“We’re lucky,” I said, trying to avert a mutiny.

“Yeah, how’s that?” muttered Gerry, as Japanese climbers stepped around us shouting brisk words of encouragement.

“For one thing,” I said, “we don’t have altitude headaches”—the clanging pain that comes when reduced oxygen forces a climber’s brain to expand against the immovable skull. “Turns out, as we get older, our brains shrink—so fewer headaches.”

“Is that so?” said Gerry. He took a hit from an oxygen canister and stared at me. “My brain must have really shrunk to let you talk me into this.”

I couldn’t blame him. Climbing Fuji isn’t the snap many people think. Yet every year, during the July-August climbing season, some 400,000 mostly enthusiastic tenderfoots (20,000 on a good day) scramble for the summit of Japan’s mighty beacon. For the Japanese, Fuji (early Chinese characters for which mean “without equal”) is unrivaled in its capacity to stir a sense of national identity even in a society that is more individualistic than in the past.

“People my age can’t even name Japan’s second highest peak,” said Atsushi Yamada, a sturdy 22-year-old climbing instructor with a bushy head of dyed orange hair. (It’s Kita-dake in the Japan Alps.) “But everybody wants to climb to the top of Fuji.” And at 12,388 feet (3,776 meters) you need neither rope nor crampon to get there. Just energy, particularly if you do it a popular way—a lemminglike dash to glimpse goraiko, or sunrise, from the highest point in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Our foursome, including my guide, Munetaka Yaginuma, and godson, Arthur Mitchell, a student of Japanese literature, fit right in. We started up with gusto at 11:30 p.m., but as dawn lightened the sky, the thin air and lack of sleep slowed us to a head-bowed crawl. Then, nearing the summit, a sudden miracle—a luminous egg yolk peeped through ruffled clouds, spreading golden fluid through the heavens. Climbers halted to savor the moment. Some applauded. Others whipped out cell phones, describing the scene for loved ones back home. Elated, possibly from oxygen deprivation, I called my brother Dave in Seattle.

Gerry, rejuvenated, looked like a man who had planted a flag on a distant planet—“Spectacular,” he beamed.

Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic magazine.

—Robin A. Palmer