By Eudora “Dodo” Wex

Mount Fuji, Japan  -A climber had to be rescued twice in 24 hours after attempting to scale Japan’s tallest mountain in the off-season, authorities confirmed Thursday.

Standing at 12,388 feet, Mount Fuji is sacred ground. A site of spiritual pilgrimage, poetic reverence, and, more recently, influencers with gimbals. Climbing season runs July to September. Outside that, the mountain becomes a white cathedral of thin air, black ice, and quiet death.

The climber, a man in his twenties, first attempted the ascent solo to “capture a summit photo.” He was struck with altitude sickness and rescued near collapse.

Twenty hours later, another distress call came in. Same mountain. Same man. This time: unconscious, found clutching his phone. Officials confirmed he had returned to retrieve the device he lost during the first rescue.

Both rescues were successful. The man is expected to recover.
So is the phone.

The Second Climb

In another era, this would be a parable.

A lone man climbs the sacred peak, fails, is spared, and returns: not for insight, not for atonement, but for a slab of glass that remembers him better than he can.

He did not ascend for enlightenment. He ascended for evidence.

Church of the Eternal Scroll

To dismiss this as idiocy is tempting. But to look closer is worse.

In a world where “pics or it didn’t happen” is no longer a joke but a spiritual law, his decision begins to make tragic sense. He didn’t climb for the photo. He climbed for the ability to prove it. All that he was, his texts, his notes, his playlists, his grief, his Google history, lived in that phone. To lose it wasn’t inconvenience. It was erasure.

Dr. Reyna Pohl, chair of Digital Anthropology at UC Irvine, explained it best:

“This isn’t addiction. It’s cosmology.
The phone isn’t a tool, it’s the ark.
It carries the self we’ve curated and uploaded.
Without it, you’re not gone.
You’re unverifiable.”

Upload or Die

Since the second rescue, the internet has anointed him: ‘The Ascendant’. A subreddit in his honor proposes renaming Fuji’s western trail “Influencer’s Path.” A Tokyo startup has launched Mount Data™ Smart Cases, “preserve the memories you’d die for.”

Meanwhile, #ForThePhone is trending across climbing communities, with users posting summit selfies captioned: “Made it. Not dead. Please like.”

Postmodern Parable

Mount Fuji was once climbed to transcend the ego.
Now, it is climbed to submit it for digital review.

He didn’t climb for insight. He climbed to re-sync. It is easy to mock him. Harder to admit how many of us would do the same.

Because in this economy, you can lose a leg and still get hired. But lose your phone, and you lose the story you’ve told the world about who you are.