Fujinomiya, Shizuoka

The iron grid of Fujinomiya Station opens onto a street where the smell of griddled noodles drifts from small stalls before noon. Those noodles — Fujinomiya yakisoba, made with a firmer, drier noodle than most — are eaten standing up, with a paper plate and a plastic fork, against a backdrop of the mountain that fills the northern sky. The mountain is not decoration here. Fujinomiya has organized itself around Fuji for centuries: as a pilgrimage town, a market town, a place where the faithful washed themselves in the Wakutama-ike spring before beginning the climb.

The spring is still there, classified as a special natural monument, its water rising from deep inside the volcanic rock. Fujinomiya Hongu Sengen Taisha, the great shrine that anchors the town, holds that water within its precincts. Festivals move through the year — the yabusame procession on horseback, the Oyama-biraki marking the opening of the climbing season, the Goshinka Matsuri with its sacred fire — each one tied not to tourism but to the long habit of the place. Upstream on the Asagiri Plateau, wasabi grows in the cold spring-fed channels, and rainbow trout are raised in the same water that feeds the shrine's pool.

The Kiseki Hakubutsukan sits quietly off the main route, its shelves of minerals and fossils available to handle. The lava tube of Manno Fuketsu runs underground nearby, formed by the same eruptions that made the plateau's fertility possible. Fujinomiya tea, local sake brewed from Fuji spring water, dairy products from the highland farms — the economy is still legible in what the town produces and eats.