What Grand Canyon is to the United States, Mount Fuji is to Japan – a natural wonder, attracting visitors by the hundreds of thousands from across the country and across the world on a yearly basis. Mount Fuji is venerated in Japanese lore – legend tells of the first ascent by a monk sometime in the 7th century – and art, and literature, with countless poems dedicated to the sacred peak. Some of Japan’s best known paintings, made by Katsushika Hokusai, are of Mount Fuji. But inside that majestic beauty hides a still active, if for now dormant, volcano.

On this day, December 16, 1707, Mount Fuji erupted in a giant plume of ash and cinders that landed centimeters thick over everything for hundreds of miles around the volcano.

While casualties from the eruption were light, the farmers in the fields around the volcano suffered greatly, with piles of dust over all the crops. To clean them off, the farmers arranged them in large piles by the river and allowed the rain to carry the dirt off. The crops were cleaned, but all that ash washed up into rivers, creating clogs and causing them to overflow. Instead of the farmers’ fields near the mountain, the giant city of Tokyo now lies, one of the most populous cities in the world. The piles of ash from a modern eruption would no doubt cause a bigger disruption there than for the farmers of the early 18th century.