28. Hakone

We took another day trip to nearby Hakone. We really took this trip because Mt. Fuji is the world-famous symbol of Japan, a perfectly symmetrical volcano whose beauty is the subject of countless poems and paintings. But the proper way to see Mt. Fuji is to hike up it starting around midnight, so that you can arrive at the summit in time to see the sunrise, then hike yourself back down. While that sounded very unappealing, the fact that you're sharing the hiking trail with thousands of other people in the middle of the night so it feels like you're going up an escalator in a department store at Christmas really clinched the deal: Hakone, here we come. The virtue of Hakone is it's near Fuji so you can see it and write a haiku about it if the spirit moves you, but you don't have to do anything else but look. The downside is that a trip to Hakone is about as tacky kitsch as Japan can get. That's Mt. Fuji behind Somchai. Since looking at Mt. Fuji would only occupy about five minutes, the Hakone tourist bureau has dreamed up a whole circuit of fun for the rest of your visit.