Even dumber, I never noticed Mt. Fuji was in the pic, focus was truly on the wave.

In some prints Fuji is coloured to look like a small wave (my personal preference) but in later prints is coloured differently to stand out.

Me too! I'd only ever noticed the waves

Worth noting the color of the boats varies from white to yellow to dark brown in the various prints, so sometimes they appear far more obviously than others.

I am in the same ..err ...boat.

I am now convinced there is a strong element of left-to-right versus right-to-left in the way we process images.

Fascinating!

This happened to me too! I'm not sure if it's the left-to-right thing though, that sounds a bit unlikely to me. Specifically that it's tied to the language we use. (For the record I probably default to reading left-to-right, though I also read and write in Hebrew which is RTL.)