Hakone Park

Hakone Park

Less than a hundred kilometers from teeming Tokyo, Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, internationally famous for hot springs (including Owakudani), hiking and outdoor activities, majestic natural beauty and fabulous views of nearby Mount Fuji is deservedly one of the most popular destinations for visitors and Japanese alike. Well served with and by mass transit, including on Lake Ashi, the big park offers tourists a range of choices in addition to scenic outlooks, including the opportunity of lengthening their lives by seven years!

According to legend, consuming eggs cooked in the restorative waters of bubbling, malodorous Owakudani, situated in the area around a crater made during in the last eruption of Mount Hakone perhaps 3000 years ago, has wonderful result. Smelly, sulfurous odors pervade the place where the special eggs, boiled in the geo-hot water (reputed to prolong one's life by approximately seven years, bus accidents aside) are for sale. The hot, mineral-rich water turns the eggs matt black (a pretty unusual look for eggs: “have a Gothic Easter”) but the taste is fine and the color doesn’t even go through the shell, much less to the food matter.






With a good guidebook in hand or a cabled-up laptop Goggled to any of the numerous sites offering diagrams of Hakone’s lavish transportation grid, visitors can trace access from, typically, Tokyo, to the park. Driving is, naturally, one way to scoot around the scenic curves cut into the landscape, driving around vast arcs gaining altitude and curling out again and again for seemingly every time more spectacular views of Mount Fuji. The sprawling place offers—aside from longevity, no mean benefit in itself—biking, hiking, and rope ways or gondolas. It’s served by rail and a funicular. Water taxi and tour boats cruise Lake Ashi (with busses dropping folks at stops, to connect with the rail head).

Indeed, there seems to be a clear difference in cosmology or “world view” between the United States and some other nation’s notion of park space and Hakone. One way to view park space is to reduce or avoid the evidence of the “hand of man.” In Hakone it’s as though engineers have fanned out to wrestle that rascal nature to the ground: it’s under control with rail, and pavement, and cast concrete and strung cable; parking lots, and sluice ways, and hard packed outlooks. It all really makes it extraordinarily easy to access the place.