Hakone Ekiden 2027: What Actually Closes on 2 and 3 January

Four and a half hours. That is how long buses from Hakonemachi Port toward Hakone-Yumoto and Odawara stopped running on the outbound day of the last Hakone Ekiden. This guide is not about which university wins. It is about what happens to you on 2 and 3 January 2027 if you are in Hakone and have no intention of watching a road race: Hakone does not become unreachable, but the driving version of Hakone stops working for a few hours, and if you travel by train, cable car, and boat, exactly one leg of your day breaks. Below: the mountain-section restriction windows, the bus suspensions section by section, the directional crush at Hakone-Yumoto Station, and a longer restriction that has nothing to do with the race at all.

A note on dates before anything else. The organisers have published the date and course for the 103rd running (2 and 3 January 2027), but not one traffic-regulation document for that edition has been released yet. Every clock time in this guide comes from the 102nd running (January 2026) official PDFs and is here to show you the shape of the day. The pattern repeats reliably year to year; the exact minutes shift. Check the sources listed at the end before you travel.

Does any of this apply to you?

Only really if you have a car. The organisers publish a PDF titled, in Japanese, a notice to visitors, and its second page is the official English version. The addressee is stated without ambiguity: drivers are asked to refrain from using those roads on the days of the Ekiden. The English version of the Tokyo regulation sheet from the same edition goes further and tells readers to use public transport when they come to cheer the runners on. What the organisers want to suppress is traffic volume through the mountains, not the number of people in Hakone.

That distinction decides how you should react. If you spent New Year's night in a Hakone ryokan and check out on the morning of 2 January to head back to Tokyo, you do not need to cancel anything — you need to re-time it. If you are driving up the mountain in a rental car, you do genuinely need to redraw the route, and you need to include the expressway interchanges, which the organisers list in the same PDF.

One counterintuitive line comes straight from the organisers: even the oncoming lane, the one that is not under restriction, jams up every year with sightseeing traffic. So the instinct that says "just stay off the closed side and you're fine" is wrong. On those two days on the mountain, it is not only the closed half that stops moving.

Which roads close, and when

The mountain section is restricted roughly 11:00–14:00 on the outbound day and 07:30–09:30 on the return day. That pair of windows comes from the header of the organisers' visitor notice, and it is one of the few summary figures here with direct official wording behind it.

The road being closed is National Route 1, from around Hayakawaguchi through the Hakone mountain section to the finish area at Lake Ashi. The full Kanagawa Prefecture course is considerably longer: it starts on Route 15 at Rokugobashi, follows Route 1 through Yokohama, Hodogaya, Totsuka, transfers to the Totsuka-Chigasaki prefectural road toward Fujisawa, runs Route 134 along the coast to Oiso, then rejoins Route 1 from Oiso Station entrance through Oyagibashi, Hayakawaguchi, Miyanoshita, to Hakone Sekisho-minami. The return day is the same road in reverse.

A few hard rules are worth carrying in your head. The runners move at roughly 20 km/h. Vehicles travelling towards the runners cannot turn right or make a U-turn from three minutes before a runner passes. Stopping and parking are banned along the entire course. Following the runners to cheer them from a vehicle is prohibited. And the organisers explicitly note that restriction times may be extended or shortened depending on how the race unfolds — so treat every clock time above as a band, not a boundary.

Large vehicles and bicycles get a separate, harder rule

On the outbound day, Route 1 from around Yamazaki IC to the Lake Ashi finish was closed to large vehicles from 10:45 to 13:00 last year. The regulated categories are listed as large motor vehicles, specified medium motor vehicles, large special-purpose vehicles — and ordinary bicycles. The organisers add that anything with a seating capacity of eleven or more counts, so microbuses and tour coaches cannot get through either.

The bicycle clause, combined with the Turnpike rules further down, produces a genuine dead end. I come back to it in the detour section.

