Andrew Bernstein (2:21)

Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Hans Wagenberg (2:23)

So Andy, what brought you to write this book? I mean, why Fuji is obvious, but because it's there?

Andrew Bernstein (2:31)

Isn't that what George Mallory said about Mount Everest? That's why he climbed it? Yeah. Well, to be honest, when I began researching Fuji about 20 years ago. I didn't set out to write an interdisciplinary history of the mountain that spans tens of thousands of years. Back then, I was actually interested in. In the impact of Meiji period regulations and then US Occupation policies on temple and shrine lands. And in the course of my research, I stumbled across a really strange legal and political dispute over who owns the Summit of Fuji, a Shinto shrine at the base of the mountain that worshiped the mountain as its deity or the Japanese state. And before and During World War II, this wasn't an issue, because with state Shinto, the shrine was at the same time. Right. Its own entity, but also state property.

Hans Wagenberg (3:27)

Right.

Andrew Bernstein (3:28)

Because of state Shinto. But this changed during the US occupation after World War II because there was this new mandate to strictly separate Shinto and the state and more broadly, religion and the state. And this meant looking at these shrine and temple lands around Japan and figuring out what's religious land and what's public land. And in many cases, this was pretty straightforward. But what do you do with something like a mountain, a waterfall. Right. That kind of thing. And there was this huge debate over who owns Fujian. And this debate was particularly heated because Fuji was not just a. A sacred mountain, but also the symbol of Japan, a part of Japan that stood for all of Japan. So I gave a presentation on this conflict at the association for Asian Studies as part of a panel called sacred mountains in 20th century Japan. And I was using this as a way to think about changing understandings of religion and the state in legal terms. And then after I gave my talk, there was someone in the audience who asked a very curious question. He said, but where's the mountain? And what he meant by that was, what about the mountain hood of Fuji? Right. How does that play into the story? And first I thought, this is a very odd question, right? What does that have to do with this territorial dispute to reveal changing understandings of the relationship of religion and the state? But I have to say, the question really stuck with me. And I thought, yeah, what about Fuji as a mountain? And what that means in the case of Fuji is, what about Fuji as a volcano? And then how does the fact that it's a volcano affect, over time, the ways people have interacted with it, both physically and in the imagination? And so that set me on this very, very long path of researching Fuji in all of its facets, from its geological origins to its designation as a World heritage site in 2013. So this took me into gender relations, volcanology, peasant protest poetry, the list goes on. And on. So it was kind of a crazy project. So it started out with just looking at this one little dispute over the summit, and then it just kind of went from there. And I thought, Fuji is a great subject in so many ways. Right. One, it's super famous. So I was thinking of aiming the book not only at academics, but general readers. And so I thought general readers would be drawn into a bigger history of Japan through looking at this world famous mountain. And of course, so much has been written about it too, that there was so much material to work with. And this was both an advantage. It allowed me to tell this very rich, complex history of Fuji, but it was also extremely challenging at the same time. So here we are. That's how the process got going.

Hans Wagenberg (6:41)

Yeah, you certainly found a mountain. You write, this is in a book. And this is actually, for me, very inspiring. It's kind of threw me back to grad school and this whole idea of deep history, geological history, and how to think about history, not just of people, but of places. And you write the book is a biography of mountain. So in what ways Fuji here, as an actor, there's something that you repeat throughout the book. Fuji is not just there.

Andrew Bernstein (7:09)

Yeah, exactly. Well, most obviously it acts by erupting. So it's a volcano and it's a young volcano. So this means that it's not just a backdrop for human history. Fuji grew up together with humans. So what we call old Fuji, this is the edifice that is underneath the current edifice or cone that we call new Fuji. That one began growing only about 100,000 years ago, which is actually not that far back in terms of geological time. And the Fuji we see today, the cone that's on top of this older cone, this new Fuji, started growing only about 17,000 years ago and really became active from around 11,000 years ago. And humans have been in the vicinity of Fuji for about 38,000 years. So Fuji grew up among humans, together with humans. And these eruptions over time, of course, have caused devastation, but they've also created a particular landscape with particular types of soil and particular conditions that determined how people would use this terrain for agriculture and other purposes. Also, it's really important to note that being an extremely tall volcano near the Pacific, there's plenty of precipitation that falls on Fuji in the form of snow and rain. And this precipitation makes its way down through the mountain and comes out in the form of springs and rivers and lakes at the base of the mountain. And this water has been used for centuries to do everything from or has been Used from everything from purification rituals for pilgrims going up the mountain to supplying paper mills that produce paper at the base of Fuji. So it's an actor in these two senses, I would say, one, through its volcanic activity and two, by particularly supplying water for these different purposes.

