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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Rising 3776 meters above the Kanto plain, the volcanic cone of Mt. Fuji is Japan's tallest mountain. Its size, location, and its striking symmetry have all contributed to its standing, since at least the medieval period, as a paradigmatic mountain in Japanese religion and aesthetics, inspiring religious observances, poetry and the graphic arts. As Byron Earhart demonstrates, however, the significance of a symbol lies in the history of its employment, of the ways its meaning is appropriated and contested over time. Surveying the imagery of Mt. Fuji in propaganda, advertising and popular culture over roughly four decades, he suggests the ways in which this mountain — as a symbolic representation of Japan itself — was employed by both the Japanese government and the Allies as a symbol of the Japanese homeland. During the occupation, images of Fuji were initially censored by the Allies, who were wary of its nationalist implications, while American troops employed the image in their insignia, symbolically capturing the Mountain as the Allies had captured Japan itself. Eventually, of course, images of the mountain returned to the public sphere, serving again as a symbolic stand-in for Japan, but now as a peacetime commercial power.
1 This article is excerpted, with permission, from the author's forthcoming book, Mount Fuji: Icon of Japan, with University of South Carolina Press. The book contains illustrations not in the article, which includes more images related to Fuji's role in war and peace. Special thanks to my son David C. Earhart for help with materials for the article, to my wife Virginia M. Earhart for assistance with the images, to Mike Sirota for editing the text, and to Mark Selden for editing the article for Japan Focus.
2 This photograph is from the psywarrior.com website, the listing “OWI Pacific Psyop Six Decades Ago,” with thanks to Herbert Friedman.
3 3 This print is from Wikimedia Commons, accessed April 28, 2011.
4 Hereafter cited as PWR. See PWR 34, 4 October 1944 (cover); see also this photo in David C. Earhart, Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media, p. 210, illustration no. 54.
5 This photo is from PWR 246, 11 November 1942, p. 17. Thanks to David C. Earhart for providing this image, courtesy of his Collection of Japanese Primary Sources from the Pacific War.
6 PWR 242, 14 October 1942, pp. 12-13; see this photo in David C. Earhart, Certain Victory, p. 291, illustration no. 79.
7 PWR 346, 29 November 1944 (cover); see this photo in David C. Earhart, Certain Victory, p. 440, illustration no. 51.
8 Dennis Warner and Peggy Warner, The Sacred Warriors: Japan's Suicide Legions, p. 123.
9 Yokichi Yamamoto, Japanese Postage Stamps, pp. 68-69.
10 PWR 266, 7 April 1943, p. 17; see David C. Earhart, Certain Victory, p. 289, illustration no. 74.
11 Sakura Catalog of Japanese Stamps, pp. 216-221, 296-297.
12 John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War, pp. 195, 249. For another Japanese cartoon caricaturing Roosevelt and Churchill, see this link.
13 Dower, War Without Mercy, p. 184.
14 Psychological warfare leaflets from World War II, dropped from airplanes on Japanese civilians and military personnel, have been collected and described on the psywarrior.com website. Special thanks go to retired United States Army Sergeant Major Herbert Friedman, an expert on U. S. psychological operations, for locating and granting permission to reproduce images of Fuji on American propaganda leaflets. Leaflets are identified by the number on the psywarrior.com website, the listing “OWI Pacific Psyop Six Decades Ago.” Hereafter cited as “OWL” Illustration 3 is leaflet 114a on this website. Friedman includes in “OWI” a brief section, “Mount Fuji as a Pictorial Theme of American Psyop,” to which the present author contributed.
15 This image is leaflet 101 from Friedman, “OWI.”
16 Friedman, “OWI.”
17 Friedman, “OWI,” Leaflet 101. Translation from Japanese is quoted from the website.
18 This image is leaflet 520 from Friedman, “OWI.”
19 This image is leaflet 519 from Friedman, “OWI.”
20 This image is leaflet 2064 from Friedman, “OWI.” The translations from Japanese are quoted from the website.
21 This account is adapted from Takakuni Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation, pp.104-145.
22 Nippon Times, January 4, 1946, p. 1. Thanks to David C. Earhart for providing this image, courtesy of his Collection of Japanese Primary Sources from the Pacific War.
23 Yamamoto, p. 76.
24 Dower, “Discussion,” in The Occupation of Japan: Arts and Culture, p. 121.
25 From “History of the US Army in Japan,” on an earlier website. A more recent website, does not include this historical account, but shows the distinctive insignia as in illustration 9, as well as a Fuji shoulder patch, and a challenge coin with Fuji. For a published source, see Barry Jason Stein and Peter Joseph Capelotti, U.S. Army Heraldic Crests, p. 411. Thanks to David C. Earhart for the gift of this insignia.
26 Thanks to Kenneth C. Earhart for the gift of this cap.
27 Four of these “challenge coins,” each with a different design including Fuji, are in the author's personal collection, purchased on ebay.
28 See this link. Last accessed April 28, 2011.
29 Gift of the author's father, Kenneth C. Earhart, who received it when stationed on the USS Missouri at the time of surrender.
30 This stamp is from Wikimedia Commons, accessed April 28, 2011.
31 Kusano Shinpei, Mt. Fuji: Selected Poems 1943-1986, p. 33.
32 John M. Rosenfield, “Nihonga and Its Resistance to ‘the Scorching Drought of Modern Vulgarity,’” p.174.
33 Kusano Shinpei, in Leith Morton, 1985. “A Dragon Rising: Kusano Shinpei's Poetic Vision of Mt Fuji,” Oriental Society of Australia, (1985) 17: p. 53.
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