kengamine, on the southwest of the rim, is the true 3,776-metre high point and carries the summit marker. If you arrive at the top of the Yoshida trail, you are on the rim but not at the highest point, and reaching Kengamine means walking part of the circuit including a short steep pull. If summiting Japan's highest point matters to you as a fact rather than an experience, plan the extra time for it.

Layers, in this order of importance: a genuinely windproof and waterproof shell, an insulating mid layer, gloves, and a hat. The mountain generates its own weather, cloud rolls in with little warning, and the temperature difference between the fifth station on a summer afternoon and the summit before dawn can be twenty degrees or more before you account for wind chill. Cotton is the wrong choice at every layer.

Boots or trail shoes with real grip and ankle support, already broken in. The descent trails on Yoshida and Gotemba are deep loose ash, and gaiters keep it out of your shoes; many climbers improvise with the plastic bags sold at the fifth station. A headtorch with fresh batteries is mandatory for any night section, and holding a phone light does not count. Bring cash in small denominations. Huts, toilets and summit vending all take coins and notes, card acceptance is patchy, and prices climb with the altitude, which is fair given everything is carried or tractored up.

Carry your own rubbish down. There are no bins on the mountain, and the litter problem on Fuji was severe enough to complicate its World Heritage bid. The toilets are composting or chemical and ask for a small fee per use, again in coins. Finally, watch the typhoon forecast in late August and early September; a route can close at short notice, and the honest answer to bad weather on Fuji is to not be on it.

For Yoshida, the usual approach is to Kawaguchiko or Fujisan Station, by the Fuji Excursion limited express from Shinjuku or a highway bus, then a connecting bus up the Fuji Subaru Line toll road to the 5th Station. Private cars are barred from the toll road during much of the climbing season, so almost everyone shuttles up from a car park lower down regardless.

Fujinomiya's fifth station is reached from Shin-Fuji or Mishima on the Tokaido Shinkansen by bus, which makes it the natural route if you are coming from Kyoto or Osaka rather than Tokyo. Gotemba and Subashiri are served by buses from Gotemba Station, which is also on the Odakyu network from Shinjuku, so it combines cleanly with a Hakone leg either side of the climb.

A sensible itinerary is to sleep near the base the night before, at Kawaguchiko or Fujiyoshida for Yoshida, rather than travelling from Tokyo on the morning of the climb. It removes the pre-dawn logistics from the hardest day of the trip and gives you a decent chance at seeing the mountain from below, which you will not do from halfway up it.