Hans Wagenberg (9:24)

Yeah, and we can go back to this later, but this distinction throughout the book between the mountain and the people who live in around and what it make of them, you opened the literature and you open, I think chapter one with a poem from Manusho. Right. And there's also, I mean, does Natsume Suseki also make an appearance, I mean, throughout the book? And you show how Fuji was actually was made by humans as much as it made human society. Right. So for example, in chapter two, from Agri God to parenthood world, I mean, we move beyond more into human history. Now, from deep time, you write that Fuji was a material and culture of shapeshifter that meant different things to different people in pre modern Japan. We're talking about pre modern Japan now. It was, as you say, it was source of life giving water, but also devastating eruptions, a God of epidemics and home of immortals. And while the steam rising from its summit suggested romantic attachment, it was sacred mountain where pilgrims and aesthetics look to transcend mortal cares. I really like these patches because it captures so much of what you're talking about and talk about so much in the first two chapters. Right. So how does. But maybe we just focus on two things, the geological eruptions and human religious competition. How does this made the mountain or the mountain image, we should say.

Andrew Bernstein (10:50)

Right. So if we go back to the 8th century, we find the first written records about Fuji. In fact, the first written record is in something called the Hitachi Fudoki, in which Fuji is compared very unfavorably, interestingly to Mount Tsukuba. And the reason is that there's something called the parent kami that is traveling around and comes to Fuji and asks to be admitted for the night, is asking to rest basically for the night. And the Fuji deity turns away the parent deity and the parent deity curses Fuji, saying, you will be snowy and cold. And so no one's going to want to come and celebrate at Fuji. And then the parent deity goes to Mount Tsukuba and the Tsukuba deity welcomes this parent deity. And so the parent deity blesses Tsukuba, saying, people will come and celebrate on your slopes, there'll be festivals. And so really interesting in this very first depiction of Fujian writing. It's quite negative focusing on the fact that it's so forbidding, so massive, so tall that it's snowy and inhospitable. So we have that image right from the get go. And then of course there's the volcanism. And so it's seen also as this temperamental, violent deity. Yeah. So in the 9th and 10th centuries, for example, when Fuji erupted, there were these divinations that were performed to try to determine what do we do, how do we placate this violent, difficult deity. And there were all these rituals, reading of Buddhist sutras and so forth. But what's interesting is that several of these divinations revealed that Fuji was also a God of epidemics and that these eruptions were portending coming epidemic. So the violence of Fuji in terms of its volcanism was attached to this danger of disease at one and the same time. And so people who didn't live right at the base of Fuji, and this would include courtiers who were often the capital of Heian, several hundred kilometers away, and really out of immediate harm's way from Fuji, they were fearful of epidemics because epidemics could travel to them. Right. So you have these images of Fuji, 1, as cold and forbidding, 2 as this violent deity. This deity that not only caused eruptions, but epidemics. Right. Making it especially fearsome. And all of this meant that it needed to be placated through particular rituals. At the same time, if we look at the Manyoshu, the collection of 10,000 leaves, we also see love poetry, interestingly, that incorporates Fuji. And here, volcanism also comes into play because even when it wasn't violently erupting, there was steam rising from the summit. And this steam came to be associated metaphorically with human passion, with human longing, frustrated longing.

Hans Wagenberg (14:34)

Right.

Andrew Bernstein (14:36)

So again, its tremendous height and its volcanism really fed into the human imagination in these different ways.

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Hans Wagenberg (15:26)

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Hans Wagenberg (16:14)

Yeah, also different gender. I mean, we're going to talk about Fujiko a little bit later. But this Fuji is a woman. Fuji is a hungry God. All those things. And one thing that actually I never thought about it, Fuji actually was far away from the center of Japanese culture because it's a very local mountain for a long time, right? Until the political center and the cultural center moves more and more east, right towards the Kanto region. And at this time you have this actually a break in, let's say from the 12th to the 18th century. Right? Edo is 18th century, but around this time when the Kanto region become more and more important. Not Edo. Right, But Fuji is well behaved, right? Well, ironically, humans are not very well behaved from 12 to 18. But you know, it's the time of the Mongol invasion and then like the decline to civil war, the shogunate and stuff. But then you have the Hoi eruption. And I know we zoomed through like a thousand years here, which we shouldn't, but the whole eruption is very interesting, right? Because I really like this chapter because it really show how you can use something like a volcanic eruption or an earthquake or to show the deep connections between human societies and the landscape. Right? So you write that the eruption broke to the breaking point. The compound state in the ideas of Jinsei and benevolent government. So. And again, zooming towards Edo. I feel bad for ignoring so much of the history here, but what does it tell us about Edo society?

