place names that include fuji as a part also suggest the origin of the word fuji is in the Yamato language rather than Ainu. Japanese toponymist Kanji Kagami argued that the name has the same root as and , and came from its "long well-shaped slope". Modern linguist Alexander Vovin proposes an alternative hypothesis based on Old Japanese reading : the word may have been borrowed from Eastern Old Japanese 火主 meaning "fire master". Variations In English, the mountain is known as Mount Fuji. Some sources refer to it as "Fuji-san", "Fujiyama" or, redundantly, "Mt. Fujiyama". Japanese speakers refer to the mountain as "Fuji-san". This "san" is not the honorific suffix used with people's names, such as Watanabe-san, but the Sino-Japanese reading of the character used in Sino-Japanese compounds. In Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki romanization, the name is transliterated as Huzi. Other Japanese names which have become obsolete or poetic include , , , and , created by combining the first character of , Fuji, and , mountain. History Mount Fuji is an attractive volcanic cone and a frequent subject of Japanese art especially after 1600, when Edo (now Tokyo) became the capital and people saw the mountain while traveling on the Tōkaidō road. According to the historian H. Byron Earhart, "in medieval times it eventually came to be seen by Japanese as the “number one” mountain of the known world of the three countries of India, China, and Japan". The mountain is mentioned in Japanese literature throughout the ages and is the subject of many poems. The summit has been thought of as sacred since ancient times and was therefore forbidden to women. It was not until 1872 that the Japanese government issued an edict (May 4, 1872, Grand Council of State Edict 98) stating, "Any remaining practices of female exclusion on shrine and temple lands shall be immediately abolished, and mountain climbing for the purpose of worship, etc., shall be permitted.” However, Tatsu Takayama (also known as Takayama Tatsu), a Japanese woman, became the first woman on record to summit Mount Fuji in the fall of 1832. 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