Hakone is Tokyo's favourite escape. It's a Japanese ideal: a land of onsen (natural hot springs) and jagged, misty mountains. At the centre is calm, cool Lake Ashi, a natural reflecting pool for Mt Fuji, which rises in the distance. If it reminds you of a scene from a wood-block print, it's because it has been, many times over.
Hakone is also a Japanese reality. It's overdeveloped and can be painfully crowded. Convenience rules: cable cars snake up hillsides, tour buses career down narrow mountain roads, kitschy 'pirate ships' ferry tourists across the lake.
But like most things in Japan, the beauty is in the details. You just have to know where to look.
The last teahouse on the Tokkaido
Hakone was once a checkpoint on the Old Tokkaido Highway (pictured above), the stone-paved road that connected the shogun's capital in Edo (now Tokyo) with the imperial capital in Kyoto. Officials on horseback used it, but so did pilgrims in straw sandals. The road and its checkpoints were formalised in the 17th century (and immortalised in Hiroshige's wood-block print series 53 Stations of the Tokkaido in the 19th century). Hakone was the last checkpoint before Edo, and thus the most perilous.
Satoshi Yamamoto runs Amazake-chaya (395-1 Futago-yama, Hataju-ku, open 7am-5pm), a teahouse along what was once the Tokkaido Highway. His family has been serving travellers there for more than 350 years.
"Travellers coming from Kyoto who'd just passed would be relieved, celebratory. Those going the other direction would be anxious. Anyone could be suspected of being a spy," he explains.
Over the past 150 years most of the old Tokkaido has been turned into paved multi-lane highways and railway lines, but a 9km stretch through the woods here in Hakone – between the villages of Hakone Yumoto and Moto Hakone – has been preserved as a hiking trail. It's a fairly lonely passageway, with moss hanging from the trees, and stones worn smooth from the foot traffic of days past. While there were once many teahouses along this stretch, now there is only Amazake-chaya. (If you don't want to walk, a bus running along the road parallel to the trail also stops at Amazake-chaya.)
"I know what you're going to ask me," says Yamamoto. "Because I ask myself the same question all the time: why are we the only ones still here?"
The building is no longer made of wood; it has burned down too many times. When customers complain, Yamamoto reminds them that he could have put up a convenience store instead. Besides, the roof is still thatched and the floor packed earth, except for a platform of woven straw mats around the hearth. Customers sit at tables that are polished cross-sections of thick cedars. The glowing embers are the brightest things in the room.
The recipes haven't changed much either. Hot, gooey mochi (pounded rice) cakes are grilled over coals and dusted with soy powder or crushed black sesame. Naturally sweet amazake, a non-alcoholic fermented rice drink that is the house speciality, is served hot, with pickles on the side.
A 19th-century hill station
The village of Miyanoshita was Japan's first cosmopolitan resort. Its golden age spanned the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, when the country began to open up to the west. The Americans and Europeans who settled in Yokohama flocked here from the city to escape the summer heat.
The main street, nicknamed Sepia Street, still has an old-time hill station feel – the narrow road now has to accommodate buses in both directions, so there's hardly room for a pavement.
Among the traditional sliding doors is Shima Photo Studio (372 Miyanoshita, Hakone-machi, open 9am-7pm), nearly a 100 years old and with old black-and-white images of Miyanoshita and its famous visitors in the window. Another, Edo & Co (363 Miyanoshita, Hakone-machi, open 9am-6pm Fri-Wed), sells antique porcelain of the kind that would have been snapped up by the first wave of Japanophiles – large platters decorated with landscape patterns in classic blue, tiny sake cups embellished with enamel the colour of rust and jade.
But Miyanoshita's grandest, if not oldest, relic is the Fujiya Hotel, one of Japan's first western-style hotels, built in 1878. It's big and creaky and not, in fact, very western. The eaves curl up on the edges like a mustache, the roof is tile, the accents are vermillion.
Nearby, a signal to Miyanoshita's future. The Naraya Ryokanwas once the Fujiya's proud rival, but it was torn down in 2000 when its owners were unable to pay the steep inheritance tax. All that was left to Yoshikazu Ando, the 14th in line, was scrap wood and a legacy. This he turned into Naraya Cafe – Miyanoshita's hip new hangout.
Using the framework of an existing shop on family land up the road, Ando and some friends – an architect and a carpenter among them – set to work building an airy cafe. It's redevelopment done right: raw beams crisscross overhead and a loft on the second floor doubles as a gallery for local artists. The best innovation, however, is the hot spring footbath on the terrace. Here you can take off your shoes, roll up your jeans and soak your feet in steaming mineral water while sipping espresso or a glass of wine.
Hidden baths
Bath hopping is one of Hakone's most-publicised pleasures, but you could easily walk right past the Rakuyu-jurin day spa, also in Miyanoshita. Only a few paper lanterns on aluminum poles mark the start of a winding series of stone stairs that seem to go off the side of the cliff. They go on and on, before finally ending at a simple wooden gate with flapping red curtains that is the entrance. Made of unpolished cedar on stilts, the whole complex looks like a tree house. Foliage hangs over a series of rotemburo (open-air baths) arranged like terraced rice paddies perched on the side of a ravine. Bamboo leaves, like long pointed tongues, lap at the edges.
Only 100 people are allowed in per day, split between the men and women's baths. For those lucky enough to get through on the phone when they open at 10am, there are two private baths that can be reserved by the hour.
If you can't get in, another of Hakone's hidden gems is well and truly hidden - in the back of an art museum in the nearby village of Hakone Yumoto. The Key Hiraga Art Museum is dedicated to the works of the Pigalle-inspired Japanese painter and is run by the late artist's wife in their 100-year-old villa. It's a rambling structure with long corridors of polished wood and a garden that looks half wild.
She lets out the villa's bathhouse for an extra admission fee. It's pure hot spring water in a marble tub under a vaulted canopy of wood – and you can have it all to yourself.
Getting there
To get to Hakone from Tokyo, take the Odakyu Line limited express Romance Car from Shinjuku Station to Hakone Yumoto. It takes 90 minutes and costs ¥2020 (£18). A tourist information outside the station has maps in English. Transfer to the Hakone Tozan Line for Miyanoshita.
Rooms at the Fujiya Hotel start at £135pp; (weekday offers available). The Prince Hakone Hotel has rooms overlooking Lake Ashi starting at £160. Both have hot spring baths.
• Rebecca Milner is a writer based in Tokyo
