Most of the prints in Katsushika Hokusai's famous series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji show the mountain from far away: from a boat, a village, a bridge or a bay. This one puts you on it. Pilgrims in white jackets and round straw hats climb over the red rock of the upper slopes with staffs in their hands, picking their way across ledges and up a ladder. Banks of mist swirl around them. At the upper right, a crowd of people sits packed together in a rocky shelter, resting from the climb.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates the print to about 1830-32. Climbing Fuji was a devotional journey, and in the Edo period ordinary people from the city of Edo, today's Tokyo, organized themselves into clubs to make the pilgrimage together. The mountain was holy, and the climb was an act of faith as well as an adventure. Hokusai, who was in his seventies when he designed the series, shows the work of it: bent backs, careful feet, and the stranger's pleasure of sharing the road.
The series was so popular that Hokusai's publisher added ten more views to the original thirty-six, making forty-six prints in all.
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