This first clear morning, while waiting on the 21st floor of the Hilton for my traveling companions to finish breakfast, I happened to glance up and noticed the volcano faint in the Tokyo haze beyond the high-rises and sprawl. I immediately photographed it with my longest telephoto lens and then ran the results through a rather extreme application of Adobe’s dehazing tools. 

This is probably prosaic for the inhabitants of the Kanto plain, but for me it’s rather special. I don’t think I have ever seen Fuji outside of illustrations or photos before, even on earlier visits to Asia. One can understand why there was (and lingers still in out-of-the-way shrines) a Shinto cult involving the veneration of backyard-mound replicas for those who cannot make the pilgrimage to the real version of the mountain.

It’s presumptuous on my part, but I suppose it would be possible to interpret the peak as embodying the spirit or deity (kami, to use the Shinto term) of the sentiment the Internet describes as fernweh — which, if the Web is to be trusted, signifies in German “the longing for far away places”, in this case (according to Google) 58.04 miles or 93.41 km east-south-east from this window.