Unknown artist, Japanese; Meiji; Edo

Repeated images of the sacred mountain Fuji; the first flowering tree of springtime, the plum blooming in the foreground; and a landscape of pine confirm that this wrapping cloth would have been used during a New Year’s celebration.

Why does the mountain have such design and cultural prominence? Japan’s major religions, Shintō and Buddhism both revere the mountain, a volcano, as representing the forces of creation. The legend of the Shintō deity of Fuji is of a beautiful goddess who brought forth her children through fire without pain and whose name signifies “radiant-blooming-as-the-flowers-of-the-trees, or causing-the-flowers-to-bloom-brightly. The grand peak of Fuji represents the form of the white bud of the Sacred Flower in Buddhism.