Oshino Hakkai, the Eight Springs of Oshino

Oshino Hakkai is the collective name for eight spring ponds fed by underground water from Mt. Fuji. Rain and snow that fall on the mountain sink into the lava, flow beneath the surface, and emerge here.

The Oshino basin was once a lake created when lava from Fuji’s eruptions blocked the flow of water. Known as Lake Utsu, this large lake is thought to have spread over today’s Lake Yamanaka, Oshino village, and part of Nashigahara. Later, the water drained into the Katsura River and the lake dried up, leaving behind the springs on its bed that form the eight ponds.

The eight ponds are Deguchi-ike, Okama-ike, Sokonuke-ike, Chōshi-ike, Waku-ike, Nigori-ike, Kagami-ike, and Shōbu-ike. Each has its own legend and its own Fuji-kō poem. At Sokonuke-ike, for example, it is said that anything let go while washing there vanishes into the bottom of the pond. Waku-ike has the largest flow of the eight. Formed like an inverted cone roughly twelve metres across, it has water at an average of thirteen degrees throughout the year gushing from a hole about a metre wide in its centre. The deity of Shibokusa Sengen Shrine, the guardian shrine of the area, is said to have been born from this pond, and during its festival the portable shrine is washed in the water. The eight springs are the source of the Katsura River and have also supplied Oshino’s drinking water and the water for its rice fields.

Fuji-kō pilgrims went round the eight ponds as the Moto-hakko (Uchi-hakkai), treating them as sacred places for purifying themselves before their climb. After the sites had fallen into neglect, Tomoemon, who had founded a Fuji-kō group in Ichikawa Daimon in Kai, worked with others and parishioners of Tōenji in Shibokusa village to revive them in 1843 (Tenpō 14). Together, they enshrined the Eight Great Dragon Kings and set up a stone monument at each pond.

In 1929 (Shōwa 4), the geologist Ishihara Hatsutarō studied the geology of the eight ponds for a Yamanashi Prefecture survey report, recording in detail the legends and local customs attached to each pond. The ponds are a nationally designated Natural Monument and were selected for the Environment Agency’s list of the hundred best waters of Japan. In 2013, they were inscribed as a component of the World Heritage property Fujisan: Sacred Place and Source of Artistic Inspiration. Today they are busy with tourists, but pilgrims of the Edo period purified themselves here before climbing Mt. Fuji.