Japan 2025: Hakone

Melon Pan, Romancecars, and Ominous Weather

I feel like most of these entries start with sleep trouble and I would love to report that by this point in the trip my body had figured itself out and we were operating like normal humans again. That would be a lie. Your body simply refuses to believe what the clock says. My advice, for whatever it’s worth: get to your destination as fast as possible when you land, then be flexible while your body re-calibrates. Some days you will wake up at dawn feeling amazing. Other days you’ll wake up at dawn feeling amazing and then crash around 3pm. On this particular morning I woke up feeling refreshed. Properly refreshed.

I glanced at the clock expecting something reasonable. Surely it was at least 6. It was 4:15am.

Gross.

I tried the classic move of laying there pretending sleep might return. Maybe if I just… didn’t move. Maybe if I closed my eyes harder. Maybe if I negotiated with my brain like a tired parent bargaining with a toddler. No luck and by 6am I surrendered, showered, and decided the only logical next step was breakfast.

Which meant a trip to the combini.

Breakfast that morning was a chicken sandwich with jalapeños, a canned coffee, and melon pan. This was the first time I had melon pan in Japan and it made a huge impression on me. I’m not usually much of a sweets person, but melon pan? Oh my god. Despite the name, it’s not actually melon flavored. The bread is round and scored in a pattern that vaguely resembles the skin of a melon. Flavor-wise it’s closer to a sugar cookie fused with soft bread. The outside has this thin, crisp, cookie-like shell with a light sugar crunch. The inside is fluffy, slightly sweet bread. Imagine a warm bakery roll wearing a cookie hat. Texture is the real champion here. Crunch outside, cloud inside. No melon involved. Continuing the theme of breakfast, I also grabbed dried candied lemon peel for the train ride along with dried pineapple and mixed nuts seasoned with yuzu.

With yesterday’s preparation, getting through Odakyu Station was surprisingly smooth. We had already purchased our upgrade seats for the Romancecar, the limited express train that runs from Shinjuku out toward Hakone. There was only one small hiccup, turns out the Romancecar upgrade does not include the base train ticket. Minor detail, the station attendant briefly looked panicked when I asked if he spoke English while simultaneously attempting to ask the question in my extremely questionable Japanese. This created a moment of mutual uncertainty where both of us wondered if the conversation was about to collapse, but then he calmly pulled out a pocket translator device. You speak into it. It translates. The other person responds. It translates back. Suddenly the entire situation becomes much less intimidating. Within about thirty seconds we had solved the ticket mystery and I walked away feeling like we had just completed a diplomatic negotiation.

From there it was smooth sailing.

The Romancecar itself was exactly what you’d expect from Japanese rail: clean, quiet, organized, and comfortable enough that you immediately start wondering why trains everywhere else can’t figure this out. Large windows lined both sides of the car, perfect for watching the city slowly dissolve into countryside. Shinjuku’s dense skyline faded into suburbs. Suburbs faded into small towns. Rice fields began appearing between clusters of houses. Before long the terrain started rising and the landscape shifted into low mountains.

We were on our way to Hakone.

Hakone sits inside the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, about 90 minutes from Tokyo, and it’s one of Japan’s most famous mountain resort areas. People come here for hot springs, lake views, ropeways, old cedar roads, and if the weather cooperates, views of Mount Fuji. It’s also a region famous among car nerds. If you’re a fan of MF Ghost, sequal to Initial D, a lot of the racing scenes are set on the winding mountain roads around this area. Those tight hairpins and downhill stretches? Real roads. Real geography. The kind of place where you suddenly understand why Japanese car culture loves mountain passes so much.

The weather, however, had its own plans.

Somewhere out in the Pacific, a typhoon was doing the slow, ominous spiral toward the mainland. The entire ride out to Hakone was under a thick gray blanket. Clouds hung low over the hills. The air outside looked dense and heavy. It had that quiet, cinematic quality where everything feels calm but slightly tense like the opening act of a disaster movie.

We hadn’t seen a drop of rain yet, but the mountains were watching and the day was just getting started.

Pirate Ships, Bad Maps, and the Udon That Saved Us

Hakone’s station was beautiful. You step off the train and immediately realize you are no longer in Tokyo. Shinjuku had been noise, steel, and lights. Hakone was quiet, green, and felt like someone had turned the volume knob down on the entire world. Right on the platform there was a little drink bar, water, juice, snacks, even beer if that’s the direction your morning is heading. Japan has this wonderful habit of placing food exactly where you didn’t know you needed it. I walked up and that’s when I saw them…Onigiri for 100 yen.

Um. Yes.

If you’ve never had onigiri, they’re simple in theory: a triangle or ball of rice with some sort of filling. I spotted salted plum onigiri (umeboshi) and grabbed one immediately. I had never tried it before, but it sounded exactly like something I would enjoy. I sat down on a bench and took a bite. It was exactly as advertised. Buttery rice paired with the sharp, salty, tart punch of the plum in the center. The flavor is aggressive in a good way. Salty, sour, slightly fermented. If you like pickles, olives, or anything that punches you in the mouth with acidity, it’s fantastic. Kristen watched this entire experience unfold with silent skepticism. She is not much of a pickles person. She is also not much of a plums person. The overlap of those two categories meant she was very comfortable judging my choices.

