Kawaguchiko: the Mountain, Twice Over

Lake Kawaguchi is the most accessible of the Fuji Five Lakes and the one that gives the mountain back to you twice. On a windless morning the surface goes to glass and Mount Fuji appears upside down in it — the same sakasa-Fuji that Lake Motosu lent to the old thousand-yen note. Everything in this corner of Yamanashi is organised around that sightline. Guesthouses put their windows on the north shore, the Kachi Kachi Yama ropeway climbs Mount Tenjo for the postcard angle over the lake, and photographers set alarms for the twenty minutes after sunrise when the snow turns pink.

The classic composition is a few minutes away in Fujiyoshida: 398 steps up Arakurayama to the five-storey Chureito Pagoda, with Fuji behind it and cherry blossom in front in mid-April, or maples in late November. Around the lakes the seasons keep offering set pieces — Oishi Park with its lavender bands in early July and kochia bushes turning scarlet in October, the Momiji Kairo maple corridor lit at night along the Nashigawa, the eight spring-fed pools of Oshino Hakkai where Fuji's snowmelt surfaces after decades underground, so clear the trout look suspended in air.

There is more here than viewpoints. Walk the thatched houses of Iyashi-no-Sato on Lake Sai, rebuilt where a landslide destroyed the original village; descend into the Narusawa ice cave at the edge of the Aokigahara forest, where ice survives all summer; eat hoto, the flat wheat noodles stewed with pumpkin and miso that are Yamanashi's own comfort food, and drink Koshu white wine from vineyards an hour east. From July to early September the Yoshida trail opens and the mountain itself can be climbed from the fifth station when conditions allow, usually with a night in a mountain hut. The rest of the year, you simply live in its shadow — an easy, spectacular counterweight to Tokyo and Kyoto.