The expressway interchanges themselves close

Per last year's Kanagawa regulation PDF, the interchanges closed on the outbound day were Hakoneguchi IC on the Odawara-Atsugi Road; Hakoneguchi, Hayakawa, Odawara, Sakawa, Kozu, Tachibana, Seisho-Ninomiya, Oiso-nishi, and Oiso-higashi on the Seisho Bypass; and Chigasaki-kaigan IC on the Shin-Shonan Bypass. On the return day the same Seisho interchanges are listed in reverse order, and the Shin-Shonan section widens to the stretch from Chigasaki-nishi to Chigasaki-kaigan.

In plain terms: if your plan is to escape the jam by getting onto the expressway near Odawara, the nearest on-ramps are the ones that are shut. The same document also names the congestion points the police expect. Outbound: the Kamiyabe area of the Yokohama Shindo southbound, the Hodogayabashi area of Route 1 southbound, and the Fujisawabashi area of the Totsuka-Chigasaki road southbound. Return: the Hakoneguchi IC area of the Odawara-Atsugi Road, the Totsuka police station area of Route 1 northbound, and the Fujisawa Bypass exit northbound.

Does the Hakone Free Pass still work?

Trains, cable cars, and the cruise all run; the bus leg is what breaks. The official regulation map draws the Hakone Tozan Railway as a separate line from Route 1, because what is being closed is a road. So the sequence of mountain railway to Gora, cable car to Sounzan, ropeway over Owakudani, and pirate ship across Lake Ashi — rail, cable, and water — is entirely off the course.

The failure is at the end. In the large-vehicle regulation PDF, the organisers write that bus routes will see suspensions, diversions, and partial-section suspensions, and ask passengers to check each service. The bus operator then publishes its own table, section by section and hour by hour. Last year's went out on 24 December 2025. Four sections:

Look at the third row. That bus, from Hakonemachi Port back toward Hakone-Yumoto and Odawara, is the leg both of our Hakone guides describe as the way to close the loop. In the golden loop itinerary it appears as step six; in the elevation-by-elevation foliage route it is the "mountain bus back to Yumoto" at the end. Neither carries a date condition, and following either on 2 January leaves you stuck at the lake.

So on that day, draw the route as an out-and-back rather than a loop: from Togendai or Motohakone, take the ropeway back to Sounzan, the cable car down to Gora, and the mountain railway down to Hakone-Yumoto. All of it is inside the Free Pass, and none of it touches Route 1. Note the trap in the detail: the Togendai bus toward Hakone-Yumoto and Odawara is on the suspension table too (10:45–13:00), so the return has to go by cable and rail, not by bus from Togendai.

The pass itself is still worth buying. The Shinjuku two-day adult price is ¥7,100, covering the Odakyu round trip plus eight modes inside Hakone. If you intend to ride the outbound half of the loop, it pays off as usual — you simply do not use the bus entry that day.

Two limits to be honest about. First, this table does not appear every year. For the edition before last (January 2025) there is no equivalent notice in the same news listing; the closest item that year was a general New Year timetable announcement that does not contain the word Ekiden at all. So do not assume "they always post it in December, just check then" — check the race-suspension notices and the New Year timetable notices together. Second, nothing has been published for the 103rd running yet; based on precedent, expect it in late December.

The operator also attaches three disclaimers, all pointing in the unhelpful direction: services may be suspended or turned back at an intermediate stop depending on conditions on the day; the restriction windows may shift earlier or later; and delays can occur outside the restriction windows because of ordinary congestion. Build your buffers with all three in mind.

The two days, side by side

The outbound and return days are not the same event. On 2 January buses genuinely stop; on 3 January the operator lists no suspensions and only warns of delays. The table below lays both days out. The colours are severity: 🔴 closed or suspended, 🟡 delays or crowding likely, 🟢 running normally.

The Tokyo end runs on the opposite rhythm: the start area is restricted 06:00–09:00 on 2 January, and the finish area 12:00–15:00 on 3 January. If you are staying in central Tokyo near the Yomiuri Shimbun building at Otemachi, those are the windows that matter to you. For how the whole New Year period fits together, see the three-day Tokyo New Year plan.

