You leave the ryokan at half past five with a thermos, and the lake road is empty in the way that only Japanese roads are empty – swept, lit, nobody on it. Twenty-five minutes later you are in a car park on a hillside above Fujiyoshida, pulling on another layer, and the sky behind the mountain has gone the colour of the inside of a shell.

There are 398 steps if you start from the bottom, cut into the hill beside the Arakura Sengen shrine, and they are steep enough to be a real climb in the dark. If you have a driver, there is a small upper car park that takes most of them away, which I unapologetically use and recommend. Either way you come out onto a wooden viewing platform, and the pagoda is simply there, below you and slightly to the left, with Fuji filling everything behind it.

What nobody tells you

The pagoda is not ancient and it is not a temple. It is a war memorial, built in 1963, for the men of this district who died in the conflicts from the Russo-Japanese war onwards. Knowing that changes the view – it was put exactly where it is so that the mountain would stand behind it, which is why the composition works so improbably well. It was designed to be looked at from where you are standing.

The hour is the whole thing

I cannot overstate this. At six in the morning in October there were four other people on the platform and no sound at all except a crow somewhere below. The light comes up the cone from the bottom, the snow line goes pink and then white, and the valley underneath stays blue and cold for another twenty minutes. By half past eight the first coaches are in the lower car park. By nine there is a marshalled queue for the platform and a man with a megaphone keeping it moving, and the mountain has usually gone into cloud anyway.

This single fact is the best argument I know for sleeping on Lake Kawaguchi rather than coming out from Tokyo. The coach day trip cannot get you here before noon. A night on the lake gets you here before anyone.

The seasons, briefly

April gives you the cherry trees on the slope below the pagoda, which is the version of this picture everyone has seen and the busiest fortnight of the year here – go at five rather than six. November gives you the maples, far fewer people and a much clearer mountain. December and January are the sharpest and coldest, with no foliage at all and the best odds of a cloudless cone. Mid-summer is the worst of it: haze, humidity and a mountain you may never see.

How I build it

Two nights on the lake, a driver who will be outside the ryokan at half past five on both mornings, and breakfast arranged for after you get back rather than before you leave. That is it. The mountain decides which of the two mornings it gives you, and having two is the only insurance that exists.

If you would like me to put that leg together properly – the right room facing Fuji, the driver, the sunrise, and the rest of Japan around it – start here and tell me when you are thinking of going.