Stop along the Tokyo-Kyoto Shinkansen for Mt Fuji views
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 5 Aug, 2023
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(This is a bit late for OP but might benefit future visitors.)
You can, if the weather is good, easily get great views of Mount Fuji from the Shinkansen, as Tetsujin mentioned. In fact, here is a picture of Mount Fuji I took from my phone from the Shinkansen in December 2019:
Note that you want to be sitting on the right in the direction of travel when going westbound; and on the left when going eastbound. Those should be the sets of two seats, not the sets of three.
If you really want to get off somewhere to see it through air only instead of a train window, I suppose Shin-Fuji station is the one to go to. Iirc, the picture above was taken somewhere around Shin-Fuji station.
However I strongly recommend against doing it. Why? Only the all-stop Kodama trains stop at Shin-Fuji. The Nozomi trains do not stop at all between Shin-Yokohama and Nagoya and the Hikari trains have only about two intermediate stops, most likely inconveniently located for Fuji-viewing. Thus, adding a 30-minute or 1-hour stop to get better views of Mount Fuji (assuming the cloud base even allows you to) will probably add at least two hours to your entire Tokyo–Kyoto train trip. So if your objective is to add as little time as possible, go for the train window view.
You get pretty good views of Fuji just from the train itself. Unless you’re planning on getting a lot closer – car hire, bus trip – then it might just be ‘good enough’… it’s not small, you can see it from Tokyo on a clear day, 100km away;)
I’ve driven around it on the tiny roads in the area & tbh, you can’t see it a lot of the time, if you get too close. It was very wooded where I was, though we were specifically aiming for an onsen in one of the small villages [I forget which.]
I think it’s one of those instances where the closer you get, the less you see. The phrase, "You can’t see the wood for the trees" springs to mind.
Planetware has a guide on getting to Kawaguchiko [& a good picture of Shinkansen & mountain for a sense of scale], which is over the opposite side [North] from the Shinkansen line. That’s kind of the ‘centre’ of the five lakes district. I’m not sure how dedicated you’d need to be to want to do that just to see what is in effect a triangle shape from all directions – it’s impressive because of its sheer size, but it’s a pretty simple cone shape from all angles – except you get to see it over water rather than just over flat arable land. I’m not sure it presents a ‘best face’ from any particular angle, though if anything, the sun is going to be from east/south/west depending on time of day so the Kawaguchiko aspect is likely to be in shadow for some of the day.
Credit:Planetware
This picture is from perhaps 25km away. The drive to Kawaguchiko from Fuji [town] is about 60km by the shortest main route, 90 by the prettiest. If you want to get any closer, you’re into some really twiddly roads – not too bad for me, I’m a Brit and used to driving on the left – but you really can’t see anything further than the trees at the side of the road for mile after mile until you start to get close to or above the tree-line… by which time you’re far too close.
Near the treeline, it starts to open up bit…
This is as far as you can go by car up the Skyline Road… your best view from here is back down the hill.
Pics from google
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Credit:stackoverflow.com‘
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