Andrew Bernstein (17:57)

I know with a book that covers so much time, it's difficult to do it all, isn't it? Let's jump to the Hoi eruption, which took place in 1707. So this was the most recent eruption of Fuji, and it was massive, burying nearby villages and as much as 3 meters of debris and spewing up to 8 centimeters of ash over 100 kilometers away. And this eruption buried agricultural fields and wreaked havoc on flood control and irrigation systems that really took decades to repair. And so what it showed really dramatically was just how vulnerable the infrastructure for agriculture was by this time. So this infrastructure had developed tremendously over the 17th century, and it was in harm's way when Fuji erupted. Now, at this time, power was wielded on a national level by the Shogunate, which oversaw foreign relations and implemented certain rules, like a ban on Christianity, that had to be enforced throughout Japan. But at the same time, most of the country consisted of semi autonomous domains ruled by daimyo. And that's why people refer to the Tokugawa regime as a compound state. And this arrangement remained largely intact for about two and a half centuries. So it's successful for quite a while. But like any political system, it had its tensions and contradictions, because generally speaking, domains were supposed to run their own affairs, which included providing relief during famines. But what happened when a domain government didn't have the resources to meet the needs of its subjects? Or if a disaster affected multiple domains, like we see with the Hoe eruption. So that puts this compound state to the test. Yeah. So the domain that suffered the largest impact from the Hawaii eruption was the Odawara domain. And it just didn't have sufficient resources to help peasants who repeatedly appealed to officials for emergency funds. So in response, the Shogun's government expropriated, over half the domain, just took control of it.

Hans Wagenberg (20:22)

I mean, that before. Right.

Andrew Bernstein (20:24)

It was. This expropriation would happen from time to time, but never on this scale for a disaster of this scale. So it wasn't completely unprecedented, but at the same time, yes, it was unprecedented, you could say. Right. So not only did this, and this next thing is completely unprecedented, there was a tax that the Shogunate implemented throughout Japan, the entire country, to help pay for relief efforts and primarily to repair riparian infrastructure, to repair levees and other and flood control systems in general, in what's called the Ashigara plan, to bring agricultural production back. So in any case. So you had this, this flexibility. Right. The Shogunate could, when necessary, muster resources. Right. That ordinarily it couldn't under this system of the compound state. At the same Time. It's interesting to consider that the shogunate temporarily took over Odawara lands to provide direct relief in a way that kept in place the principle of divided governance. Right. That it could only justify providing direct relief by expropriating this land from the Odawara domain. And in the case of future disasters after the Hoi eruption, in fact, the shogunate would provide really loans to daimyo that had to be repaid. So the shogunate's reaction during the Hawaii eruption was more the exception than the rule, you could say. Yeah. Also, the relief offered by the shogun's government was inadequate to keep many people from starving, so villages repeatedly petitioned officials in the years and decades following the eruption to provide more. And what we see here is a real faith in the written word to get things done. So, as I mentioned in my book, James Scott, in his book Seeing Like a State, shows how states try to make populations legible, that is visible, in order to extract resources from them. But the flip side of this legibility, at least in Tokugawa Japan, was that people could make themselves legible to hold the state accountable. The thinking was, if we show you our suffering, you have to do something about it. And that's what we see in these petitions. And in these petitions, we see over and over again this appeal to benevolence, this appeal to compassion. And according to the Confucian worldview of the time, subjects were expected to obey the rulers. But rulers were, according to Confucian values, supposed to in turn, take care of their subjects. Now, the shogunate and domain governments, of course, repeatedly stressed Confucian teachings should legitimize their power.

Hans Wagenberg (23:35)

But.

Andrew Bernstein (23:36)

But invoking the ideal of benevolence was a way for Tokugawa period Japanese to hold their lords to their ideological word. And when the petitions didn't work, they of course would march off right to the domain castle or even threaten to go to Edo, which actually did happen in the weeks following the Houe eruption. So the responses to the eruption, both on the part of officials and on the part of commoners, really, I think, reveals the tensions of the political and moral order in which the shogun shared power with the daimyo of several hundred domains, but within an increasingly nationalized context.

Hans Wagenberg (24:17)

Yeah, and also show how it works. Because I think a lot of what we think about Edo, both in the context of iki, of those peasant uprising and the bakufu ability to deal with national. It's so much painted by the collapse of it in the 19th century and those massive peasant peasant rebellions in the end and beginning of Meiji, when we already see it through the eyes a Westernized kind of idea of political order and relationship between population and states, which is very different. And I think he showed very different. He showed the difference very clearly in the Fuji in relation to the Fuji eruption. And I want to ask also about I want to stay in Edo. And you see my early modern and modern bias here. And I apologize for all my pre modern colleagues for saying I'm going to stay in Edo in the modern period more and talk about religion, which again, is very, very different from our very understanding of religions right now. And the Fujiko, the children of Fuji and which reframe Fuji as a nurturing cosmic presence, which is for me was a bit odd for a violent volcano. So who are those Fujiko and how they transform the religious and social landscape of the mountains? And I was thinking mostly in terms of gender, but we can think about other things like Fujizaka and the way the representation of Fuji kind of went from Fuji around Japan, right?

