Tokyo Trailhead is a guide to the mountains that are genuinely easy to get to from Tokyo.
Most of them are a train ride: you tap through the gate at Shinjuku and are standing at a trailhead ninety minutes later, on the Chuo, Ome or Itsukaichi lines. A few are worth a night away. What they have in common is that you can plan them around the days you already have in Tokyo, rather than building a trip around them.
There is plenty written in English about hiking near Tokyo. Most of it is a list: ten mountains, three sentences each, a stock photo, a link to a train timetable. It will tell you that Mount Takao has eight trails. It will not tell you which one has a staircase you cannot avoid, that the chairlift will turn you away if you have been drinking, or that the sign explaining the best view on the Inariyama Trail is written only in Japanese and faces the wrong way.
That gap is the entire reason this site exists.
Who writes this
One person. I live in Tokyo, I walk these trails myself, and I publish here under the name Koke.
I am not a tour operator, a tourism board, or a travel agency, and nobody pays me to send you up a particular mountain. I am a hiker who got tired of watching visitors arrive at a trailhead with information that was technically correct and practically useless.
I read Japanese. That turns out to be most of what this site is: standing in front of a notice board at a temple gate, or beside a 450-year-old cedar, or at a chairlift ticket window, reading what is posted there, and putting it into English for the person who will stand in the same spot next month.
How an article gets made
Every route on this site has been walked. Not researched from a map — walked, with a camera.
- I go. I walk the route, photograph the junctions, the signs, the toilets, the vending machines, the places where people stop being sure which way to go.
- I check the timestamps. The photographs carry the time they were taken, so the walking times published here are what the walk actually took, not what a signboard estimates.
- I read what is posted on site. Trail regulations, temple etiquette, bathhouse rules, seasonal one-way restrictions. Much of it exists in Japanese only.
- I check it against the operator. Fares, first and last services, opening hours and closures are confirmed against the railway, the temple or the facility that runs them, and linked so you can check them too.
- I write down what changed my mind. When something surprised me on the trail, that surprise usually goes in near the top, because it is the part no other English page has.
Every photograph on this site is mine, taken on the trail it appears on.
What this site will not do
- It will not tell you a hard walk is easy. The paved trail up Mount Takao is the hardest of the three main routes, and we say so, even though it is the one that sounds gentlest.
- It will not send you somewhere for a commission. Some links here earn this site money. What gets recommended is decided before any of that, and where a route is crowded, a view unreliable, or a lift closed to you, that goes in the article.
- It will not pretend to be current about things that change weekly. Timetables, fares and closures move. Where they matter, this site links you to the operator rather than asking you to trust a number typed here last spring.
- It will not cover a mountain I have not walked. That is why this site grows slowly.
Where it goes next
Mount Takao came first, because it is where most visitors start and because it is badly served by English guides that treat it as one mountain rather than eight quite different walks.
From here the site moves outward along the same three train lines — Mount Mitake next, then the ridges and the smaller stations beyond it. Further out, some mountains are worth a night rather than a day, and Mount Fuji is one of them. Where this site goes there, it will get there the same way it gets everywhere else: on foot, with a camera.
The organising idea does not change. A mountain belongs here if you can reach it from Tokyo without the journey becoming the trip.
How this site is paid for
Reading it is free and always will be. It is funded by advertising and by affiliate links, which are explained in full in our privacy policy. Nothing on this page, or any other, changes because of them.
Getting in touch
Corrections are genuinely welcome — a trail that has been rerouted, a price that has gone up, a rule that has changed. If you walked something here and found it different on the ground, that is the most useful message this site can receive.
There is no public email address; everything comes through the contact form, and I read all of it.