Hakone is the perfect escape from the chaos of Tokyo: in just over an hour and a half by train, the megacity gives way to forested mountains, steaming valleys, hot springs and a calm lake in whose mirror, if the sky cooperates, the snowy cone of Mount Fuji stands out. It's a place made for slowing down, sinking into an outdoor hot-spring bath and letting yourself be carried along a loop of mountain trains, funiculars, ropeways and boats that seems designed for enjoying the scenery.
What makes Hakone unique is that mix of volcanic nature, onsen culture and art. You can cross a mountain by ropeway over a valley of sulphur vents where the famous black eggs are boiled, sail a lake on a galleon, walk through a forest of open-air sculptures and end the day in a yukata (cotton kimono), soaking in a hot-spring bath as the snow falls. All just a short hop from the capital.
This guide covers Hakone with a practical eye: how to make the most of the Hakone Free Pass and do the classic loop without getting lost, where and when you have the best chance of seeing Fuji, which museums and hot springs are worth it, and how to choose a ryokan for the night of onsen and kaiseki cuisine that turns Hakone into much more than a day trip.
Hakone sits on the caldera of a volcano whose last major eruption, about 3,000 years ago, formed the Owakudani valley and dammed Lake Ashi. For centuries it was a strategic pass on the Tokaido, the great road linking Edo (Tokyo) with Kyoto: here, in the Edo period (17th-19th centuries), the Tokugawa shogunate set up a famous checkpoint (the Hakone Sekisho) to monitor the movement of people and weapons to and from the capital, and an avenue of cedars lined the route. Its hot springs, known since ancient times, made Hakone a resting place for travellers and pilgrims. With the arrival of the railway and, above all, the Hakone Tozan mountain railway in the early 20th century, along with the tourism development driven by the Odakyu company, Hakone became Tokyo's great onsen getaway, a role it still holds today. The full story, from volcano to onsen, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Japan's political heart: from the fishing village called Edo to the Tokyo of 37 million, with Kamakura, Nikko and Hakone around it.
Read the history of Kanto (Tokyo and surroundings) →If you only have one day, take a guided tour on the first one: it sets up the rest of your trip and saves you a lot of walking. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have over 30 activities in Tokio. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
They depart from Tokio, 70 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before any road, any samurai and any onsen, Hakone was fire. The whole landscape that charms visitors today — the forested mountains, the steaming valley of Owakudani, the calm waters of Lake Ashi — is the work of a volcanic history hundreds of thousands of years long. Mount Hakone is actually a volcanic complex that, over millennia, formed large calderas as it collapsed after successive eruptions.
The last major reshaping of the landscape happened around 3,000 years ago, when a violent eruption brought down part of the mountain. The landslide dammed a river and created Lake Ashi (Ashinoko), the lake that is now the symbol of the area. That same activity created Owakudani, 'the great boiling valley', an area where plumes of steam and sulphurous gases still rise from the ground, proof that the volcano is still alive beneath the surface.
That geothermal activity is also the source of Hakone's greatest treasure: its hot springs. The volcano's heat warms the groundwater that rises in dozens of springs of varying mineral composition, and centuries later these springs would make Hakone famous as an onsen destination. At heart, Hakone is a gift from the volcano: dangerous and generous at once, able to shut down the ropeway when gas levels rise and, at the same time, to offer a restorative hot-spring bath among the mountains.
Geography made Hakone a place everyone had to pass through. The mountains around Lake Ashi formed a natural barrier between the Kanto plain (to the east, where Tokyo lies) and the rest of Japan (to the west, towards Kyoto). Anyone travelling overland between those two regions had to cross the difficult Hakone pass, a steep and often dangerous stretch.
That role as a natural frontier gave it an early spiritual aura. According to tradition, Hakone Shrine (Hakone-jinja) was founded in 757 on the shores of the lake, in a forest of cedars. For centuries it was a place of worship and protection for the travellers, samurai and pilgrims who commended themselves to its gods before tackling the mountain pass. Its setting, between forest and water, still conveys that mix of quiet reflection and respect for nature.
