A two-lane road on the shore of Lake Kawaguchi, a short walk from the station. Cars come round a gentle bend every few seconds.
A tourist backs off the sidewalk and into the traffic lane, phone raised, lining up the exact angle where Mount Fuji appears to be sitting on the roof of the Lawson convenience store across the street.
A horn. A swerve. The photo gets taken anyway, and by evening it is one more nearly identical clip in a feed that already has several thousand of them.
The shot is not hard to understand once you have seen it: from one specific spot outside a branch of Lawson near Kawaguchiko Station in Yamanashi Prefecture, the snow-capped cone of Mount Fuji lines up perfectly above the store's blue-and-white sign, as if Japan's most famous mountain had chosen a convenience store as its plinth. Somebody posted it. Then a lot of people reposted it. By 2023 it had become one of the most reliably photographed street corners in the country, a bucket-list stop for tour buses that had never previously had a reason to stop on that particular block.
What a single popular photo angle does to a small town's sidewalk, nobody had really planned for. Cars parked illegally outside the store and along the shoulder. Litter piled up. Visitors jaywalked mid-shoot, some of them backing into the road exactly as the shot required. A few climbed onto the roof of a neighbouring dental clinic to get a cleaner angle over the crowd. When staff or residents asked people to move, some shouted back, or flicked away a lit cigarette on their way past. None of it was dramatic on its own. All of it, every day, on a sidewalk built for a quiet lakeside town, added up to something the town could not just wait out.
So on 21 May 2024, workers put up a screen: black mesh netting, 2.5 metres high and 20 metres long, strung along the sidewalk directly across from the store, priced at roughly 1.3 million yen. It did exactly one job — it removed the mountain from the photo — and the story of a country literally hiding one of its own national symbols from tourists went around the world within a day. It lasted about as long as you would expect. Within a week, holes had been cut and poked through the mesh at exactly the height of a raised phone; the town swapped it in July for a tougher, harder-to-cut material and kept patching it through the summer.
Then, in mid-August 2024, the screen came down — officially because a typhoon was approaching and a loose 20-metre curtain of mesh is not something you leave up in high wind. What happened next is the part that barely made the second wave of headlines: the crowds that the screen had supposedly failed to stop did not fully come back. Visitor numbers at the spot stayed noticeably lower than before, the town's tourism office said, and officials chose to simply leave the barrier down rather than reinstall it — while warning that it would go back up if the bad behaviour did.
It didn't quite come back the same way. A year later, in August 2025, the town installed something new on the same stretch of sidewalk: not a tall black view-blocker, but a low brown fence, about 1.4 metres high — roughly chest height, and openly described by officials as a guardrail rather than a screen. Mount Fuji sits fully visible above the Lawson roof again, exactly as it did before any of this started. What the fence is actually for is keeping people's feet on the pavement and off the traffic lane.
The story everyone shared in 2024 was a fight over a photograph: Japan built a wall to hide a mountain, and camera-wielding tourists poked holes in it until the wall gave up. That framing makes the whole saga sound like a loss. But look at what the town actually built back a year later, once the cameras and the international coverage had mostly moved on to the next viral spot. It isn't tall. It isn't black. It doesn't block anything, and nobody photographs it. It exists purely to stop a person from stepping backwards into a moving car — a plain, unglamorous safety rail on a blind corner, quietly finishing the job the famous, mocked, ultimately abandoned curtain was only ever a clumsy first attempt at.
- The original black mesh screen, installed 21 May 2024 outside a Lawson near Kawaguchiko Station in Fujikawaguchiko, Yamanashi Prefecture, measured 2.5 metres high by 20 metres long and cost the town roughly 1.3 million yen (about $8,000). Holes were cut in it within days; the town replaced it with tougher material in July 2024.
- The screen came down in mid-August 2024, initially for safety ahead of an approaching typhoon. Visitor numbers at the spot stayed low afterward, and the town chose not to put the screen back up, while saying it would return if disruptive behaviour resumed.
- In August 2025 the town installed a different, lower barrier on the same stretch of sidewalk — about 1.4 metres of plain brown fencing, framed by officials as a road-safety measure rather than a view-blocker. Mount Fuji is once again fully visible above the store.