Garbage piles up on sacred Mount Fuji

Fujikawaguchi, Japan: If you look up from the forests at the foot of Japan's Mount Fuji, the volcano's graceful slopes rise into the distance and peak in a nearly symmetrical, snowcapped cone.

If you look down in the forests, however, you see something much less elegant: trash. Lots of it. Just below the surface of leaves and topsoil are discarded microwave ovens, construction debris, broken office furniture. Even rusting refrigerators.

Mount Fuji, the pride of the nation and symbol of the Japanese soul, is a huge garbage dump.

"We've found everything from household trash to broken TV sets and other appliances," said Mayumi Wakamura, who heads periodic cleanups of the mountain. "Sometimes we find hazardous materials like leaky old car batteries." Nobody knows how much trash is buried on Fuji, but Wakamura's Fujisan Club says it collected 84,150 kg (187,000 pounds) of illegally dumped garbage from the mountain's slopes in the 12 months through March.

Fuji's garbage problem is a potent symbol of the general environmental destruction wrought by decades of industrialisation in a nation with one of the highest population densities on Earth.

The sorry state of Japan's most-heralded mountain could also be a stumbling block in Japan's campaign to get the United Nations to list Fuji as a World Heritage site.

In the mid-1990s, activists and local officials asked the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation to evaluate informally Fuji's chances of joining the list, said Fujisan Club official Naoko Aoki.

"'Not good' was the answer, and trash management was one of the reasons," she said.

That spurred some Japanese to action. The Fujisan Club - "Fuji-san" means Mount Fuji in Japanese - was formed in 1998 and now has about 1,100 members.

About 200,000 Japanese and foreign tourists climb the 3,753-metre (12,388-foot) mountain every year, and many have found foul toilets at way stations and garbage scattered along the paths.

Government officials and activists agree the problems along the paths are now largely under control. The real problem, they say, is the trash dumped around the foot of the mountain by businesses and people who live nearby.

Illegal dumpers are trying to avoid Japan's hefty garbage collection fees, he said. Throwing out an appliance like a refrigerator, say, can cost about 7,500 yen (Dh227) while businesses have to pay for all of their trash pickups.

Local governments have arranged for special patrols and set up surveillance cameras. But education may be the key, some say.

"Picking it up is not enough - people have to learn not to create so much in the first place," Ken Noguchi, mountaineer and environmental activist, told volunteers over the Internet in mid-April from Mount Everest, where he led an extensive cleanup campaign.

Despite the trash woes, Japan is stepping up its campaign to get Fuji on the Unesco list.

Candidate

In January, the government announced it was adding Fuji to the list of tentative Japanese candidates for the World Heritage Committee to consider at a meeting this month in New Zealand.

Still, many volunteers have mixed feelings, worrying a World Heritage designation could mean more tourists, more traffic and more trash - problems other such sites have had to face. Even Everest, a forbidding mountain that requires special gear to climb, is thought to have about 50 tonnes of trash on its slopes.

"The trails to the top can be so jam-packed in the summer that you can hardly move," Aoki said. "I hope that's not a sign of the future we would have to look forward to."