Gora Park and 2 Museums – Joel’s Journeys & Jaunts

Today, my last day in Hakone, I spent the afternoon in Gora Park and two museums, the Hakone Museum of Art and the Hakone Museum of Photography. The park came between the two museums.

As has become the norm in this farshtunken travel journal, because this is my last post from here, I’ll provide a summary of my time in Hakone at the end of this entry.

Hakone Museum of Art

The Hakone Museum of Art is just two cable car stops up the mountain from Gora Station, which, in turn, is only about a 15-minute walk from the Hakone Open-Air Museum, where I was this morning.

I don’t know why they call it the Hakone Museum of Art. Only half of it is what I’d call an art museum, or art gallery, if you will. For the other half, just “Hakone Museum,” without the “Art,” would have been more appropriate to my mind.

The museum galleries are on two levels of a small building. They have pieces that I would call art on the lower level. However, except for a few pieces, including, but not exclusively, some decorated dishes and bowls, the upper level contains what I’d call artifacts, not art. True, they’re interesting artifacts, but most of them were designed primarily for functionality, not to be visually creative.

The two small rooms on the lower level display contemporary Japanese art, including paintings, drawings, ceramics, and pottery.

Signs at the front of both the ground-floor rooms and icons beside each piece of artwork forbade photography. Not just no flash photography. No photography of any kind was allowed.

So I don’t have any photographs from that floor to remind me of what I saw there. The Hakone Museum of Art was the first stop of the afternoon, and it’s now after dinner as I write this. Consequently, I don’t remember much. But I do remember not hating what I saw. Coming from me, that passes as close to high praise when it comes to art.

The upper floor displays mostly old stuff. There are some artistic pieces, but as I said, a lot are primarily functional, such as pottery jars of various sizes, including some very large ones.

This floor isn’t entirely devoid of what I’d call art. There are some statues and some beautifully decorated dishes and bowls.

There was one piece on the second floor that dates to between 3500 and 2500 BCE. It’s an intricately sculpted piece of pottery. But most of the pieces are more recent, dating up to as recently as the 17th century CE.

I know the above sounds like an, at best, meh rating of the Hakone Museum of Art. Nevertheless, I rate it extremely highly, just not for what’s inside the building. The museum has a stunning moss garden.

Moss garden sounds boring. “What, all they have is a plot of moss?”

No, that’s not it. Where other gardens have grass, the Hakone Museum of Art has moss. That moss grows between beautiful trees, and it’s not to be walked on by the likes of me or any visitor. There are, however, some lovely winding paths through the garden to allow visitors to enjoy it.

As was the case with the nearby Hakone Open-Air Museum, the leaves on the trees are in the midst of changing colour. It was gorgeous. If anything, the colours were even more brilliant here.

There are two streams in the garden, a tiny one and one that’s a little larger. They both burble over rocks as they flow down the mountainside that the Hakone Art Museum and its garden are on.

There is a teahouse in the gardens. It’s not a traditional one. You don’t sit on the floor. Instead, it contains modern tables high enough for their Western-style chairs. And, you don’t take your shoes off in this teahouse. So, it’s definitely not traditional Japanese.

Where this teahouse shines is that the chairs are on only one side of the tables. All patrons all face the floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on the beautiful garden. I had the only option on offer there, matcha tea and a Japanese confection.

Gora Park

I mentioned that the Hakone Art Museum is two cable car stops above Gora Station. The main entrance to Gora Park, which is a prim European-style garden, is close to the first cable car stop above Gora Station. The park runs up the mountain, so the back entrance is only a short piece below the Hakone Art Museum. Apple Maps didn’t seem to know this. Either that or it wanted me to get my exercise. I don’t know which.

Instead of sending me to the closer back entrance, it directed me to the lower front entrance. Because Gora Park is on the mountainside, to visit the whole park, I then had to climb back up that bit of the mountainside.

Gora Park is also beautiful. There are lots of trees, a rose garden (which does have mostly roses, but also some other flowers), a high-jetting fountain, a couple of greenhouses, a couple of restaurants, a craft house, and a traditional teahouse that didn’t seem to be open to the public today.

