The summit has been thought of as sacred since ancient times and was forbidden to women until the Meiji era in the late 1860s. Ancient samurai used the base of the mountain as a remote training area, near the present-day town of Gotemba. The shōgun Minamoto no Yoritomo held yabusame archery contests in the area in the early Kamakura period.
The first ascent by a foreigner was by Sir Rutherford Alcock in September 1860, who ascended the mountain in 8 hours and descended in 3 hours.[18]: 427 Alcock's brief narrative in The Capital of the Tycoon was the first widely disseminated description of the mountain in the West.[18]: 421–27 Lady Fanny Parkes, the wife of British ambassador Sir Harry Parkes, was the first non-Japanese woman to ascend Mount Fuji in 1867.[19] Photographer Felix Beato climbed Mount Fuji two years later.[20]