The ocean home of the rising sun, is one of the most beautiful spots on our globe, with its endless line of foam-fringed coast, its rich plains and fertile valleys, its green hill slopes and forest-clad mountains towering one above the other in grandeur, and its picturesque harbors, safe and lovely. It has a cold, crisp, bracing climate in winter, with not too fervid a sun in summer. It has a magnificent flora of over one hundred and fifty evergreens alone, and no end of rare deciduous trees -- the camphor, the wax, the violet-scented paulownia, the pomegranate, the cotton, and wax tree, the magnolia, the chestnut, maple, pear, cherry, plum, peach, apple, myrtle, orange, with an endless variety of flowers -- camellias, lilies, roses, side by side with the azalea and the mikados armorial flower, the chrysanthemum. The glory of autumn foliage is unrivalled except by that of North America.
But of all beautiful objects of nature in Japan the most famous is the volcanic mountain, Fuji-san, or “Heaven Seeker,” often written Fuji-yama. Daily the imaginative children of the great Nippon gaze toward this most sacred object. Its snow-crowned peak towering in solitary grandeur guides thousands of devout pilgrims. The devotee climbs its volcanic sides, toiling and fasting and praying, and resting anon at each of the lava huts. When he has reached its awful summit he spends the night at a lava temple, where he abjures the past, and makes promise of a better future. Before dawn, bathed, clothed in pure white, he salutes the rising sun with a hymn of praise. He then performs the circuit of the lofty Fuji-san, gazes with awe on the mouth of its crater, over five hundred feet deep, shaped like an eight-petaled lotus flower!
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From General Nelson A. Miles
Thrilling Stories of The Russian-Japanese War, 1904
