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In separate instances, man in sandals and woman who\u2019d never been to Mt. Fuji before both require emergency assistance to get off Japan\u2019s tallest mountain<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n July 4 is just another day in Japan, but as an American living in the country, I usually try to do something fun to celebrate my home country\u2019s Independence Day. Eat a hamburger, go to the beach, or maybe even go to a local Japanese fireworks festival if one just so happens to coincidentally fall on the same day.\u00a0But I \u2018ve never spent the Fourth of July in Japan the way one of my countrymen did this year: needing to be rescued from the side of Mt. Fuji despite the trail still being officially closed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n There are four trails that lead to the top of Mt. Fuji. One of them, Yamanashi Prefecture\u2019s Yoshida Trail, opened on July 1, but the other three, Shizuoka Prefecture\u2019s Fujinomiya, Gotemba, and Subashiri Trails, aren\u2019t open for climbing until July 10<\/strong>. So none of them were open when a 67-year-old American man<\/strong> decided to start hiking up the mountain on June 26, but while he was apparently in a hurry to get onto the mountain, he doesn\u2019t seem to have been in a rush to leave, having set up a tent near the Fujinomiya Trail\u2019s seventh station to camp out in.<\/p>\n On July 4, a call came in to Japan\u2019s 119 emergency services number from other people who were in the area that \u201cA foreign man is calling out for help from his tent.\u201d<\/strong> The police were then able to coordinate with the operator of a mountain hut who was able to locate the man and transport him using maintenance equipment back down to the trail\u2019s fifth station, where police and fire officials took over. The American man appeared to be suffering from hypothermia<\/strong>, and despite being dressed in cold-weather clothing had sandals on his feet, though it\u2019s unclear if he he\u2019d been wearing more appropriate footwear while making his ascent to where he\u2019d set up his tent.<\/p>\n The man told rescue workers that he\u2019d hiked to the summit of Mt. Fuji twice before this trip, which seems to have contributed to his overconfidence regarding his mountaineering capabilities. Then, in a lightning-fast example of history repeating itself, a similar situation happened the very next day<\/strong>.<\/p>\n On the night of July 5, the Shizuoka Prefectural Police received a call, forwarded from a mobile phone service provider, informing them that a 59-year-old American woman was lost and needed to be rescued from, once again, the Shizuoka side of Mt. Fuji<\/strong>. The call came slightly after 8 p.m., and the woman had said \u201cI\u2019m lost on Mt. Fuji. It\u2019s dark and I\u2019m very frightened, so please help me.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n So once again, a rescue team was dispatched, and thankfully they were able to find her and escort her down safely. The woman, who had entered the Gotemba Trail earlier that day, had been able to make it to the summit of Mt. Fuji, but then became lost while making her descent<\/strong>, taking a wrong turn onto a path that connects the Gotemba and Fujinomiya Trails via Mt. Hoei, a flank volcano next to Mt. Fuji. This means she was making her descent through unfamiliar terrain in the dark, and on a separate mountain from the one she\u2019d just hiked up, all of which no doubt contributed to her feeling of disorientation and fear. The woman told the rescue team that she was traveling in Japan on vacation, and while she\u2019s done mountain hikes outside Japan, this was her first time at Mt. Fuji.<\/p>\n So to review, in both cases the people who needed to be rescued weren\u2019t just hiking outside of the official climbing season, which is already a bad idea, but compounded the risk by hiking alone.<\/p>\n Despite how gently Mt. Fuji\u2019s slopes appear when viewed from a distance, and how popular it\u2019s become as a tourism destination in recent years, it\u2019s still the tallest mountain in Japan, and trekking to the top can be very dangerous. Odds are both of the American hikers who needed rescuing figured they\u2019d be fine, since they weren\u2019t hiking all that much ahead of when the Shizuoka trails open. However, the trails still being closed means that the full array of on-site support systems aren\u2019t up and running yet either, which in turn means longer response times for rescue teams, which could have life-threatening results, so if you\u2019re going to climb Mt. Fuji this summer, make sure you do it the right way.<\/p>\n Source: Shizuoka Broadcasting System (1<\/a>, 2<\/a>) via Yahoo! Japan News<\/a> via Otakomu<\/a><\/em> In separate instances, man in sandals and woman who\u2019d never been to Mt. Fuji before both require emergency assistance to get off Japan\u2019s tallest mountain. July 4 is just another…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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