Andrew Bernstein (25:50)

So Fujiko were Fuji worship groups that really took off from the 17th century and particularly going into the 18th and 19th centuries. And these Fuji worship groups would get together about once a month and perform rituals in the homes of people called Sendatsu. These were leaders. These ritual leaders focused on Mount Fuji. And during the summer months, several people from a particular group from a Fujiko would travel to Fuji on pilgrimage. And the leaders of these groups taught that Fuji was the origin of the cosmos. It was referred to as the original father and mother of Fuji of the world. And what's interesting is that the mountain was imagined in bodily terms. So I use this term, bodyscape, to describe, right, Fuji and its relationship to human bodies. So there are caves, for example, at the base of the mountain called tainai or wombs. These are actually lava tree molds formed when big trees fall and they're covered by lava and they burn slowly enough to leave these big hollow spaces. And when you have a bunch of them fall on top of each other, they form these little cave networks. And so pilgrims would go to these so called tainai, or wombs, and be metaphorically reborn when they would go in and come out of them. And then the water dripping from the ceilings or from into these tainai was compared to breast milk, in fact. And it was thought that if a pregnant woman drank this, she would have a safe delivery. So Fuji was really imagined by these Fujiko in these very human terms, you could say, right, as a kind of human body nourishing and Healing. And what's really interesting to me is that in 1707 you have the whole eruption which we were just talking about, but you don't see it all. You don't see it at all in Fujiko teachings. It just gets ignored, by and large. Not entirely, but for the most part ignored. People saw what they wanted to see, which was this beneficent benevolent deity right. From the 18th century on. I should add too, that these Fujiko built starting at the end of the 18th century, these things called Fujizuka or these Fuji hills, these mini Fujis which you can visit today, by the way, if you go to Tokyo. And these enabled people who couldn't make the trip all the way to Mount Fuji to do these little mini pilgrimages.

Hans Wagenberg (28:44)

This include women, right?

Andrew Bernstein (28:45)

And that would include women? Yeah. Because women were forbidden to go to the summit of Fuji for most of the Tokugawa period, and this was common around Japan and other sacred mountains. Fuji wasn't alone in this. And it was in 1860 that finally, because that was a particularly important year, ritually speaking, that women could actually climb to the summit. And I should add too, that women would secretly go up to the summit, but they were officially banned. And so these mini Fujis gave an opportunity for women to make these mini pilgrimages. Pilgrimages. Because they couldn't make it all the way up to the summit.

Hans Wagenberg (29:30)

Yeah. It's also very hard again, if we try to shed our Western category, it's very hard to put the Fujiko religion in any kind of religious category. Right. I mean, again, the separation of Shinto Buddhism, where would you put this Shugendo? Where would you put Fujiko in this categorization, if you really even have to? I don't think you do, but.

Andrew Bernstein (29:51)

Oh boy. Okay, let's see. Well, it included Buddhist elements, right. So the Fuji deity was called Sengen Bosatsu. And the characters to write Bosatsu were different from the ones written used to write Bodhisattva in general, Bosatva meaning bodhisattva in Japanese, Bodhisattva being a being on the way towards Buddhahood. But it still resonated with Buddhism. And there were certain other Buddhist derived practices, you could say within Fujiko. Then you also had these other folk practices that come from what's called Shugendo. You have forms of kami worship that really can't be fully defined really by Buddhism, let's say, and shugendo. So it's kind of a mix, right, of all these different rituals and beliefs that come together in Fuji worship.

Hans Wagenberg (31:00)

Yeah. Because a lot of times my students ask me about, is it Buddhism? Not about this particular one, but other religious manifestation, or let's say, for example, the deification of the Shogun, something like, is it Buddhist, is it Shinto? It's none of it. It's because those are modern ideas that we have this complete separation. I want to move a little bit from religion to. Even though we can talk much more about this, to the economy and the Edo economy and commercialization. Because I think Fuji. Correct me if I'm wrong, my understanding is that Fuji really became. But we will understand the national phenomena through commercialization, right? Through that became ubiquitous through, like the fact that is, in poetry, in prints, in fashion, on kimono, in maps, in tourist. What we now call tourist guides. And how does this proliferation contribute to Japan becoming proto national or becoming a Japan and Fuji become connected to it?

