A 7-year-old boy from Nagoya was left alone on Mount Fuji on Thursday morning after his father and older brother kept hiking toward the summit. The child was later found unharmed near a mountain hut on the Fujinomiya Trail and reunited with his father.
The boy, who had started up the mountain early with his family, became tired near the trail’s sixth of 10 stations. His father, 48, told him to wait there and continued on with the boy’s older brother, a first-year junior high school student, toward the summit. That left the child sitting alone on a bench near a mountain hut, where a worker spotted him at around 7:40 in the morning, as rain was falling and fog was beginning to gather.
The search for the boy was immediate because the mountain can turn quickly. Mount Fuji Climbing official website estimates say it takes a little over five hours to hike from the Fujinomiya Trail’s sixth station to the peak, and slightly more than two and a half hours to walk back down from the peak to the sixth station. Based on those times, the boy was likely left unattended at around 4:30 in the morning, well before the hut worker found him.
The worker invited the boy inside and let him take shelter while police were contacted. Officers identified the father and reached him when he was near the trail’s eighth station, then told him to come back and get his child. They also told him, in effect, that even if it meant giving up on climbing the mountain together, leaving a child behind was unacceptable. The boy was later reunited with his father and was not hurt.
What police did next was not made public, and that is the part that now matters most. The father had continued toward the summit after telling a tired 7-year-old to wait alone on a mountain where visibility and footing can change fast, and the record so far shows only that officers forced the climb to stop long enough for the child to be picked up.
