Local authorities are urging climbers to bring helmets to protect themselves against a possible eruption of Mount Fuji after the season to ascend the nation’s highest peak opens on July 1.
Yamanashi Prefecture is also distributing evacuation route maps to climbers, a measure that is rare but now deemed necessary in light of intensifying volcanic activity in various parts of Japan.
Local governments around the 3,776-meter mountain will supply equipment to visitors if an eruption occurs, but these measures can cover only a small fraction of the climbers, who can number in the thousands on some days.
Workers on June 20 carried 105 helmets, along with food and fuel, to the Hakuunso lodge on the eighth station of the Yoshida-guchi mountain climbing trail in Yamanashi Prefecture. The helmets, for climbers and lodge employees, were placed on shoe shelves.
“It is the first time for me to prepare helmets for climbers,” said Yoshiko Yamamoto, 67, who has operated the lodge for 20 years. “If an emergency occurs, we will lend them to climbers and guide them quickly for evacuation.”
The Yamanashi prefectural government placed 1,500 sets of helmets, goggles and dust-proof masks on the fifth station of the Fuji Subaruline toll road. The Fujiyoshida city government also prepared 1,000 of the sets in mountain lodges.
“It is in preparation for an eruption (of Mount Fuji),” said an official of the Yamanashi prefectural government’s division on tourism and resources.
Yamanashi Prefecture decided to prepare the helmets and other tools after the September eruption of Mount Ontakesan, which straddles Nagano and Gifu prefectures, killed 57 people.
On the Shizuoka Prefecture side of Mount Fuji, associations of mountain lodges along the three climbing trails of Fujinomiya-guchi, Subashiri-guchi and Gotenba-guchi decided to buy a total of 700 helmets with subsidies from the prefectural government.
According to the Environment Ministry, however, the total number of people who climbed Mount Fuji was about 285,000 in 2014, including nearly 9,000 on some days.
On June 19, the Shizuoka prefectural government held a meeting in Yokohama for travel companies and mountain climbing groups in the Tokyo metropolitan area that organize tours to Mount Fuji.
The prefectural government asked the travel companies and the groups to urge participants to bring their own helmets.
The Yamanashi prefectural government on June 24 began distributing to mountain lodges 3,500 copies of maps that show four evacuation routes in the event of an eruption.
The prefectural government also confirmed that it will instruct climbers to evacuate through mountain lodges if Mount Fuji erupts.
“(What’s important is) to know the risk (of eruptions), fear them in the correct manner and prepare for them in the correct manner,” said Hiroshi Yamashita, head of the Yamanashi prefectural government’s division on disaster prevention and crisis management. “We hope that such awareness spreads among mountain climbers.”
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