Snack finished, we wandered outside.

Hakone was somehow more beautiful than I expected. The color palette was completely different than anything we had seen in Japan so far. Tokyo had been bright and saturated, Kamakura had that sunlit seaside look. Hakone was shades of grey, blue and green and somehow those colors worked together perfectly. Forests climbed up the mountainsides in layers of mossy greens. Clouds rolled across the ridge lines. As a photographer, I absolutely love cloudy days, that might sound strange, but hear me out. Sunlight is harsh. It creates hard shadows, blows out highlights, and warms the color temperature so much that everything starts drifting toward yellow. Clouds act like a giant diffuser in the sky, the light becomes soft and even, colors stay true. Greens get richer. Reds and blues pop. It’s nature’s softbox.

Hakone looked incredible under that soft grey ceiling.

Hakone is famous for something called “The Hakone Round Course,” or more casually the Hakone Loop. The idea is simple: you make a big scenic circuit through the mountains using a series of different types of transportation. You start with trains and then buses, there’s a mountain cable car that climbs the steep slope. There’s an aerial ropeway, a gondola ride that floats over volcanic valleys and sulfur vents. You cross Lake Ashi on a giant pirate ship. Because apparently when someone designed this system they thought: “You know what this mountain lake needs? Pirates.” The ships are these ridiculous, ornate, multi-deck vessels that look like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean. Most people buy the Hakone Free Pass, which covers the entire loop under one ticket. We did not. Why? Because we had been watching the weather. If conditions get bad, particularly wind or lightning, they shut down the ropeways and cable cars. If that happened, half the loop would become unusable and we’d be sitting there holding a very optimistic ticket. So we decided to play it by ear and buy each leg individually depending on how things unfolded.

At this point the weather was still behaving. Grey, yes. Dramatic, definitely. But dry.

We boarded a bus that immediately began climbing the mountain. These roads were not designed for modern vehicles. They were narrow, twisting, and featured switchbacks so tight the bus had to swing wide into the opposite lane just to complete the turn. Our driver handled this like a man who had been doing it for forty years and probably could have navigated the route blindfolded. Twenty minutes later we arrived near Lake Ashi, where the pirate ships dock. The sky had darkened a little but still no rain. We stood there looking at the lake and made a strategic decision. We really wanted to experience the cable cars and ropeway, and if the storm hit later those would be the first things to close. So we skipped the pirate ship, which felt slightly ridiculous. Skipping a pirate ship feels like a decision you will regret later in life, instead we started walking along the lake toward the next bus stop.

The scene around us was surreal.

Lake Ashi stretched out under a blanket of dark clouds. Mist hung low across the water. The mountains surrounding the lake faded in and out of the fog. It had that strange quiet tension you get right before a massive summer thunderstorm. The air felt heavy, like everything was holding its breath. We passed the floating torii gate near Hakone Shrine, one of the most photographed landmarks in the region. The shrine itself dates back over 1,200 years, founded in the 8th century as a sacred site protecting travelers through the mountains. We admired it briefly, then continued our march toward the bus stop that the map promised existed. The map lied. Or more accurately, it simplified reality in a way that maps sometimes do. In reality the road was narrow, very narrow. There was no sidewalk, there was no shoulder, just a thin mountain road hugging the edge of the lake. Eventually we found the hotel listed on the map as the location of the bus stop. Success! Except for one minor detail the map had also forgotten to mention, the bus did not run every day and today was not one of those days.

At this point we paused.

We looked into calling a taxi. Uber technically existed here but it was… not Ubering, estimated pickup time: 50 minutes, which meant standing in the middle of nowhere waiting for a car during an approaching storm. So we did the only thing left to do, we turned around and started walking back defeated, thinking we probably should have just gotten on the damn pirate ship. This was the exact point the sky decided to stop pretending, the clouds went from grey…to black…and then the entire atmosphere opened up.

Rain.

Not normal rain, biblical rain. The kind of rain where the sky just gives up and dumps all of the water. We had umbrellas, umbrellas help, but there is a point where umbrellas only make you slightly less wet and within minutes we were soaked. My shoes had developed a delightful squelching sound with every step and in my panic to protect my camera, I hurriedly shoved it back into my waterproof backpack. A great plan, except I forgot one tiny detail. I did not zip the bag. So while my camera was fine…my passport was not. It had absorbed a concerning amount of water. Let me tell you something, the realization that you may have destroyed your passport in a foreign country on Day 4 creates a very specific type of anxiety. We stumbled past a few small local places while trying to escape the rain. At one bar several locals stood on the porch watching the storm and the two drenched idiots walking through it.

Eventually we spotted salvation, a tiny udon shop. Run by an elderly couple.

