Things to do
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Gōra Park
A hillside garden at the top of the mountain railway, a few minutes above Gōra station and laid out in terraces down the slope. It falls between the train up and the cable car on to the ridge, which is how it is usually met, as a pause in a day of transport and not as a destination.
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Hakone Barrier
The shogunate's checkpoint on the Tōkaidō stood at the southern end of the lake, and what occupies the site now is a reconstruction of it. Traffic moving between Edo and the west was stopped and inspected here, which is why the crossing was feared. It sits a few hundred metres from the post town, and the two are separate places.
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Hakone Open-Air Museum
Japan's first open air museum, opened in 1969, with about a hundred and twenty sculptures standing out on the grass and more than a thousand pieces held in all. Picasso, Moore, Brâncuși, Hepworth and Taro Okamoto are among them, and one pavilion holds around three hundred Picassos. A hot spring footbath runs on the site.
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Hakone Shrine
Shōgun, samurai and travellers on the Tōkaidō have stopped at this lakeside shrine for centuries, and it goes by the older name of Hakone Gongen as well. The shrine holds that the Komagatake peak above it has been venerated since ancient times. A red gate standing out in the water below the precinct is the frame most cameras end up pointing at.
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Hakone-juku
Tenth of the fifty three stations on the Tōkaidō, and at seven hundred and twenty five metres the highest post town on the whole road. It was hard enough to supply that the shogunate struggled to keep it going at all. The surviving cedar lined stretches of the old highway run from here along the lake shore.
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Lake Ashi
A crater lake along the southwestern wall of a volcano that erupted as recently as 2015. Since 1670 it has drained through an aqueduct toward Susono, away from Odawara, which is not the direction the geography suggests. Pleasure boats work it, several of them dressed as sailing warships. Long preserved stretches of the old Tōkaidō run along the shore.
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Okada Museum of Art
The largest indoor exhibition space in Hakone, over five floors, opened in 2013 around one private collection of Asian art: early modern and modern Japanese painting, with Chinese bronzes, lacquer, ceramics and Buddhist sculpture. Several of its best known works were sold at auction in November 2025 to satisfy a judgment, so what hangs has changed.
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Onshi Hakone Park
Laid out in 1886 as a summer retreat for the imperial family and open to the public since, on the promontory between the checkpoint and Moto-Hakone. It juts far enough into the lake that the views run in three directions at once. Free, flat, and usually quiet while the shrine a kilometre away is not.
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Ōwakudani
An explosion about three thousand years ago tore this valley open, and it still vents sulphur and boils hot water out of the ground. A ropeway crosses the ridge to it, and that link is the first thing to shut when the volcano stirs. Eggs boiled in the water come out with black shells. The nature trail is reservation only, guided, four slots a day.
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Pola Museum of Art
Nikken Sekkei sank this one into the national park in 2002, holding more than nine thousand five hundred works collected by the head of a cosmetics company, weighted heavily to French Impressionism and the École de Paris. A nature trail of six hundred and seventy metres was cut through the grounds around it.