Japan Diaries: Hakone & Kyoto
Black eggs, snow monkeys, and a surprise wild animal encounter
This is Part II in a travel diary series about our trip through Japan. You can find Part I here. If you’d like to receive these newsletters in your mailbox, subscribe for free! Paid subscribers will receive full access to the archives.
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I reached the conclusion early in our trip that I love Japanese breakfast: rice topped with salmon flakes and seaweed, pickled veggies, miso soup, fish. Perhaps if I lived in Japan, I could kick my sugar addiction (I have been known to eat a slice of Portillos’ chocolate cake for breakfast). We spent our last morning in Tokyo eating breakfast on the top floor of our hotel taking in the view. Goodbye to the big city, its neon signs, and labyrinthine train stations. Our next stop was Hakone, a mountain town known for its volcanic hot springs and views of Mount Fuji.
We took a two-hour local express train to Hakone-Yumoto Station, arriving at noon, a half hour too late to utilize the luggage transfer service that would whisk our bags to our hotel. Even though I’d packed lightly with only a carry-on sized backpack and a crossbody bag, my shoulders ached, thanks to the mystical process of transfiguration in which the exact same amount of luggage grows heavier and gains mass once clothing has been worn.
To visit Hakone is to take a series of trains, cable cars, and ropeways up the side of a mountain, and one of the stops includes a village that sells black eggs boiled in the sulfuric water of an active volcano. Eating a black egg is said to increase your longevity by seven years—sure, I’ll try anything to reverse the damage done by the competitive drinking games of my twenties.
Our first leg of the trip was aboard the Hakone Tozan Railway, a delightfully old-timey-looking cable car that climbs a steep route up the mountain, at times reaching an 8% grade. The train was designed using a blueprint from the Alps, incorporating three switchback spots along the track. We settled in for the thirty-five minute-long ride through the woodsy mountainside, watching unsecured roller bags drift down the aisle until their owners sheepishly corralled them.
At the end of the line, we reached a picturesque little railway station that, lo and behold, offered luggage-sized storage lockers. If you’ve followed my travel writing over the years, you may recall that I am constantly seeking large lockers that I refer to as “big enough for a Muppet to live in like in The Muppets Take Manhattan.” Even in a rural area on the literal side of a mountain, Japan doesn’t fail to supply every convenience. We stowed our luggage before transferring to the next two legs: the cable car and the ropeway.
Throughout our travels, I’ve battled my fear of heights via exposure therapy, mustering up the courage to ride gondola lifts, though my soul will never feel fully settled when I’m dangling in a plexiglass cube above a giant ravine. The Hakone ropeway travels directly over the active sulfur vents of Ōwakudani (which literally translates to “Great Boiling Valley”). I felt the spike in my pulse as we ascended up the ropeway, the forest floor dropping away beneath our feet, the distinct scent of sulfur wafting through the air. When we crested the peak and the distinctive peak of Mount Fuji emerged into view, every passenger gasped audibly in unison and four different accents. We deboarded the ropeway car and a fierce wind knocked into us, biting through my nano-puff jacket. We shuffled inside the store to line up for black eggs. Here’s to a hopefully longer life!
For our one night in Hakone, we stayed in a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) with tatami floors, shoji doors, and a private open-air onsen. Many public bathhouses in Japan do not allow people with tattoos, so booking a private onsen guaranteed that we’d both get to experience one. After a hot soak in our private onsen, Kurt and I dressed in the yutaka and tabi socks required to wear to dinner. We were guided to a private dining room behind a shoji sliding door, two low seats side by side facing the greenery outside the window. Our dinner was delicious, even when I wasn’t quite sure what I was eating; sushi in Japan is incredible, so fresh you’d swear it was swimming an hour ago. We returned to the same private room for breakfast: rice, miso, and barracuda.
From Hakone, on to Kyoto! Since my early twenties when I’d imagined traveling to Japan, it was Kyoto that I dreamed of seeing: pagodas, shrines, zen gardens, narrow alleys traversed by geisha in kimono, cherry blossom petals drifting on the river. Since Japan reopened to tourism post-covid, Kyoto has been front and center in discussions on overtourism. While a gigantic city like Tokyo is equipped to handle crowds, the historic narrow streets and alleys of Kyoto can get quickly jam-packed. I hoped that our strategy to travel off-season in late winter would pay off and remained hyper-vigilant about being a model tourist: no loud talking on trains or buses, no eating or drinking while walking on the street, standing on the correct side of the escalator, etc.
We took our first shinkansen (bullet train) from Odawara to Kyoto station, then a local bus to our hotel near Gion. I gazed out the window at wooden buildings lined with paper lanterns, torii gate entrances to shrines, everything already so different from Tokyo. Japan is incredibly photogenic, whether you’re seeking the futuristic neon of the big cities or the traditional architecture in villages that survived WWII intact. I fell deeply in love with Kyoto at first sight. I could wander up and down the banks of the Kamo-gawa River all day into night, watching the lanterns light up at sunset. We wandered through Nishiki Market, where Kurt was in heaven scoping out the various food stalls, then over to Pontocho Alley, a narrow lantern-lit alley full of yakitori and sushi restaurants.
For our first full day in Kyoto, we had arranged to attend a traditional tea ceremony in the historic Gion district. At ten a.m., the storefronts of Gion were just starting to open, a light trickle of tourists walking up and down the famous Ninenzaka stone steps. One of the most hilariously popular photo ops on the historic street is the Kyoto Starbucks where you can drink your latte on tatami mat seating. We humans can’t help but love the juxtaposition of mundane staples of modern life dropped into the historic setting of a street dating back to the 700s.