We ducked inside looking like we had just crawled out of the ocean. The woman took one look at us and immediately switched into grandmother mode. She didn’t seem to mind too much that we were dripping water all over her floor. Still, we did our best, shoes off, umbrellas left outside. Emergency passport triage began immediately and to my immense relief, passports are very durable. Mine would remain water-spotted for the rest of the trip, but it was still usable and now it had a story attached to it. Once the panic settled down I finally looked around, this place felt like it had been lifted directly out of a Studio Ghibli film. Wooden interior, steam floating out from the kitchen while rain taps softly on the windows. I half expected a magical cat or soot sprites to wander out of the back room. Instead, the only surprise was discovering the restroom featured a squatty potty, which is an experience that everyone should try once in their life. Then the food arrived, two bowls of udon, thick noodles in a delicate broth. The menu explained that the soup included edible plants gathered from the mountains around Hakone. I’m still not entirely sure what those plants were, but I can confirm with great confidence…they were definitely edible.

And it was some of the best udon I’ve ever eaten in my life.

Rain, Onsen, and the World’s Largest Hornet

After lunch we squished back onto the bus and rode back up to Hakone-Yumoto Station. At this point I had decided that just because the experience was different from our expectations did not mean it was a failure. This was not a ruined day. This was what travel actually looks like when the plan meets reality. Instead of failure, I chose to believe we were simply creating a fantastic story for later.

Then I promptly slid off the bus seat while trying to get up to exit and humbly ate the floor.

I might eventually write a separate blog post titled “Everywhere I’ve Fallen in Japan.” It would not be a short article. Still, things were looking up. We still had the onsen to look forward to, and surely nothing could go wrong with a hot bath on the side of a mountain. We wandered around the station area looking for coffee and something small to eat. That’s when I found pistachio melon bread shaped like a turtle, which was equal parts adorable and delicious. I’m not entirely sure why turtle-shaped pastries exist, but I fully support them as a concept. Between the coffee, the pastry, and the fact that we were no longer actively drowning in rainwater, morale improved significantly.

After a short search around the station we eventually located the shuttle for our next stop. Fifteen minutes later we arrived at Hakone Yuryo Onsen, which would be our first real experience with Japanese onsen culture.

Public baths are an important part of daily life in Japan, though they come with a few traditions that can surprise first-time visitors. Because of tattoo policies that still exist at many baths, we decided to reserve one of the private rooms instead of using the main communal pools. It ended up being a fantastic way to experience it for the first time.

For two hours we soaked in mineral-rich hot spring water while rain moved through the surrounding forest. After spending most of the day damp and chilled from the storm, the timing could not have been better. The heat, the quiet, and the mountain air combined into one of those experiences that resets your entire mood. The onsen itself deserves a proper write-up of its own, so I’ll save the deeper dive for another post.

Eventually we made our way back toward the station with a little time left before our train home. The area around Hakone-Yumoto was lively with street food stalls and small shops. Dango, yakitori, sweet snacks, grilled everything. There were dozens of tempting options, but somehow we followed a few locals into what turned out to be a small fast-food restaurant. Our logic was simple, the locals must know something.

It turns out what they knew was cheap fast food.

Still, it did the job. After eating we returned to the station, grabbed a beer for the train ride, and settled in to wait for our Romancecar back to Tokyo. That’s when the screaming started. People were running around the platform, pointing and shouting. The cause of the panic was a single ōsuzumebachi, better known in English as the Asian giant hornet. If you’ve never seen one before, imagine a hornet the size of your thumb with an orange head and a reputation for being unpleasant. One insect managed to successfully terrorize an entire train station. When our Romancecar finally pulled into the station and we lined up to board, the doors slid open and the first passenger off the train was… not human.

A mukade.

If you’re unfamiliar with a mukade, imagine the angriest centipede evolution could possibly produce. Long. Fast. Far too many legs. This particular nightmare stepped calmly off the train like it had just completed its commute. After it was gone, everyone nearby performed the exact same synchronized reaction: a collective full-body shiver. At that point I wasn’t sure what was more disturbing. Seeing that many-legged horror marching toward us… or realizing that it had apparently ridden the train with other passengers for the entire trip before casually exiting at Hakone like it had somewhere to be.

On the ride back we managed to grab the panoramic front seats of the Romancecar. The view through the wide front windows looked out into rain streaking across the night landscape as the train slid quietly back toward Tokyo. We sipped our beers, I caught up on writing notes from the day, and watched the dark countryside pass by. Between the early wake-up, the rainstorm, the mountain wandering, and the onsen soak, exhaustion hit us the moment we returned to the hotel. We didn’t even try to fight it and within minutes of lying down we were asleep.

Even though Hakone unfolded very differently from what we planned, it ended up becoming one of the most memorable days of the trip. Travel rarely goes exactly according to schedule, and sometimes the detours, storms, and unexpected bowls of udon become the stories you remember the most. Between the rainstorm, the mountains, the onsen, and the small moments along the way, Hakone gave us a full day of adventure we hadn’t anticipated. We’ll be attempting the Hakone Loop again in 2026.

And next time… we’re getting on the pirate ship.