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The story
The steep prices at the vending machines and shops atop Mt. Fuji sparked a debate on 5ch’s Nanademo Jikkyo (“Live Commentary”) board. Against posters defending the prices by citing transport and labor costs, a wave of replies pushed back with concrete comparisons, like “Coke at Tokyo Dome is only 400 yen.”
What people said
It's heavy, so hauling it up there is a pain!
Amazing.
Nobody's buying a lukewarm Coke that's gone soggy in the drizzle.
Yeah, there's no way he can win this one.
He's probably hopped on a plane and gone into hiding.
They're hauling it up with stuff like this, so it really should be cheaper.
100 kg a load is pretty inefficient.
Like, even on Marugame Seimen's monthly "1st of the month" discount days,
their daily sales still aren't running at a loss.
Meaning the business works fine even at that price,
so the rest of the time they're just charging customers double for no reason.
So it's like how some people would take a civil servant job for 3 million yen a year, yet they go and pay 6 million anyway — that kind of weird?
How many round trips is some underpowered drone gonna need?
They can reach the summit of Everest in 8 minutes — this isn't the drone you're picturing.
Update your drone knowledge, man.
Kamikochi has toilet attendants, but they barely let anyone in who doesn't look like a hiker — that's shady.
does the water actually get all the way to 100°C?
Does that really matter that much?
90°C should be plenty.
It boils at around 90°C up there, so it won't get any hotter than that.
No way.
Eating hard, lukewarm cup noodles and still going "so good, so good" — that's what mountain climbing is.
If you think that, why don't you do it yourself then?
Because you can't open a new business there.
The mountain huts in the national parks are the same — pure vested interests.
So it's just sour grapes, then.
Coke at Tokyo Dome → 400 yen
If you're gonna bring up transport costs, you should be complaining about that one first.
Coke at a live house venue is 600 yen…
Aquarius is just too tasty, I end up drinking way more than I should 😭
Is water from an oasis in the middle of a desert worth the same as water that comes out when you turn on a tap downtown?
And who's paying for that construction, exactly?
How would they even recoup the cost?
Background and Key Points
Coke costs 500 yen at a Mt. Fuji summit vending machine because everything above the fifth station has to be hauled up by bulldozer, helicopter, or on the backs of porters — Mt. Fuji has no road or cable car to its 3,776m peak, so vendors running the mountain huts pay for that logistics out of pocket, and it’s a known, decades-old arrangement rather than a new scandal. Similarly, huts and even public toilets on the mountain (and at other national parks like Kamikochi) charge fees because there’s no municipal utility service; someone has to pack out waste and maintain facilities without any public subsidy covering the trail itself. Climbers are also told water actually boils around 90°C at that altitude, not 100°C, due to lower atmospheric pressure — a genuine physical fact, not an urban myth, which is why cup noodles never quite cook properly at the summit.
The thread’s actual fault line wasn’t “is 500 yen expensive” — nobody defended it as cheap — but whether the transport-cost justification holds up at all once compared to other “expensive” venues. Posters citing Tokyo Dome’s 400 yen Coke argued that a stadium in central Tokyo, with elevators and paved loading docks, still charges only slightly less than a summit reachable only by manual portage, which undercuts the logistics excuse rather than supporting it.
What outside readers might miss is that this isn’t really a free market: mountain huts on Fuji operate under long-standing concessions inside a national park, so new entrants can’t simply undercut them by opening a cheaper stall, which is why the “just start your own business there” rebuttals in the thread got dismissed as naive rather than as real competitive pressure.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nanademo Jikkyo) thread “Me: “Mt. Fuji’s vending machines are overpriced” Idiots: “It’s the transport costs~ the labor costs~”.”
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