The Hakone Open-Air Museum: Sculpture on a Mountainside

Opened in 1969, this was Japan's first open-air museum, and the idea behind it is that sculpture is diminished indoors. The collection is spread across a hillside with the Hakone mountains behind it, so the pieces are seen against sky, cloud and changing weather rather than a white wall.

It works. A Henry Moore reclining figure on a green slope in low autumn light is doing something a gallery cannot arrange. The museum owns one of the larger Moore collections outside Britain and rotates the display.

The practical consequence is that this is an outdoor visit. You are walking on paths and slopes for two hours or more, and the weather is part of the experience whether you wanted it to be or not. Hakone is wet — check the forecast and bring a layer.

A dedicated indoor pavilion holds several hundred Picasso works — not the famous paintings, but ceramics, prints, gold and silver plates, and glass, much of it from his later decades and a good deal of it donated by his daughter Maya.

Most visitors arrive for the sculpture park and have no idea it is there, which is why it stays comparatively quiet even when the grounds are busy. It is also the place to be when it rains.

The other indoor highlight is the Symphonic Sculpture, a tower of stained glass with a spiral staircase inside it. You climb through coloured light to a viewing platform over the whole valley. It is the single most photographed thing on the site and it deserves it.

Roughly halfway round the grounds sits a long, shallow hot-spring footbath, fed from Hakone's own thermal supply, free with admission, with towels sold nearby for a small amount.

It is a genuinely good idea. You are two hours into walking a hillside, and sitting with your feet in hot water looking at a sculpture garden is the kind of detail that makes people remember a museum. Bring or buy a small towel — there are no dryers.

There is also a children's area with climbable woven structures, which makes this one of the few art museums that genuinely works for families rather than tolerating them.

The museum has its own station, Chokoku-no-Mori, on the Hakone Tozan Railway — the mountain switchback line that climbs from Hakone-Yumoto. That makes it the easiest possible stop to fold into the standard Hakone loop.

The classic sequence is Tozan railway up, museum, continue by cable car and ropeway over Owakudani, boat across Lake Ashi, bus back. The museum is the natural morning stop before the ropeway section.

If you are doing that loop, the Hakone Free Pass covers the transport but not the museum admission, which is separate. Allow more time than you think: two hours here plus the loop legs is a full day, and rushing the hillside defeats the point of putting the art outside in the first place.