Our tea ceremony consisted of three other tourist couples, from Florida, Argentina, and Russia, guided into a room where we sat on small cushions on the tatami floor. Our host explaining the steps to us before silently demonstrating the tea ceremony. It was mesmerizing in its ritual elegance, the way she carefully folded a tea towel and whisked matcha in a bowl with an easy flick of her wrist. This is when I was also first introduced to the phrase Ichigo Ichie, “one time, one meeting.” To sit with this concept is to reflect on the unrepeatable nature of a moment, a perfect way to capture an idea I think about a lot but have never been able to express as eloquently.
From Gion, we took the bus to Nanzenji Temple. The spacious grounds at the foot of the Higashiyama Mountains also include the smaller Tenjuan Temple, Sanmon entrance gate, traditional landscape architecture and a rock garden, and large aqueduct system built to carry water from Lake Biwa. A quiet hush hung over the grounds, like a prayer lingering in the air. I wandered in one direction while Kurt went elsewhere with the pocket wifi in his backpack, cutting me off from network connectivity, but that didn’t matter. It was easy to imagine this was exactly how it looked when first built during the Meiji Period: the moss-covered rocks, the wooden beams and crenellation adorning the temples, the stark beauty of late winter trees against a blue sky. I’m drawn to places of worship, whether it is a pilgrimage site in New Mexico, a Scandinavian church in Reykjavik, or an elaborate cathedral in Santiago. I always light a candle in every church I visit; in Japan, I deposited some yen into the donation box and lit incense in the temple. It felt like a good way to reflect on the moment and express gratitude for being allowed to visit this beautiful place.
We saved Fushimi Inari Taisha for the evening; one of the most popular destinations in Kyoto, its thousands of vermilion torii gates appear on the covers of many guidebooks. During the day, crowds at the shrine can get intense, creating human traffic jams along the paths, but it is much calmer early in the morning or after sunset.
The street was dark and almost desolate as we left the train station. The Romon Gate lit up in the evening, highlighting its bold red frame against the dark blue velvety night sky. While the vendor booths had closed for the evening, the shrine itself remains open to the public twenty-four hours a day. In the darkness, moonlight filtered into the tunnel of torii gates, creating bold geometric shadows on the path. We walked deeper into the shrine as it snaked into the darkness of the forest, bamboo stalks stretching upward towards the stars. A thousand torii gates is no exaggeration; they seem infinite, leading up to the mountaintop, shooting off into side paths lined with small altars guarded by stone foxes. In the solitude of night, it was easy to feel like we weren’t alone, that something was out there in the woods. Then suddenly something was—I heard a rustling sound in the brush, then spotted a wild boar as it trampled past! I snapped a blurry photo, the boar’s distinctive white mustache noticeable.
On our last full day in Kyoto (how did it fly by so fast??), we woke up early to take an hour-long bus ride to the west side of the city, arriving at Arashiyama Monkey Park right at opening. The park is on the side of a mountain overlooking the Katsura River valley. We hiked up a mile-long trail to the spot where snow monkeys congregated. A few signs warned us of how to behave around the monkeys: don’t get closer than three meters, don’t look them into the eye, and my favorite Google translation, “monkeys do not like their bodies touched.” Fair! Noted! At the top of the trail, the view widened, overlooking the city of Kyoto with a mountainous backdrop. Snow monkeys ran about, doing their monkey thing—scaling the side of the visitor's center, picking each other’s nits, napping in the grass. We went inside the visitor’s center, where we could purchase small baggies of apples and peanuts to safely feed the monkeys through a wire fence. An American woman heard Kurt and I talking, clocking our accents, and commented, “Can you imagine something like this back home? It wouldn’t last five days. Some guy from Staten Island would ruin it for everyone!” We laughed and agreed. It’s fun to run into other Americans abroad so we can get each other’s references.
The famous Arashiyama Bamboo Forest is a short walk from the monkey park, so we headed there next. Another extremely popular tourist destination/guidebook cover, the crowds thickened as we got closer to the forest entrance, mostly made up of local students on school trips. We wandered through the crowds of people lining up at the shrine to purchase omamori (amulets dedicated to Shinto kami) and omikuji (fortunes written on slips of paper). The bamboo forest was beautiful, enveloping us in ancient greenery stretching high above our heads, leaving only a sliver of visible sky, but with the crowd of tourists, strollers, and photographers filling the path, it was hard to find the same serenity we did while alone in Fushimi Inari. Mainly, I remember 1.) lucking out with a perfect break in the crowd to get a quick photo alone on the path, and 2.) overhearing an American woman tell her friend about seeing the Beyoncé Renaissance Tour in Stockholm.
A soft rain began to fall by the time we reached Kinaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion. The Zen Temple gets its name from the gold leaf that covers its outer walls and sits beside a tranquil pond, originally built in 1397 as the retirement home for a shogun. As we shuffled through the grounds, pulling up our hoods against the misty rain, I was starting to feel the cumulative effect of hitting 18,000 steps/eight miles of walking every single day. I’d been stretching each day in our hotel room and the beginning and end of each day, and brought along my resistance band to exercise my hip and stave off any flare-ups of my old injury, but it’s also wise to know when to call it a day. We took the crosstown bus back to the hotel and capped off the night at Kyoto Brewery with a few rounds of pints. In the morning, it would be on to the next stop.
I haven't checked my substack box in months and it felt so nice to open it up to these two Japan stories <3 So good.
The rope gondola!! 😳 looks scary, but also what beautiful views. Loved your kimono for the tea ceremony! Monkeys are the coolest, and my guess is that your sushi was really swimming just an hour before--for real!