There is a sign at the top telling you to look up.

The gondola takes six minutes to the eighth station of Mount Adatara, and a short walk from where it lets you off there is a post in the ground. The sky above this place, it says, is the real sky.

Which is a strange thing to find on a mountain that people climb in October for the color on its slopes. You arrive looking down and across, and the sign asks you to raise your head.

The phrase comes from Chieko Takamura, who was born in a sake brewer's house at the foot of this mountain, trained as a painter, married a poet, moved to Tokyo, and lost her health there. Tokyo, she said, had no sky. Her husband put the remark into a poem, and it is the remark that survived — not the mountain, but what stands above it. She died at fifty-two.

The color arrives in early October and comes all at once, because the upper slopes carry no tall trees. Low shrubs turn red and gold across open ground, and nothing blocks the view in any direction. So the leaves and the sky are available at the same time, from the same place, which is not usually how it works.

Adatara is an active volcano and still vents steam. Worth knowing while you stand there admiring it.