Why Mount Fuji’s Rescue Bill Has Become Japan’s Most Heated Mountain Debate

Every year around this time, the same headline resurfaces: someone gets stuck on Mount Fuji, a rescue team risks their own necks to bring them down, and the whole country ends up arguing about who should pay for it.

If you’ve been following Japanese news lately, you’ve probably seen it again this month. On August 20, a German woman developed altitude sickness symptoms at the 8th station, got checked by a doctor, pushed on to the summit anyway, then had to be rescued by Shizuoka police’s mountain rescue team when she couldn’t walk down on her own. The very next day, mountaineer Ken Noguchi — one of Japan’s most famous climbers — posted about it on X, saying he felt for the rescue teams and that it might be time to seriously consider charging for rescues.

This isn’t a one-off complaint. It’s become a genuine annual ritual. A case that really got people talking happened last year, when a Chinese exchange student in her 20s had to be rescued near the summit, got airlifted down by helicopter — and then went back up four days later because she’d left her phone behind, and needed rescuing again. That prompted the mayors of Fujinomiya and Fujiyoshida, the two cities at Fuji’s base, to publicly say rescue costs should fall on the climbers themselves. One of them put it bluntly: rescuers are risking their lives, so why should taxpayers fund people who get into trouble on what is essentially a hobby.

Here’s where it gets structurally messy, though. Japan’s Fire Service Act treats rescue as a free public service, so any prefecture wanting to charge has to work around that. Saitama already did it back in 2018, after a rescue helicopter crash killed five crew members. They now charge about ¥8,000 per five minutes of helicopter flight time in designated danger zones — averaging around ¥72,000 per rescue, with 38 cases billed by March of this year. Shizuoka and Yamanashi have been “seriously discussing” a similar system for Fuji for almost a year now, but as of this summer, officials in Shizuoka are still calling it “difficult, with a lot of issues to work through.”

It even made it to the national level. Back in June, Prime Minister Takaichi was asked about it in the Diet budget committee and gave a cautious answer — she flagged two real concerns: fairness (why single out mountain rescues versus other emergency services?) and the fear that people in genuine danger might hesitate to call for help if they know it’ll cost them.

Meanwhile, the climbing-season entry fee — ¥4,000 for the Yoshida Trail this year, doubled from the original ¥2,000 — doesn’t even apply here, since most of these incidents happen during the official closed season (roughly October to June), when the mountain is technically off-limits but nothing physically stops anyone from climbing anyway. And foreign climbers are an increasingly large share of the incidents: police recorded 100 mountain rescue cases involving 145 foreign nationals in 2023, and 99 cases with 135 people in 2024 — both record or near-record highs.

My take, watching this play out from down here in Fujiyoshida: everyone agrees something needs to change, but nobody wants to be the one who writes the actual rule. Yamanashi’s governor has said he wants to have a direction by autumn, possibly with a new ordinance this December. Shizuoka is way more hesitant. So for now, the mountain stays open in spirit even when it’s closed on paper, and the rescue teams keep doing what they’ve always done — for free, for now.