History
Yamanashi holds Mount Fuji’s northern face and the Fuji Five Lakes — the side most people mean when they picture the classic postcard shot of the mountain — while the summit itself is administratively split with Shizuoka on the southern side, a geographic quirk that’s shaped a centuries-long, entirely friendly local rivalry over which prefecture the mountain “really” belongs to.
Yamanashi and the wider world
Yamanashi’s wine industry has a direct, documented French origin story. In 1877, early in the Meiji government’s push to import Western industries, two young men from Kofu, Tsuchiya Ryuken and Miyazaki Masanari, were sent to study winemaking in France; they returned to found Japan’s first wine company in Yamanashi, using local Koshu grapes that had been cultivated in the region since at least the 8th century. That French-trained foundation is why Yamanashi, rather than any other prefecture, became Japan’s serious wine country — a rare case of Meiji-era Western technology transfer (alongside Gunma’s silk industry) that produced a genuinely internationally competitive product rather than just domestic industrialization.
Neighbors: Yamanashi and Shizuoka
Mount Fuji’s summit sits directly on the border between Yamanashi and Shizuoka, and the two prefectures have maintained a long, mostly good-humored rivalry over bragging rights to the mountain — including competing claims about which side offers the better view, and periodic half-serious debate over exactly whose mountain it is.
Getting there and getting around
Kofu is on the JR Chuo Line, about 90 minutes from Tokyo by limited express; the Fuji Five Lakes area is reached by direct highway bus from Tokyo or by local train via Otsuki. A car is useful for the wineries around Katsunuma.
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