Andrew Bernstein (32:05)

Right. So as you said, it's during the Tokugawa period that Fuji really circulated all around Japan, through consumer items, through dishware and clothing and so forth. Also through literature, poetry, through artwork of various kinds. And this made Fuji deeply familiar to people. Fuji was incorporated into people's daily lives. You could wear Fuji, right? You could drink out of a cup that had Fuji on it. You had this bodily contact with Fuji, whether you ever saw it in person or not. And this contributed to a sense of Fuji as a Japanese mountain. And so I really would say that Fuji plays a role in this growing sense of Japan as a nation. And in the Edo period too, you have people who explicitly say that foreigners admire Fuji. Right? There is this explicit kind of association of Fuji with Japan in relation to the rest of the world. So it creates a kind of cultural cohesion within Japan and at the same time is increasingly seen as an emblem of Japan. I should say this is not just on the part of Japanese, but foreigners as well.

Hans Wagenberg (33:26)

And also it's very modern, right? It's very much like our own culture where people have seen so many representations of Paris when they're actually in the actual Paris. They don't quite understand it doesn't quite fit. I mean, he had this Paris syndrome. And I had a friend visiting Japan. And so Fuji is like, basically, it's like, is that all it was? You know, he never saw Fuji in the past. And, you know, it is a very impressive mountain, but it is, after all, just a mountain, right? So you have a similar thing. So Edo is like that, right? It's both very modern, very much like our own, but very much not so. Right. And one aspect of it that you already Mentioned is the foreigner aspect. And I want to talk a little bit more about globalization in terms of global commodities. Thinking about Hokusai, Berlin Blue and other things, how does this affect the Fuji becoming a national? We can also talk about mountaineering if we move to Meiji, how does this affect Fuji becoming a national place?

Andrew Bernstein (34:33)

So in both the Tokugawa and Meiji.

Hans Wagenberg (34:35)

Yeah, Tokugawa to Meiji, when Japan becomes part of a global network. So the era of globalization. Right. So you write quite a lot about Berlin Blue. Right, Hokusai. We can talk a little bit about Hokusai in Berlin Blue.

Andrew Bernstein (34:48)

Right, right. So probably, I would argue, the most famous piece of Japanese art in the world is what people often call the Great Wave, which is part of Hokusai's series, the 36 Views of Mount Fuji. There are actually more than 36, but that's what it goes by. We see Fuji from all these different angles, and the Great Wave under the Wave off Kanagawa is the official name of this piece. We see this monstrous wave, and there's Fuji right there on the horizon, this stable focal point. Right. With this giant wave over it. And the blue that Hokusai used here, and not just here, but in other woodblock prints, whether depicting Fuji or not, was actually invented in Europe. And it's called Berlin Blue. And it was introduced to Japan through Dutch traders and Chinese traders in the late Tokugawa period. And when Hokusai, and I should say also Hiroshige, another famous woodblock print artist of the time, was using it, it was seen as this novel, exotic dye that would create these beautiful, beautiful shades of blue. And I think what's interesting is that this piece of art, the Great Wave, but not just that, but other pieces of art in which Fuji appears, that it seems, like I said, quintessentially Japanese, but is incorporating this synthetic dye that was invented in Europe. And so you have these woodblock prints of Fuji that circulate and become famous around the world, and at the same time, they are themselves a product of globalization through the use of this imported dye. Right. So that's just one example of this kind of back and forth in terms of the globalization of Fuji wrapped up in its increasing identification with the Japanese nation.

Hans Wagenberg (37:03)

Yeah, that's endlessly fascinating for me. And also, it's not new like you write in, I think, chapter one, how you have those Chinese inspired cosmic understanding of Fuji, but indeed, they're actually indigenous histories. I mean, the understanding of Fuji is a God and all the folk legends about it, a lot of it is very Chinese inspired. And there's Chinese models, but it's become indigenous. And I think it's kind of a pattern you see in many things, especially if you go towards Meiji. I mean, I have a class called Global Japan, where almost everything which essentially Japanese, from my students, from ramen to kendo, right. Is basically, as you show here, a dialogue between Japan and other culture, and Japan other culture. But there are differences, right? And there are moments of clash. And one of those moments I mentioned mountaineering before is this very different understanding of Fuji. When Meiji comes along, right? And you have this mountain stop being. Well, first, when we can talk about becoming like a Shinto mountain, but a place where you do science and mountaineering. How does the break of the Meiji Restoration and Westernization, how does this affect Fuji?

Andrew Bernstein (38:20)

Okay, there's a lot there.

Hans Wagenberg (38:22)

There's a lot there. Yeah. So maybe we'll talk. Let's talk with Shinto and science. Let's start with Shinto and then go to science. The Nonaka Expedition so in the Tokugawa.

