“I wrote my book . . . to get people to think more deeply about the ways in which they imagine and relate to the non-human world.”
That’s Japan scholar Andrew W. Bernstein, speaking on the Asian Revew of Books podcast recently about his new book Fuji: A Mountain in the Making, a title in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute series that Princeton University Press published last fall.
Bernstein is professor of history at Lewis & Clark College and also the author of Modern Passings: Death Rites, Politics, and Social Change in Imperial Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), an earlier volume in the Studies series. In Fuji, he undertakes a panoramic history of Japan’s national icon, from its geological origins as a violent volcano all the way up to its present-day status as a world heritage site and social media fixation.
In the December 2025 Asian Review of Books podcast, Professor Bernstein touches on much of that history, focusing on Mount Fuji’s continually evolving role in the Japanese, and later the world’s, consciousness. He tells host Nicholas Gordon: “Its power as a national icon lay in its capacity to mean different things to different people—much like the nation itself.”
The absorbing conversation touches on Hokusai, the transformation of the Japanese landscape over centuries, and even a latter-day Godzilla movie. Listen to the embedded audio below or via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your platform of choice.
Readers have an opportunity to learn more about Mount Fuji and Professor Bernstein’s work when he gives a book talk at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute on March 25, 2026. Click here for further details and to sign up for the event.
