Jujo Fujizuka
十条冨士塚（十条冨士神社） · Jujo Fujizuka
- Ward
- Kita
- Price
- Free
- Hours
- Grounds always open; climbing
- Closed
- None (climbing limited to the festival days)
- Getting there
- 5 min from Higashi-jujo Station (JR Keihin-Tohoku), 7 min from Jujo Station (JR Saikyo)
- You can climb it on 30 June and 1 July only
- Burn the incense first, then bow at the summit shrine
- The whole mound was moved back in 2023
We do not republish copyrighted photographs. Use the links below to see the actual venue.
Obvious to locals, invisible to visitors
There is a simple reason guidebooks leave this out: to the people who live here it is too obvious to be worth explaining.
The mound itself is off limits most of the year; climbing is allowed only over the two days of the great festival timed to the opening of Mount Fuji. The ward gives the hours as nine to eight, with climbing ending at eight and the rites at half past. Outside those two days you pray from the foot.
There is an order to it. You carry incense up the mound, throw it into the concrete vessel in front of the summit shrine — a stand-in for the burning cauldron — and let it burn. Only then do you bow to the shrine. Done this way, the merit is held to equal a climb of the real mountain.
Widening of the metropolitan road in front meant the mound had to be shifted back; work began in April 2020 and finished in 2023. Older photographs and directions show it in a different spot. The 2024 festival was the first after the rebuilding.
What it is
A mound about 5.8 metres high where the local Fuji confraternity has held its rites since the mid-Edo period; it became a Kita Ward designated folk cultural property in 1991. Lava is arranged in imitation of Fuji, with a stone shrine at the summit holding a portion of the mountain's deity and another to Komitake partway up. Between 2020 and 2023 the whole mound was moved back to make room for road widening.
What to order
Why locals keep coming
One of the ward-area mountain-opening festivals with the largest turnout of stalls. Locals call it simply O-Fuji-san. On the mound, incense and prayer sticks are burned in a vessel standing in for the crater of Fuji.