Andrew Bernstein (38:34)

Period, we see the growth of nativism, this desire to really identify what makes Japan essentially Japanese. And for many nativists, especially in the late Tokugawa period, what made Japan especially Japanese was this idea of a native religion of Shinto, right? This faith focused on kami worship, the worship of native deities. And of course, worship in Japan of various deities have been shaped by the continent for centuries. So really this was a process of inventing tradition, trying to turn Japan into this authentically Shinto nation. So in the case of Fuji, for example, in the Toba Bella period, nativist scholars who saw Buddhism as this foreign intrusion and wanted to rid Fuji beliefs of any sort of Buddhist taint, you could say they decide, okay, actually the Fuji deity is not great Bodhisattva Sengen Sengen daibosatsu. Actually, it's a deity that we can find in the ancient imperial histories called Konohanasakuya Hime, or Princess of the Flowering Tree Blossoms. So she appears in the ancient Nihon Shoki. She appears in the kojiki. This deity had never been associated with Fuji before, really the 17th century at all. And really was only from the 19th century that shrines around Fuji began to see this particular so called native deity, right, as the deity of Fuji. When the Meiji Restoration took place in 1868, there were nativists in the new government, nativists who had an influence on officials in the new government. And there was this policy put into place of separating kami from Buddhas, right? Shinbutsu Bunri, separating Shinto from Buddhism. Even though you had these combinatory Systems over the centuries that had brought together local kami worship and Buddhist ideas. And this was, in some cases, a violent process. Right. So you have places in Japan where you have the destruction, for example, of Buddhist statues and the forced laicization of Buddhist monks and nuns. And in the case of Fuji, there was violence. So institutions around Fuji were Shintoized. So in the case, for example, of one famous shrine on the northern side of Fuji, there was a gate with Buddhist guardian kings in it, and this gate was destroyed, and the Buddhist guardian kings were destroyed, and the object of worship of the shrine purely became Konohana Sakyo Hime, this deity that was in the ancient imperial myth histories. So you have this attempt to Shintoize Fuji, which succeeds to a great degree. If you go to these major Shinto shrines around Japan. I'm sorry, not around Japan, but around Fuji today, you'll see that this was largely successful. Buddhism was removed. Yeah. From these places. However. However, after the 1870s, people in the government and ideologues, nationalistic ideologues outside of the government really were less interested in Shintoizing Fuji than in simply treating it as this national symbol for all Japanese. That is, the focus went from trying to teach people, oh, the Fuji deity is actually Konohana Osakiro Hime, to just. In really simple terms, Fuji is the symbol of the Japanese people. Right. Shinto or not. Yeah. And we see this most explicitly, I think, in school books that were designed for school children. Right. So when you look at these school books, many of them, for example, designed to teach children how to read and write, we see Fuji extolled as the pride of Japan, but this Shinto deity doesn't appear at all. Yeah. The focus is simply on the fact that this is the pride of Japan. And, oh, by the way, foreigners really admire it. We see that again and again in these school books. That's a very long answer to your question.

Hans Wagenberg (43:40)

No. And foreigners also wanted to climb it and made a point. Right. You have all these fascinating, which I never knew that all those first. All those diplomats. Right. The first councils, the British namescape, me, now Rutherford Alcock.

Andrew Bernstein (43:54)

Yeah.

Hans Wagenberg (43:55)

Made a point of climbing it, which really also led to a lot of conflict with the locals because they didn't behave the way that they were supposed to. Right. Because they were doing it as a mountaineering. Imperial mountaineering. Right. There's a different breed of people that now climb it, foreigners and non foreigners alike. Right.

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Andrew Bernstein (45:44)

Right? Yeah. So you're referring to Rutherford Alcock, I believe, who was the British consul in Japan in the late Tokugawa period negotiating with the shogunate. And he was the first foreigner that we know of at least to climb Fuji in 1860. And he and other diplomats in Japan really saw climbing Fuji as a way to assert their right to travel in Japan, which was controversial at the time. And when Alcock initially proposed to climb Fuji, the Shogunate resisted because it was worried that people would be upset that this foreigner would dare to climb the sacred mountain. But eventually the shogunate relented and it sent a retinue of over 100 people to travel with Alcoc, basically to keep watch and keep them safe, frankly, which was a legitimate concern. What's interesting is that Alcock goes up to the summit and we see science following the flag. So he brings with him these scientific instruments to measure the temperature, measure the altitude. Right. So we see this incorporation of Fuji into Western ideas of scientific observation. He also made sure to sing God Saves the Queen on the summit of Fuji, fired gunshots in the crater, and otherwise really made a show of the British presence on Fuji. So this was a period of time where scaling mountains was a way of asserting imperial power, right?