One of those trees is a Deodar cedar. I’d obviously heard of cedars before, but never a Deodar cedar. According to a sign in the park, they’re evergreen coniferous trees that can grow to 20-30 metres (65-100 feet) tall and bear egg-shaped pinecones between June and October. It’s now November. I didn’t see any pinecones.

The Deodar cedar in Gora Park is 100 years old. It became the symbol of the park.

Oh, and Gora Park has some benches. I took advantage of a few of those. Mountainside Gora Park is beautiful to look at, walk through, and sit in.

Hakone Museum of Photography

If you have a lot of time in the Hakone region and, in particular, Gora, or even if you have only a little time there, I recommend that you don’t spend any of it at the Hakone Museum of Photography. Sorry, I know that’s a subjective value judgement, but it’s just how I feel. I hope no one from the museum sees this because I feel bad and guilty about saying it.

First of all, it’s hard to find. The museum is close to the first cable car stop above Gora Station, but it’s a piece down one narrow laneway, and then a few steps along an equally narrow perpendicular walkway. There is a sign on the small museum, but there’s no signage on the road.

Apple Maps took me to the intersection of the road and the first laneway and left me there. I’ve generally found Apple Maps better for getting me places on foot (although it’s tried to kill me a couple of times on the few times I’ve used it to navigate while driving) than Google Maps is. But not this time. I switched to Google Maps and it got me there.

The museum is dedicated to the photography of a local photographer, Kuroda Suki. To go into the museum, you have to take your shoes off and put on a loaner pair of hotel-style slippers.

The museum is small. There’s a small room downstairs that contains large, colour photographs of Mount Fuji. They were mostly taken in dark lighting, so Mount Fuji wasn’t especially vibrant in them. A sign in this room forbade the taking of photographs there. Pity. I would have liked to snap a photo or two of the photos.

In a hallway, there are some black-and-white photos of the Hakone area from the 1950s. And in a small room upstairs, there are colour photographs of toys. Apart from the Mount Fuji room, the museum did allow photographs, but I wasn’t inspired to take any there. Thus, this section is only text except for the pictures from Gora Park that I didn’t have room for there and placed here instead.

Viewing photography, like viewing any art, is an entirely subjective experience. So, maybe you’d enjoy it. Me? Not so much. I didn’t hate it by any means. It wasn’t in any way a painful experience for me, but I didn’t particularly enjoy it either.

Oh, by the way, speaking of Mount Fuji, I said yesterday that because the clouds obscured Mount Fuji from the couple of spots I was at yesterday from where it would be visible on a clear day, I might go back to one of those spots today if there were any clear skies. No such luck. It was almost entirely overcast for the whole day.

The forecast said that there might be some sun later in the afternoon. It didn’t happen. I kept looking at the sky until it was too late for me to take the cable car and ropeway to Owakandani and still be able to get back before the cable car and ropeway shut down. (Neither of them runs past five, which wasn’t much of an issue because it’s getting dark by then this time of year, so seeing Mount Fuji would be difficult after that even if it were cloudless.)

So, apart from the glimpses through glass that I got on my first day in Hakone, I’ve only been able to see Mount Fuji again in the photographs at the Hakone Museum of Photography. So, at least the museum had that going for it.

Hakone Summary

I wish I hadn’t ended on that low note at the photography museum because I otherwise loved Hakone. The mountain scenery is gorgeous. And, there is a lot to do and see. There are a surprising number of small art galleries and museums that can be reached by cable car, bus, train, and/or foot. I didn’t make it to half of them. And there are scenic walks I could have taken, but didn’t.

As I said, it’s easy to get around to many of the sights here without a car. There is the cable car and ropeways that I rode on a few times here, but there’s also a shortline local passenger train and a few municipal and regional buses. If I stayed longer, I probably would have taken the train and/or buses a few times to expand my sightseeing. Time was just too short.

So, to conclude, a couple of days more than the three nights, equating to Terry and a half days that I did spend here, would have been welcome in beautiful Hakone. Although I might have had to find a cheaper hotel than the one I’m in if I stayed longer. It’s not brutally expensive, but it’s more than what I usually set as my upper nightly limit for hotels. I don’t know how my heir feels about how much I spent here.