Japan is like a painting in the following way. An artist arranges the elements, just so, and tries to bring out beauty from the shadows. The Japanese landscape somehow naturally arranges itself into a series of sensuous hills, green terraced rice fields, and wide rushing rivers filled with rounded stones of many colors.
As you ride in the sweetly named Romance Car out of Tokyo southwest to the mountains above Hakone, the air turns colder and wetter, and the stomach begins anticipating the area's dried fish and fish cakes; the rest of one's body is aching for the area's legendary hot springs. One's eyes will long for parquetry, the uniquely constructed wood patterning work done here that my father would have appreciated.
This district has long been a weekend retreat for Tokyo's large population. For over 100 years, ryokan, the small traditional Japanese inns, have hosted travelers.
Here, you can just look around and see tiny maple leaves still hanging on to their branches, denying winter’s arrival; or, once they fall, ever so delicately complicating the rock paths that serve as sidewalks in this ancient tourist crossroads.
This is a place the Japanese come to have fun, including illicit fun. So, if you look carefully at the couples who arrive here (which locals do), you may spot powerful politicians and wealthy businessmen with their mistresses, but, of course, given this is Japan, nobody ever speaks, nothing is revealed, and no price is ever paid, except, of course, that of the cheating heart.
Further up the mountain from Hakone, you ride on a train that has to switchback its way up the steep cliff. The recorder voice piped throughout the train explains this is second-steepest mountain scaled by any train in the world.
I wish my photos could do it justice. But they cannot. Next, I promise to take you on a visual tour of one of the world's greatest open-air sculpture museums.
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