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Fuji-Hakone-Izu NP, Kanagawa
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On October 1, Lake Ashi’s first wakasagi catch is offered at Hakone Shrine, then presented to the Imperial Household. The lake fish is also simmered into kanroni, a sweet-soy New Year staple.
The west shore was deliberately kept bare in Edo times so Hakone Checkpoint guards could watch travelers. After an imperial villa was built, 30 years of planting turned it into today’s cypress-and-maple woodland.
Much of Lake Ashi’s managed outflow takes a surprising turn: the Kojiri outlet toward the Hayakawa is normally closed, while Fukara Gate sends water west beneath Hakone’s rim toward Shizuoka and Suruga Bay.
With picks and chisels, workers dug the 1.28-km Fukara tunnel from both ends, finishing in 1670. Its center has a 1-m step: long thought to be a meeting error, it may instead have been designed to control the water.
Local legend says the monk Mangan Shonin subdued a nine-headed dragon in Lake Ashi in the 8th century. The lake was thereafter revered as sacred water of Hakone-jinja Shrine.
A 2009–10 survey of the wider west-shore area recorded 212 moss and liverwort species. Along this trail, researchers found mats of katashirogoke at cedar bases, listed as Endangered Category I in Kanagawa’s 2006 report.
Wakasagi were introduced to Lake Ashi from Lake Kasumigaura in 1918. Today, the local fishery supports the stock with a breeding program that releases more than 300 million eggs a year.
A 1242 travel diary calls the lake “Ashi no Umi”—the Ashi Sea. Later records use Ashinoko, and the name is thought to refer to the reeds that once grew thick along its shores.
