Hakone, Kanagawa

Steam rises at nearly every turn along the Hakone Tozan railway line, which climbs in switchbacks through dense cedar and oak. The towns strung along the route — Hakone-Yumoto, Miyanoshita, Ōhiradai, Tōnozawa — each carry their own thermal character, their own particular smell of sulfur and wet stone. Hakone is a place where the ground itself is active, and the traveler feels this not as spectacle but as ordinary fact.

At Amazake-chaya, a teahouse that has been serving its fermented rice drink since the early seventeenth century, the preparation method has not shifted with the centuries. The drink arrives warm, unstrained, thick. A bowl of it after a long walk on the old Tōkaidō road section through the pass is not a tourist gesture — it is simply what one does here. Not far away, Hatsuhana, a soba shop that opened in the 1930s, is credited with establishing the style of tororosobu — buckwheat noodles topped with grated mountain yam — that has since become synonymous with the area. The yam is gluey, pale, almost cold against the warm broth.

Hakone Shrine sits at the edge of Lake Ashi, the caldera lake formed by Hakone-yama's volcanic history. In March, at Suwa Shrine in Sengokuhara, the Yudate Shishimai — a lion dance performed over boiling water — is offered up as it has been for generations, designated a nationally important intangible folk cultural property. The procession of the Hakone Daimyō Gyōretsu, a feudal lord's procession, moves through the town each year in a different register entirely, pageantry rather than prayer. Both coexist without apparent contradiction, which is perhaps the texture of Hakone itself: deep historical sediment beneath a surface that remains very much in use.