Hachimantai

In late spring the snow begins to melt on the summit plateau and something peculiar appears: a ring of sapphire water around a white disc of ice, the whole formation staring upward like a giant eye. Locals call it the Dragon's Eye, and it holds its shape only briefly each year before the thaw erases it — nobody can promise you the day.

Hachimantai is a broad volcanic upland on the border of Iwate and Akita, the southern half of Towada-Hachimantai National Park and about as far from Japan's cities as the main island gets. The Aspite Line, the mountain road across the plateau, reopens each April between walls of snow, and from it a marked loop crosses the summit marshes past ponds and wetland to Kagami-numa, the pond that becomes the Dragon's Eye. Below the plateau lie some of the country's best rustic hot springs: Tamagawa, the most acidic water in Japan; Goshogake, beside a steaming valley of mud pots; Matsukawa, a remote cluster of inns beside Japan's first geothermal power plant; and springs in use since the eighteenth century. In winter the same slopes take deep Tōhoku powder.