Fujisan Hongu Sengen Taisha

Fujisan Hongu Sengen Taisha in Fujinomiya is the head shrine of more than 1,300 Sengen shrines across Japan dedicated to the deity of Mount Fuji, and it holds the mountain's summit shrine, Okumiya, as a subsidiary precinct located at the crater rim above 3,700 meters. Worship at the base of Mount Fuji is recorded from antiquity, but the shrine's present form dates largely to 1604, when Tokugawa Ieyasu, in gratitude for victory in earlier military campaigns, sponsored a major rebuilding that produced the current honden main hall, built in the distinctive two-story asama-zukuri architectural style unique to Sengen shrines, combining a lower worship structure with an upper sanctuary roof. The shrine also administers the eighth station and above of Mount Fuji's climbing routes as shrine-owned land, a legal and religious arrangement dating to Edo-period land grants that persists today. In 2013, the shrine's precincts, together with the summit Okumiya, were formally registered as a component of the UNESCO World Heritage listing for Mount Fuji as a sacred site and source of artistic inspiration, recognizing the shrine's central role in the mountain's centuries-old status as an object of pilgrimage and worship. The grounds include Wakutama-ike, a spring-fed pond fed by Mount Fuji's snowmelt filtering through volcanic rock, itself registered as a natural monument, where pilgrims traditionally purified themselves before beginning the mountain ascent. The shrine's approach avenue, lined with cherry trees, leads to a vermilion two-story romon gate before opening onto the main worship hall, and the complex today functions both as an active Shinto shrine and as the ceremonial starting point for climbers beginning the Fujinomiya trail.