Hakone, Where Fuji Rises Through the Steam

Ninety minutes from Tokyo, Hakone trades the city for sulphur, cedar and water. The Hakone Tozan Railway climbs the mountainside in switchbacks, reversing direction three times while driver and conductor swap ends of the train; in late June the embankments vanish under thousands of hydrangeas. Higher up, the ropeway lifts you over Owakudani, a raw volcanic bowl where steam vents hiss out of yellow rock and vendors boil eggs in the springs until the shells turn coal black. Locals will tell you each kuro-tamago is worth seven extra years of life.

Down at the water, sightseeing boats rigged as galleons cross Lake Ashi toward the great vermilion torii of Hakone Shrine, which stands with its feet in the lake and its back against the cedar forest. On a clear winter morning Mount Fuji rises above the lake, doubled in the still water. The old Tokaido highway still runs along the shore under a tunnel of four-hundred-year-old cedars, past the reconstructed Hakone checkpoint where Edo officials inspected every traveller bound for the capital, and the thatched Amazake-chaya teahouse still pours sweet unfiltered rice drink for walkers who arrive on foot.

Art belongs here too. The Hakone Open-Air Museum scatters Moore and Miró across a lawn framed by mountains, and the Pola Museum sinks its Impressionists into a glass box buried in the beech woods. But the reason people return is the bath. Gora, Miyanoshita, Sengokuhara and Yumoto each draw a different mineral water, each with its own ryokan and its own rotenburo open to the night sky and the noise of the river. Japan rewards travellers who slow down, and Hakone is where you learn how.