Hakone

The mountains of Hakone are the remains of a volcano that has been active for hundreds of thousands of years; the collapse of its summit formed the caldera, and landslides from an eruption about 3,000 years ago created Lake Ashi and left the steaming ground at Owakudani. Hot springs have been used here since at least the 8th century, when a monk is traditionally credited with opening the baths at Yumoto, and Hakone Shrine was founded in the same period as a place of mountain worship.

The town's importance grew with the road. When the Tokugawa shogunate organised the Tokaido between Edo and Kyoto, the crossing of these steep mountains became its hardest stage, and in the early 17th century a checkpoint was set at the lake to inspect travellers, above all to stop weapons moving towards Edo and the wives of provincial lords leaving it. A post town, a cedar avenue and paved stone sections of the road served the traffic, and the springs took in travellers along the way.

Modern Hakone was made by the railway. The line from Odawara reached Yumoto in 1888, the switchback mountain railway to Gora opened in 1919, and hotels began to receive foreign visitors, several of whom recorded the resort in the late 19th century. The Hakone Ropeway followed in the 1950s, and in 1936 the district became part of what is now the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park. Sculpture and art museums opened from the 1960s, and eruptive unrest in 2015 closed the ropeway and the valley for months, a reminder that the ground beneath the resort is still live.

The culture of Hakone is the culture of the onsen. Guests change into a yukata provided by the inn and wear it to dinner, to the baths and sometimes along the street; dinner is a long procession of small seasonal dishes; and the day is organised around bathing rather than sightseeing. Baths take many forms — indoor cypress tubs, open-air rotenburo looking into the forest, and family baths that can be reserved — and the water differs from valley to valley, which is why the district counts more than a dozen separate springs.

Craft traditions grew from the timber of the mountains. Hakone marquetry, yosegi zaiku, glues coloured woods into blocks that are shaved into patterned sheets and made into boxes, trays and puzzle boxes that open only in a set sequence. Workshops around Yumoto and Hatajuku still make them, and the craft is one of the few souvenirs genuinely local to the town.

Hakone also has an unusual place in the national calendar. The Hakone Ekiden, run each New Year between Tokyo and the lake, is among the most watched sporting events in Japan, and the climbing leg up the mountain has made local landmarks familiar to viewers who have never visited. In November the Daimyo Gyoretsu parade dresses townspeople as a lord's retinue on the Tokaido, and shrine rituals continue on the lake and at the mountain sanctuaries.

About 11,000 people live in the town of Hakone, and the number has been falling for years as the population ages, yet it receives millions of visitors annually. Almost everything turns on that trade: inns, hotels, restaurants, museums, the railways, the ropeway and the boats employ most of the working population, along with the shops and bakeries along the station streets.

Residents live in the valleys — at Yumoto, Miyanoshita, Gora and Sengokuhara — where housing is scattered and the roads are narrow. The rhythm of the week follows the guests: quiet Mondays and Tuesdays, crowded weekends, and long peaks at New Year, in the spring holidays and through the autumn colour. Many workers commute up from Odawara, and schoolchildren travel down to it.

The pressures are those of a resort: dependence on a single industry, heavy traffic on the mountain roads at weekends, an ageing workforce, and vulnerability to events beyond the town's control — the volcanic unrest of 2015, typhoon damage to roads and railways, and the collapse and recovery of visitor numbers during the pandemic. Against that, the proximity of Tokyo keeps demand steady, and a steady stream of new hotels and renovated inns has followed.

The dish everyone associates with Hakone is the least ordinary: kuro-tamago, eggs boiled in the sulphurous pools at Owakudani until a chemical reaction blackens the shells. They taste like ordinary boiled eggs, and the tradition holds that each one eaten adds years to a life. The other local food most visitors meet is the onsen manju, a small steamed bun with a sweet bean filling, sold hot from shopfronts along the street at Hakone-Yumoto.

Meals proper are mountain meals. Soba made from buckwheat, tofu in many forms, wild vegetables gathered on the slopes, freshwater fish and simmered dishes fill the restaurants and the inns, and the multi-course dinner served at a ryokan is usually the main event of a stay. Because the district sits an hour from the sea, fish also comes up daily from Odawara, whose kamaboko — steamed fish paste sliced from a wooden board — is a regional speciality sold in gift boxes.

Local drinks follow the same pattern: sake from Kanagawa breweries, plum wine, tea drunk at rest houses along the old road, and spring water bottled from the mountains. Cafés at the museums and around Gora serve cakes and coffee to walkers, and the shops along the Yumoto street sell rice crackers, pickles and sweets made with local chestnuts and citrus.