The boy was 7 years old, from Nagoya, and had climbed high enough on Mount Fuji’s Fujinomiya Trail to reach the 6th station, about 2,490 meters up, before he got tired and fussy and couldn’t go on.
His 48-year-old father told him to wait and kept climbing toward the 3,776-meter summit with the boy’s older brother, a junior high student around 12. By some accounts the child was told to sit tight for about 8 hours.
Around 7:40 a.m. on August 20, a hut worker cleaning the toilets heard an argument and found the boy alone on a bench near a drop. Staff pulled him inside as rain fell and fog gathered, then called police. He told them he was just doing what his dad said.
Officers tracked the father to the 8th station, about 3,250 meters up, ordered him back down, and reunited the family by that afternoon. Their message to him: “Even if it means having to give up on climbing the mountain together, leaving a child behind is unacceptable.”
Police weighed child abandonment charges and dropped them after he returned quickly and showed remorse, calling it a “rash decision” he deeply regretted. A mountain medicine specialist said the choice could have been fatal, given how fast the weather turns up there and how quickly a child can lose body heat.
That same rule has real has a morbid history. In January 2025, Austrian climber Thomas Plamberger left his exhausted girlfriend Kerstin Gurtner about 50 meters below the summit of the Großglockner, Austria’s highest peak, in winter conditions; she froze to death, and he was convicted of gross negligent manslaughter in February 2026.
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