Tokyo’s last street level view of Mount Fuji soon to be obscured

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AT DAWN on the first day of 2013 the snowy peak of Mount Fuji, 100 kilometres (62 miles) away, peeped out from between two nondescript apartment blocks. Residents have been coming to this lane in downtown Tokyo, known as Fujimizaka (“hill for viewing Mount Fuji”), for decades, to gaze at the national symbol to the southwest. “Enjoy it while it lasts,” yelled Makoto Kaneko, an 86-year-old local shopkeeper, at a small crowd of bleary-eyed early-risers. “It won’t be here this time next year.”

Mr Kaneko remembers trudging through this neighbourhood in March 1945, after American bombers had reduced it to ruins. Donald Richie, an American who chronicled post-war Japan, marvelled at the view of Fuji’s perfect cone from all around the flattened city—a vista immortalised in two series of woodblock prints by Hokusai (see picture) and Hiroshige, two 19th-century artists. But post-war rebuilding obscured almost all street-level views. Click below for full story -