Hans Wagenberg (47:50)

Yeah. And he was in the forest the last. And there's a whole history of mountaineering and science and you spend quite a long time on the Nonaka Meteorological expedition is where the Japanese science made Fuji its own. And maybe we can talk a little bit about it because It's a fascinating story.

Andrew Bernstein (48:08)

Yeah. So the Nonaka's husband and wife, Itaru and Chiyoko. So they attempted to spend the winter of 1895 into 1896 on the summit of Fuji to take meteorological observations. This was originally Nonaki Taru's idea, the husband's idea. But without his permission, his wife just showed up in October to help him out. And she claimed she was doing this as a woman's duty. Right. She wanted to stand by her man and do the cooking and so forth. But what's interesting is that he fell desperately ill. Right. The thin air and the cold took their toll, and she actually ended up taking over the work of doing these scientific observations. And so we see here this desire to take these meteorological observations, but they're suffering during this time. Not only Itaru, but his wife too, Chiyoko, she begins to suffer over time. And both of them record this in poetry that they write. And they have to be rescued in December. So only a few months into this attempt to take meteorological readings on top of Fuji, and they become these celebrities, basically. There's a kabuki play, for example, that's made based on their experience on the summit, and books were written about them over the coming decades. And what's interesting about their story is that it shows really distinctly that modern sciences, I think, are based on this idea of separating humans from the objects that they study.

Hans Wagenberg (49:56)

Right.

Andrew Bernstein (49:57)

You have the scientists and you study this object over there. But in fact, their bodies were subjected to the very thing that they were studying. Right. So they were in the weather that they were trying to measure. So I think it's a good reminder, Right, that scientific enterprises are always wrapped up in societal expectations, like gender expectations, and also wrapped up in our bodily experiences of the world around us.

Hans Wagenberg (50:31)

Yeah. And you talk a lot about those connections between the mountain and society and how did they shape each other In a post war section? In a post war section, when again, you have this. And again, we're zooming through so much here for like, Fuji is a national symbol. Fuji use for like the American bombing campaign and the transformation of Fuji into symbol of peace, I might say. Right. Which is part of bigot transformation. There's so much to talk about, but I really want to talk about Fuji as a global symbol of world heritage and the like, and also of the Anthropocene, which you start and end with in the book. How does this concept, Anthropocene, how do you put Fuji into it? And how does it help us understand this convergence? Again, to finish, where we start maybe of geology and human history, right?

Andrew Bernstein (51:29)

So the Anthropocene is a term referring to the epoch of humans. This idea that we've entered a new geological epoch where human impacts on Earth systems have become so great that we have left the geological epoch of the Holocene and now we're in the Anthropocene again, the epoch of humans. And this is a time where change on a geological scale for the planet has actually converged with human time. Right. These Earth systems are now changing so rapidly under human influence. And Fuji as a volcano, right, that's young, that's been erupting into human history, is kind of analogous, I would say, right, to this planetary conjuncture of geological time and human time. We've seen it throughout Fuji's history as humans have interacted with these geological processes. Now, I think that Fuji, when you look at it from all these different angles in terms of its status as a global mountain, right, you get a particularly good look at the ways in which humans and non humans are entangled in these very complex and unexpected ways. So I'll just give just one example from the book to demonstrate this. So at the base of Fuji are these large grasslands which are used by the Japanese and US militaries to this, to this day for artillery practice and military training in general. And at the end of the 19th century, the Imperial Japanese army struck deals with locals who treated these grasslands as common lands. And they kept them as grasslands, by the way, by burning them every spring. If they wouldn't burn them, these grasslands would turn into forest, essentially, and they burn them to create grass to use for fodder, for horses, for thatch, for roofs, to encourage the growth of medicinal herbs. And the military comes in, makes these deals. The locals insisted that they could collect the spent artillery shells, which they could sell a scrap metal. They wanted the manure from the army's horses to use as fertilizer. What happened then is after World War II, the US comes in, takes over these grasslands that were used for military training. They establish a base called Camp Fuji, a marine base which is there today. They didn't understand these common lands, these arrangements that the Japanese military made with locals. The locals were used to using these grasslands even while the military was using them. Not on the same days. They weren't going out there while artillery is being fired, but they were allowed to still use these grasslands even though the military was using them. Sorry, on certain days, the US comes in and just excludes people from them, which was devastating to local communities. But then in the late 1950s, control reverts to the Japanese government. And the Japanese government decides to cut deals again with these locals. But now not in the form of horse manure and spent artillery shells, but cash money, right? So payments are made to these common land associations that control these, or rather claim the rights to these grasslands that could be used for public works projects. So these funds are useful to the local economy. At the same time, from the 1950s on, we see less and less of a need for grasslands, not just here, but around Japan. Who needs fodder for horses when horses are being replaced by tractors, right? Who needs grass for thatch when you have tiled roofs? But people kept burning the grasslands every spring. Again, you need to do this to maintain them as grasslands, otherwise they would turn into forest. They continue to do this precisely so they can get money from the government. They need to assert their common land rights through the burning in order to get money from the state. And what's interesting is that because of this, this environment continues that would have basically disappeared otherwise. And if you look over the course of the 20th century, grasslands around Japan have just vanished. Again, because they're not useful really to people in the ways that they were in the past, but they persisted here. And because they persisted here, this has helped organisms that depend on these grasslands at the base of Fuji, particularly butterfly species that are critically endangered throughout Japan, but survive here precisely because the military needs this land. And because the military needs this land, locals, right, keep the grasslands as grasslands to collect money. So there's this very strange connection between butterflies and bombs, right? Yeah. Who would have thought? It's really unexpected. But I think just giving this example is just one example of these very complex and often unexpected entanglements between humans and non humans in the Anthropocene. And it's not just simply a matter of just taking humans out of the picture, which we often think about.

