Hakone is Evangelion's Tokyo-3: riding the switchback line into the caldera

Neon Genesis Evangelion calls its battleground Tokyo-3, a fortress city raised over a lake inside a dead volcano, its launch shafts and armour folded into a mountain that could open at any moment. The lake is Ashinoko, the volcano is Hakone, and both have been here, quietly steaming, long before the anime borrowed their geography. You reach it in roughly ninety minutes from Shinjuku, which is the first surprise: the apocalypse has a commuter timetable.

The line that climbs by reversing

The Hakone Tozan Railway (箱根登山鉄道, Hakone Tozan Tetsudō) leaves Hakone-Yumoto and gains height the only way an eighty-per-mille gradient allows, by switching back three times — at the Deyama signal point, at Ōhiradai, and again above it. The train stops dead, the driver walks the length of the carriage to the far cab, and the whole thing reverses into the next stretch of hillside. It is Japan's oldest mountain railway still running on adhesion alone, opened in 1919, and the ride to Gōra costs 460 yen and takes about forty minutes for a distance a crow would cross in fifteen.

Sit on the right going up and the valley of the Hayakawa drops away beneath the windows. From mid-June into July the embankments carry roughly ten thousand hydrangea shrubs, and the railway runs its cars slower and later into the evening so the ajisai (紫陽花) glow under floodlight. In the series, slopes exactly like these hide the entrances to a city that sinks underground when the sirens sound. The train does not dramatise the climb. It just keeps stopping, changing direction, and going on.

Ōwakudani, where the ground still breathes

Past Gōra you change to the cable car up to Sōunzan, then to the Hakone Ropeway, which lifts you over the lip of Ōwakudani (大涌谷) — the Great Boiling Valley, torn open when the central cone collapsed some three thousand years ago. The gondola crosses a slope with no green left on it, only ochre rock, hissing fumaroles, and the smell of sulfur that reaches you inside a sealed cabin at fifteen hundred metres. The ropeway runs 09:00 to 17:00 from March to November, closing at 16:15 in winter, and it shuts entirely when the volcanic gas readings climb — a signboard at Sōunzan tells you before you buy the ticket.

At the top, vendors sell kuro-tamago (黒たまご), eggs boiled in the pools until the iron in the water blackens their shells, five to a bag for 500 yen. The local promise is seven years of life per egg, though nobody sells more than they think you can eat. This is the ground Evangelion drew its Geofront from: the sense of a lived-in surface stretched thin over something molten and patient. Stand at the viewing deck on a clear afternoon and Fuji sits on the far rim, indifferent, while the valley below you keeps venting steam it has never stopped venting.

Lake Ashinoko, at eye level

The ropeway sets you down at Tōgendai on the north shore of Ashinoko (芦ノ湖), the caldera lake that fills what used to be the crater floor. From here the Hakone Sightseeing Cruise runs boats dressed as eighteenth-century warships — gilded, absurd, and entirely serious about it — across to Moto-Hakone and Hakonemachi for about 1,200 yen one way. The crossing takes half an hour, and on a still morning the water holds the mountains upside down so cleanly that the establishing shot the anime borrowed resolves into something plainer and better underfoot.

At Moto-Hakone the red torii of Hakone Shrine (箱根神社, Hakone Jinja) stands ankle-deep in the lake — the Heiwa-no-torii, raised in 1952 — with a queue of visitors waiting their turn on the small jetty to be photographed against it. Behind the shore the old Tōkaidō survives as an avenue of four-hundred-year-old cedars, planted in 1618 to shade the feet of travellers walking to Edo. Come on a weekday outside the summer holidays and the jetty, the steam, and the switchback line are mostly yours.

The frame did not invent the place. It noticed it.

Getting there, and getting it right

The clean way in is the Odakyu Hakone Freepass, 6,100 yen for two days from Shinjuku, which covers the Romancecar out (an extra 1,200-yen limited-express seat, and worth reserving the front row) plus every train, cable car, ropeway, and pirate ship inside the loop. Ride the circuit in one direction — Yumoto up the Tozan line, across Ōwakudani, down the lake by boat, back by bus — rather than doubling back, and the two days stretch to hold an onsen night in between. The single mistake worth avoiding is treating Ōwakudani as guaranteed: gas closures are frequent and sudden, so check the ropeway status the morning you go and keep the lake as your fallback. Off the mountain, the water is the point — Hakone-Yumoto's day baths open from around 1,000 yen, and a soak after the descent is the part the anime left out.

第3新東京市は、いまも湯けむりの立つ箱根の上に建っている。