Mount Fuji crowds snap back
Fujiyoshida canceled its cherry‑blossom festival because tourist crowds — often more than 10,000 visitors a day around Arakurayama Sengen Park — were overwhelming narrow streets and daily life. (japantoday.com) Local officials and national travel authorities are calling it “tourism pollution” and rolling out crowd‑control measures as part of a wider response to millions of visitors to Mount Fuji and nearby hotspots. (scmp.com) (travelandtourworld.com)
Fujiyoshida did something towns built on spring tourism almost never do: it canceled its 2026 cherry blossom festival and told visitors the park would stay open, but under road closures, guards, temporary toilets, and strict crowd controls from April 1 to April 17. The city’s own tourism site says daily life had been seriously disrupted by a rapid rise in visitors from inside and outside Japan. (fujiyoshida.net) This is the town with the postcard shot: Mount Fuji in the distance, the five-story Chureito Pagoda in the middle, and cherry blossoms in the foreground at Arakurayama Sengen Park. One viral image turned a hillside neighborhood into a global photo queue. (apnews.com) Even without the festival, Fujiyoshida is warning that the viewing deck will run on five-minute rotations and that waits could stretch from one to three hours. The city is also telling drivers not to approach the park because the surrounding roads are too narrow for peak blossom traffic. (fujiyoshida.net) The pressure is not just one park having a busy weekend. Japan’s tourism authorities are still tracking record foreign arrivals after the country’s post-pandemic rebound, which means famous places now get hit by larger crowds, more often, and with less slack in local infrastructure. (statistics.jnto.go.jp) Around Mount Fuji, officials have already moved from polite signs to physical barriers. In nearby Fujikawaguchiko, a black mesh screen went up in May 2024 to block the mountain view behind a Lawson convenience store after tourists crowded the roadside, jaywalked, littered, and climbed onto a dental clinic roof for photos. (time.com) That screen was 2.5 meters high and 20 meters wide, and tourists still poked holes in it within a week. The point was less to hide Mount Fuji than to break the exact camera angle that social media had turned into a magnet. (time.com) Officials are now treating the mountain itself the same way they are treating the photo spots around it: as a place that needs limits, fees, and timed access. The official Mount Fuji climbing site says climbers must preregister and pay before entering, and the 2026 season is set to open on July 1 for the Yoshida and Subashiri trails and July 10 for the Fujinomiya and Gotemba trails. (fujisan-climb.jp) Shizuoka Prefecture said on April 10, 2026 that its first full season of entrance fees and nighttime climbing restrictions cut dangerous overnight “bullet climbing” and helped bring the number of deaths and missing persons on its side of the mountain from 6 to 0. The same report said accidents fell to 36, down 28 from the previous year. (japannews.yomiuri.co.jp) So the story in Fujiyoshida is not that Japan suddenly turned against tourists. It is that one of the country’s most famous views now works like a stadium exit after a sold-out show: guards at the chokepoints, rotating access at the platform, and locals asking visitors to stop treating residential streets like part of the attraction. (fujiyoshida.net)