Hans Wagenberg (57:32)

You also talk a little bit, not a little bit a lot about that pollution in Uruguay Bay. And Godzilla made a show. It seems that Godzilla made a show, was it in the 70s, I think, at the time of pollution, like the sludge from the paper factories, was it, I think, right.

Andrew Bernstein (57:51)

There was a massive paper industry at the base of Fuji, between Fuji and Tsuruga Bay, and it released so much sludge into the bay that this became really infamous. And there's a monster Hedorah that grows right from the sludge and feeds on the smoke from the smokestacks of the paper mills. In the end of the film, Godzilla defeats Hedorah. But there Is this ominous warning at the end of the film, will there be another one? This idea that if humans don't deal with pollution, there will be more of these monsters that will appear in the future. And I should say that since the 70s, the paper industry has done a lot to reduce emissions, to reduce the amount of pollution going into the bay. But the bay is still highly contaminated.

Hans Wagenberg (58:47)

And now the issue is not much less pollution and more like over tourism. Can talk about the campaign against the UNESCO. That was another fascinating chapter. They've campaigned against declaring as a UNESCO Heritage Site. Right?

Andrew Bernstein (59:03)

Right. Yeah. So it was declared a heritage site in 2013. As I say in the book, awarding Fuji World Heritage status was like conferring an honorary doctorate on an academic who had a long and illustrious career. I mean, Fuji was already world famous. What's interesting is that the first campaign to make Fuji a World Heritage Site focused on making it what's called a Natural World Heritage Site. So local organizations, especially environmental organizations, figuring Fuji is a mountain, decided to campaign to make it a Natural World Heritage Site. There are actually three types of World Heritage sites. One is natural, one is cultural. The other is mixed. And a mixed World Heritage Site brings together both what are considered to be natural and cultural features. What's interesting is that this first campaign to make Fuji a Natural World Heritage Site failed because it was decided by a government commission that there were too many stratovolcanoes around the world like Fuji. Fuji wasn't geologically unique enough. So then another campaign developed, and this one was spearheaded more by business and political elites, including the former Prime Minister Nakasone, to turn it into a Cultural World Heritage Site. So it did become a Cultural World Heritage Site. But what's interesting is that in turning Fuji into a Cultural World Heritage Site, a lot of inconvenient aspects of the history of the mountain were completely ignored. Right. So if you go to the Fujisan World Cultural Heritage Site page that UNESCO has, you'll see no mention, of course, of the militarization of the grasslands. You'll see, interestingly, no mention of the devastation caused by the Hoi eruption or any other eruptions. You just see this extolling of a supposedly special Japanese relationship to nature through Fuji.

Hans Wagenberg (61:06)

It's the current idea, right? The Kondo Shuichi and all this. How we Japanese have such a, you know, interesting understanding of nature and we're environmentalists by. As they cover Fuji and everything else in concrete, right?

Andrew Bernstein (61:22)

Yeah, exactly. So the making of World heritage. Sorry, turning Fuji into a Cultural World Heritage Site is a process of not just celebration, but erasure.

Hans Wagenberg (61:31)

Right.

Andrew Bernstein (61:33)

And so I end the book with that to really bring things full circle, to show how we have this picture postcard image of Fuji, which in fact disguises or obscures this long history of competition, this long history of conflict and destruction.

Hans Wagenberg (61:52)

Yeah. And the book is fascinating. Look at it. And I think we're passing the one hour mark. So I would like to conclude on this note. Thank you very much, Andy, for coming to the show and I hope to have you here again. Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

Andrew Bernstein (62:07)

Thank you. It's been my pleasure.