I have drawn Fuji from Kanagawa, from Ejiri, from the Tama River, from forty places. The mountain does not change. What changes is how much air is between you and it.
What you're looking at
Two axes crossing. The horizontal measures how much of the mountain you can see — detail, texture, the shape of individual rocks. The vertical measures how much the mountain makes you feel something. Four positions on this field: climbing at the base, painting from a day's walk away, printing from Edo, and the small Fuji behind the Great Wave.
Why I drew it this way
The diagram refuses a simple line from left to right. If seeing more meant feeling more, I would have spent my life climbing. Instead the best distance — one day's walk, where I made most of the Thirty-Six Views — sits high and in the middle. Too close and you are looking at rocks. Too far and Fuji becomes geometry. The crossing axes make the argument: these are independent variables, not a progression.
What it argues
Distance is a compositional choice, not an accident of where you stand. The printmaker's Fuji — small, far, behind a wave — has less information than the climber's Fuji but more meaning. What you leave out by standing farther away is not loss. It is the carving that makes the image work.
What I left out
The diagram has no path between the four distances, no arrows suggesting you should move from one to another. I have painted from all four and they do not form a sequence. You do not graduate from the wave's small triangle to the climber's boulders. They are four different mountains that happen to have the same name.