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2nd STATION

MOUNT FUJI

Stretching the boundaries

Our train stops at the peaceful town of Mishima, which announces the upcoming view of Mount Fuji. Will the mountain most revered by the Japanese be visible today, or will it be hidden behind a curtain of mist?

Expert travelers ask for a seat “on the Mount Fuji side” when they book a Shinkansen ticket from Tokyo to Kyoto, or vice versa. From these seats they wait impatiently for the imposing spirit-mountain to reveal itself in all its splendor.

However, if the day is not entirely clear, the bullet train will pass within touching distance of this dreamed-about place without our managing to see it. Mount Fuji is always there, as are all the great objectives in our life, but sometimes the worldly mists make them invisible to us.

The Mountain of Immortality

The first written reference to Mount Fuji known to us appears in a tenth century tale. The central character is a young girl named Kaguya, who came from the moon and had rejected the emperor’s marriage proposal. One August night, under a full moon, a great light absorbed Kaguya and the Moon people took her back home. The emperor, who was still in love, wrote a letter to the girl and ordered an army of men to take his words to the summit of Mount Fushi (不, “without,” 死, “death”), the closest place to the moon known to the ancient Japanese.

When the soldiers reached the summit, they burned the letter in the hope that the smoke would reach the Moon and the emperor’s words could be read by Kaguya. Along with the letter, they also burned the elixir of immortality, since the emperor did not wish to live forever.

The word fushi means “without death” or “immortal.” With the passing of time, the pronunciation evolved into fuji (富, “full of, wealth,” 士, “soldier”), in reference to the heroic soldiers who climbed up to the summit to take the message to the Moon.

Ever since then it has been said that when Mount Fuji erupts, the smoke transports the emperor’s words to our moon to converse with Kaguya, thus representing love and the eternal hope of making the impossible possible.

Sir Rutherford Alcock’s adventure

However, the first person known to have climbed to the volcano’s snowbound summit was not one of the emperor’s soldiers, but a Buddhist monk, in the year 663.

Until that point, reaching the summit had been considered impossible, although with time that ‘impossibility’ was overcome by more and more people. Still, until the start of the Meiji era, in the nineteenth century, no woman or foreigner had been allowed to climb Fuji, as it was considered a sacred mountain.

The first non-Japanese to reach the white summit was the British diplomat Sir Rutherford Alcock who, accompanied by a group of Japanese guards, led nine British climbers to the peak in 1860.

The Japanese officials told him that it was reckless to go up at the end of November and that he would not make it because the weather conditions made it impossible. What’s more, a typhoon was approaching Japan.

When Alcock’s group began the ascent, the typhoon was indeed approaching. Some government officials said it was a message from the gods warning foreigners that it was a forbidden place for them. But the diplomat ignored everyone who told him it was impossible and, one step at a time, reached the summit, becoming, along with his group, the first foreigner to do so.

At that time, it was not an easy challenge and many mountaineers had died in the attempt, but the athletic Alcock climbed from sea level up to the summit, at an altitude of 3,776 meters, taking eight hours to get there and another three hours to go back down.

Sir Rutherford Alcock’s hand-drawn illustration of Mount Fuji from his personal diary.

Luck was with him, and the typhoon struck the coast of Shizuoka just as he completed his descent.

Alcock described Mount Fuji as an inhospitable, rocky place that looked as though it did not belong to this planet. As he was a very good artist, he produced the first depiction seen in the West of this sacred place’s characteristic silhouette.

He narrated his ascent in letters he sent to the British government over the three years he spent in Japan as not only the first British diplomat, but also the first Briton to live in Japanese territory.

“The last stretch was the hardest; the ever-increasing fatigue worked against us. We frequently stopped to fight against the pain in our legs and to get our breath back. Some of us thought about going back but we carried on until the final step up to the mountaintop, which revealed to us the summit crater and the views.” SIR RUTHERFORD ALCOCK

Mission: possible

Our life is full of mountains we believe to be forbidden or that we feel incapable of climbing, but the fog that prevents us from seeing the path ahead is usually on the lens through which we are viewing it.

We have to wipe our gaze clean of “impossibilities,” as we would a steamed-up window, before setting off on our way to the summit. Because the impossible is, in reality, a mental label, a deceptive filter before our eyes.

Over the course of a lifetime there are many things we irrationally feel unable to carry out, since just thinking about them makes us feel terrifyingly dizzy. We go along mentally building many of these walls and when they finally tumble, we cannot believe they ever caused us so much fear, paralysis and frustration in our life.

There is a very thin mental line dividing the possible from the impossible and the job of the engineer or literary sherpa, just to give you two examples, is to help us to cross it.

Walt Disney used to say, “There is nothing more enjoyable than doing the impossible.” With that in mind, just for the fun of it, it could be a good weekly objective to do at least one thing we feel ourselves utterly incapable of doing.

Learning Japanese or Hungarian, taking up a sport that seems very difficult, playing the piano without sheet music, exploring an untamed country… or climbing the equivalent of Mount Fuji where we live.

As a good friend’s WhatsApp motto has it, everything starts with the re-labelling: MISSION POSSIBLE.

Make A List Of Impossible Ventures That Weren’t

A very powerful exercise for sweeping our horizon clean of obstacles, prejudices and things we believe we cannot do, is to remember those “impossible ventures” that turned out not to be so.

We tried this out with the following results:

Francesc’s 3 False Impossible Ventures:

1. LEARNING TO SWIM. “Until the age of fourteen I was terrified of water and was convinced I would never manage to cross a swimming pool where I couldn’t touch the bottom. It took some time, but I ended up discovering I floated.”

2. FINISHING A COLLEGE DEGREE. “Considering I failed four or five school subjects every year, neither I nor my teachers nor anyone else thought I was capable of getting my high school diploma, far less any kind of degree. When I shook off that prejudice, I managed to do a whole degree course in German.”

3. HAVING A GIRLFRIEND. “I also saw that as something impossible until I was twenty-three or twenty-four, since the girls I liked seemed like goddesses or extra-terrestrials to me, and out of my reach. The moment I realized they were like me, with fears, doubts and desires of their own, that aura of impossibility disappeared.”

Héctor’s 3 False Impossible Ventures:

1. WORKING AT CERN. “When reading books on popular science, I always imagined NASA and CERN as places where only the chosen few could work. It seemed like an impossible dream that would forever live in the realm of my imagination. But in 2004 I was accepted at CERN, where what I had imagined turned into reality.”

2. TRAVELING TO JAPAN. “As a child I would open an atlas and Japan seemed one of the most remote places on the planet to me, a faraway exotic country that I would most likely never visit. I have now been living in the Land of the Rising Sun for over twelve years.”

3. PUBLISHING A BOOK. “Isaac Asimov was one of the authors I was crazy about as a teenager. I read his biography and I was fascinated to find he had published over four hundred books. At that time, the publishing industry Asimov described seemed like something from another world. Now, our book Ikigai has an international audience, and the US edition was published by Penguin, one of the publishing houses that published Asimov.”

Whenever you feel incapable of doing something, a very effective practice is to write down your own list of all the things that you had at one time you believed you would never achieve, but ended up managing to do. Sometimes they can be silly inventories, as we have shown, but they help to knock down the walls between you and your confidence.