Arakurayama Sengen Park

Arakurayama Sengen Park spreads across the mid-slope of Mt. Arakura in the city of Fujiyoshida. At its foot stands Arakura Fuji Sengen Shrine, and the view of Mt. Fuji rising beyond the Chūreitō — the five-storied pagoda on the hillside — is widely known as one of the defining landscapes of Fujiyoshida.

Arakura Fuji Sengen Shrine received the veneration of the Takeda clan, who ruled this region in the Sengoku period. A record survives that in 1533 (Tenbun 2) Takeda Nobutora, lord of Kai Province and father of the famous Shingen, dedicated a votive tablet to the shrine. For the Takeda of Kai, the northern foot of Fuji was borderland facing Suruga, and the Sengen shrines were revered as gods of war as well.

Most remarkable is that the shrine’s former administering temple, Shōfukuji, owned a mountain hut at the eighth station of Mt. Fuji and cared for worship-climbers there. The shrine and temple of Arakura held effective stewardship over the upper reaches of the Yoshida climbing trail, binding the village at the foot and the summit region together in faith. The Fuji seen from Mt. Arakura was thus never a mere distant view — it was the mountain of faith that the people of this place actually climbed, guarded, and lived by.

The Chūreitō was erected in the Shōwa era as a memorial to the war dead. In spring, cherry blossoms cover the hillside, and visitors from Japan and abroad gather at this spot where pagoda and Fuji can be taken in at a single glance. The town of Fujiyoshida spreading below is the temple town of the Yoshida trail, where the lodges of the oshi priest-innkeepers once stood eave to eave. When the vermilion of the pagoda and the white peak of Fuji enter the same field of view, one comes to realize that centuries of worship-ascent lie layered beneath this landscape.