We woke to a cloudy sky, the webcams showed that even at altitue Fuji was hiding and so we had a slower morning than usual. For a few moments Fuji did appear in a gap in the clouds, but before we could get out of the house, she was gone again. With the weather saying it would be cloudy all day we decided to walk to Kawaguchiko town, rather than driving, as it was only 4.6 miles away. It was a lovely walk, and wasn’t unbearably humid yet. We both love the slice of life of Japan, and most of the first half of the route took us through residential areas, and we got to see a lot of farmland, flowers, and some abandoned homes.

Just as many visitors to Japan may be familiar with the gaijin seat (who seats on a busy train next to a foreigner may stay empty) I also had heard about the gaijin stop – where police will stop tourists. As we were walking along a main road ahead we could see a police car parked at the side, as we got closer the police excited the vehicle and approached us. I thought it was our turn to experience the gaijin stop! The more senior officer asked if I could speak Japanese, and when I said yes he went on the explain that there was a bear nearby that had come down from the mountain, and the area was closed. I explained where we were headed, and that was fine as we would proceed past the affected area. As we walked on we saw the police person in the picture below, decked out in a hockey-style face mask, with a net and body armour – dressed for bear! The second photo is taken from a news article on that day showing the bear in someones garden. Eventually the bear was scared back to the mountains, as it turns out this bear often comes down to steal vegetables and fish.

As we were a little early for the shops to be open, as we left at 7:30am, we explored some parts of Kawaguchiko that we had managed to miss on our last 6 visits to the area. We found some rather… unusual kappa statues. Kappa are one of my favourite mythical creatures in Japan, they usually live in rivers and are quite partial to cucumbers!

We also found a shrine that we hadn’t visited previously, it was completely empty as it was still early in the day. We also found an interesting aspect of a shrine that I hadn’t seen before. There was a small building that was filled with old amulets, presumably in preparation to be burned in a offering as thanks for their protection or luck. Once in town we visited our favourite apparel store Sora no Shita (under the sky) who sell unique Mount Fuji and Kawaguchiko themes t-shirts, as well as hiring out hiking gear for those not prepared to summit Fuji.

We walked back another way, instead of using the bridge we walked past the main stores and posh lake side hotels, and got a few souvineers on our way. We also found one of these old signs, a hand painted rendering of the surrounding area. I love stumbling across old things like this that have someone been forgotten and so haven’t been replaced with a digital replica.

The rest of the afternoon was mostly uneventful, the clouds remained, and so we focused on preparing ourselves for tomorrow, when we attempt to summit Mount Fuji.