In the summer of 2002, I spent a few weeks hitchhiking town to town from Hokkaido (the northernmost island in Japan) to Shizuoka (near Tokyo), with the vague goal of climbing Mt. Fuji, the tallest and most revered mountain in Japan.

It was a beautiful summer day when I finished the final leg of my hitchhike to Mt. Fuji. The driver who picked me up and drove me there seemed confused as to my destination: the bottom of Fuji-san. He dropped me off on a small side road – “Zisu.. izu… bottom… Fuji-san” — just as the last rays of sunlight were fading.

I hadn’t really read much about climbing Fuji, except that most people climbed it at night — to view the sun rising from the peak in the morning. I soon came across an old rusted sign that read: (in Japanese) “Mt. Fuji 1st station” and a small overgrown hiking path. Okay, I thought. I’m on the right track. By this point, the sky was almost pitch-dark so I fished out my trusty flashlight — which I had bought the day before at the 100Yen store (the Japanese cultural equivalent of our Dollar Store). After passing the sign for the 2nd station and not running into a single person, I began to worry I had started up an old, now-unused climbing path. The more than occasional spider-web-to-the-face only added to my suspicions. I nonetheless decided that the path would eventually have to meet with another path, at the very least at the summit.

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