Hakone

Where it sits. Hakone is a town in Ashigarashimo District at the western edge of Kanagawa, built inside and around the caldera of an active volcano roughly ten kilometres across. The rim ridges rise to around 1,000 metres, the central cone of Kami-yama reaches 1,438 metres, and the southwestern floor of the caldera holds Lake Ashi. Because the whole complex sits between the Tokyo plain and Mount Fuji, Hakone has spent a thousand years as both an obstacle and a destination: the road west had to cross it, and the hot water underneath made crossing tolerable. It lies within Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, and from Shinjuku the Odakyu limited express reaches Hakone-Yumoto in about eighty-five minutes, which makes it the most-used mountain escape in the country.

The road and the barrier. The old Tōkaidō, the highway between Edo and Kyoto, climbed over the Hakone pass, and the shogunate placed one of its most severe checkpoints on the lake shore. The Hakone Sekisho controlled movement along the route from 1619 until 1869, with a particular eye on weapons heading east and women of hostage families heading west. The reconstruction opened in 2007 is unusually rigorous — it was rebuilt from excavated foundations and surviving Edo-period drawings rather than approximated — and includes the guardhouse, prison and lookout. Nearby, a stretch of the original stone-paved road survives in the woods, and the avenue of cryptomeria planted along the highway in 1618 still shades several hundred metres of the old route with trees now well over four hundred years old.

Hot water. Hakone's onsen were counted historically as seven springs and are now usually reckoned at around twenty distinct hot spring areas, each with different water chemistry: the alkaline simple springs of Yumoto, whose first bath is traditionally dated to 738; the sulphurous, milky water piped down from Ōwakudani; the acidic springs at Ubako; the quiet high-altitude baths at Ashinoyu. This variety is the reason people return. The town's ryokan range from working family inns with a single indoor bath to architect-designed properties with private open-air tubs, and many of them sell day-use bathing, which is the cheapest way to sample several.

The loop. Hakone's transport is itself the attraction, and the standard circuit uses five different modes in sequence: the Hakone Tozan Railway from Odawara to Gōra, a mountain railway that climbs through three reversing switchbacks on gradients of up to 80 per mille; a cable car to Sōunzan; a ropeway over the fumarole field of Ōwakudani and down to Tōgendai; a lake cruise aboard one of the sightseeing ships got up as galleons; and a bus back through the pass. The Hakone Freepass covers the whole sequence plus most buses. Bear in mind that the ropeway is suspended whenever volcanic gas concentrations rise, and buses substitute — that happened for over a year after the 2015 eruption episode.

Tokyo-3. For a large share of visitors under fifty, Hakone is where Neon Genesis Evangelion happens. Hideaki Anno's 1995 series and the Rebuild films site the fortress city of Tokyo-3 in this caldera, with the lake, the surrounding ridges and the geothermal ground reworked into a landscape of retractable buildings and armoured hills. The correspondence is deliberate and precise enough that fans navigate by it. Hakone has embraced this rather than resisting it: there is a permanent Evangelion shop at Hakone-Yumoto selling official goods, collaborations have put character artwork on local buses and station signage, and the town has run stamp rallies linking the anime's sites to the real ones. It sits comfortably alongside the traditional draws instead of replacing them.

Museums, seasons and crowds. The Hakone Open-Air Museum, opened in 1969 as Japan's first sculpture park, spreads works by Henry Moore and others across seven hectares of hillside and includes a dedicated Picasso pavilion. The Pola Museum of Art, opened in 2002, is buried in the beech forest with only its top level above ground and holds a serious French Impressionist collection. Each New Year on 2 and 3 January the Hakone Ekiden, a university relay race run from Tokyo since 1920, turns the pass road into a national television event and closes it to normal traffic. Hydrangeas line the Tozan Railway cuttings in mid-June, when evening trains run slowly for the flowers. Autumn colour peaks from late October at altitude to late November lower down, and the same weeks give the clearest views of Fuji across the lake. Golden Week, the August holiday and autumn weekends produce genuine queueing on every leg of the loop.