Over time, the Hakone pass became part of the Tokaido, the most important of the five great routes of feudal Japan, which linked Edo (present-day Tokyo) with Kyoto along the coast. Thousands of people travelled it: feudal lords with their retinues, merchants, messengers and pilgrims. Hakone was one of its stations and one of its most feared stretches because of how steep it was. To give walkers shade and a sense of direction, an avenue of tall cedars was planted along the route in the 17th century, and a section of it still survives beside the lake.
Precisely because everyone had to pass through it, Hakone became a key point of political control for the Tokugawa shogunate. Around 1619, the government set up one of the country's most important checkpoints (sekisho) here: a kind of internal customs post that everyone travelling the Tokaido between Edo and western Japan had to go through.
The checkpoint had two very specific missions, summed up in the Japanese phrase 'deteppo ni irionna' ('guns going out, women coming in'). On the one hand, it stopped firearms from leaving for the west, where they could be used against the shogunate. On the other — and above all — it made sure that the wives and daughters of the feudal lords (daimyo) did not flee Edo. Under the sankin-kotai system, the daimyo had to live in Edo in alternating periods and leave their families there, where in practice they served as hostages guaranteeing their loyalty. If one of those women escaped the capital, it was a sign of rebellion, and the Hakone checkpoint was there to catch it.
The post had guards, thorough searches and harsh punishments: trying to slip past the checkpoint or cross the mountain to avoid it could cost you your life. It operated for about 250 years, until the end of the shogunate and the Meiji modernisation made it unnecessary; it was abolished in 1869. Today, a faithful reconstruction on the shore of the lake lets you picture this human filter through which, for two and a half centuries, much of Japan's traffic passed.
Long before the trains arrived, Hakone's hot springs were already drawing weary travellers. The 'seven springs of Hakone' (Hakone Nanayu) — different hot springs in the area — had been known for centuries for their supposed healing properties, and walkers on the Tokaido took advantage of their passage through Hakone to recover their strength in its baths. Little by little, hot-spring inns (ryokan) sprang up around those springs and gave the place its identity.
The big leap came with the modernisation of the 19th and 20th centuries. After the Meiji Restoration, the abolition of feudal checkpoints and the arrival of the railway brought Hakone closer to Tokyo and made it fashionable, first among the elite and then among the general public, as a place for summer holidays and rest. A milestone was the opening in 1919 of the Hakone Tozan mountain railway, a feat of engineering that climbed the slope with zigzag switchbacks and made it easy to reach the heights of the hot-spring area.
Throughout the 20th century, the Odakyu railway company developed the clever circuit we know today — mountain railway, cable car, ropeway over Owakudani and boats across Lake Ashi — designed so that the journey itself would be an attraction, and created the Hakone Free Pass to make getting around easy. Open-air art museums, hot-spring resorts and dozens of ryokan at every level followed. And so the old mountain pass feared by Tokaido walkers became Tokyo's getaway destination par excellence.
Today's Hakone is part of Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, one of the most visited in Japan, and every year it welcomes millions of people, Japanese and foreign, who come looking for the same things travellers sought centuries ago: rest, hot springs and mountain scenery, with the added bonus of Mount Fuji peeking over the horizon. Just a few hours from Tokyo, it is the classic weekend getaway and a very common stop on the itineraries of first-time visitors to Japan.
To its hot-spring tradition, the 20th and 21st centuries added a surprising cultural side: Hakone is now a kind of great open-air museum, with the pioneering Open-Air Museum of sculpture, the Pola Museum of Art and its Impressionists, the Venetian glass museum and many more, all making the most of the natural setting. That combination of nature, onsen and art is unusual and explains much of its charm.
But Hakone never forgets that it sits on a volcano. Periods of heightened activity at Owakudani, which in some years forced the temporary closure of the ropeway and of access to the valley because of rising gas levels, are a reminder that the fire that created this landscape still smoulders beneath the surface. That tension between the calm of a hot-spring bath and the energy of the volcano is, at heart, the essence of Hakone: a place where the earth, generous and fearsome at once, offers waters that heal and vapours that demand respect.