Will Hakone-Yumoto Station be too full to board?

Yes, and the crush is specifically in the Odawara direction. The station-by-station PDFs say it plainly: after the runners pass, Odawara-bound trains may be full to the point that you cannot board, and boarding may take time. The same sheet warns that if you alight at Hakone-Yumoto, the Odawara-bound platform gets extremely crowded and entry restrictions may be imposed.

The congestion windows officials published last year:

Lay that over a ryokan checkout time and the answer falls out. Anyone who stayed in Hakone on New Year's night and checks out on the morning of 2 January lands squarely inside 09:30 to 14:00. Two ways out: come down before 09:00, or eat lunch and leave after 15:00. The one thing not to do is queue with luggage at 11:00.

By contrast, 3 January has a much shorter window and it sits at dawn — 07:30 to 09:30 at Hakone-Yumoto. Move after 09:30 and it is arguably the easiest travel of the two days. No itinerary change is needed for the return day.

The station PDFs also publish walking distances, which is exactly what you want when a train is unboardable: Odawara Station east exit to the course, about 10 minutes; Iriuda to Hakone-Yumoto, about 24 minutes; Hakone-Itabashi to Odawara about 23 minutes and to Hayakawa about 13; Kazamatsuri to Hayakawa about 2 km or 25 minutes, to Hakone-Yumoto about 3 km or 40 minutes, and to Odawara about 3 km or 40 minutes.

Can you still get a Romancecar seat that morning?

Not from Odawara, for a block of departures. For the edition before last (2 January 2025), the railway announced that because of Ekiden congestion it would stop selling limited-express tickets at Odawara Station for services from the 09:39 departure through the 12:33 departure, at platform 7, and directed passengers to take the local train to Hakone-Yumoto instead.

Read the scope carefully: this applies to boarding at Odawara. Services running direct from Shinjuku are not affected by that notice. Our own Hakone two-day plan opens with an early Romancecar from Shinjuku, which is fine — but if you were planning to reach Odawara first and pick up a limited-express seat for the last stretch uphill, that plan fails on the morning of 2 January.

Honest limit: whether the same measure was repeated last year was not confirmed in this round, and nothing has been published for 2027. Treat it as an item to re-check in late December.

How drivers get around it

The organisers name two roads: Hakone Shindo, which is free, and the Hakone Turnpike, ¥900 for a standard car and no ETC. That is the entire content of the official recommendation — two names and the toll status in brackets.

The Turnpike figures were checked against the operator directly. On the Hakone-Odawara main line, standard and light cars pay ¥900, motorcycles above 125cc pay ¥650, microbuses ¥2,500, and large vehicles ¥3,600; the Hakone-Izu connecting line is priced separately, at ¥200 for a standard car. Operating hours are 05:30 to 22:30 with last entry at 22:00. The operator marks the table as current at 1 July 2024, which is not the same as the date it was read.

Three traps to know before you reach the barrier:

• ETC does not work. The operator states outright that ETC is not supported. The cashless alternative is ETCX, which requires prior membership registration. Rental cars almost always come with an ETC card, and it will not open this gate. Carry cash.
• ¥900 buys one one-way passage, and U-turns are banned. The wording is explicit: the tabled fare applies per one-way trip. Going the wrong way costs you a second fare.
• It is a motor-vehicle-only road. Motorcycles of 125cc or under, mopeds, small electric vehicles including kick scooters, light vehicles including bicycles, and pedestrians are all prohibited.

Stack that last item against the race rules and you get a dead end. As noted above, the outbound-day large-vehicle restriction lists ordinary bicycles among the regulated categories. So on the morning of 2 January, a cyclist heading up Hakone can use neither Route 1 nor the Turnpike. Each side states half of this; no single document puts the two halves together.

One thing I did not verify and therefore will not promise you: where the Turnpike begins and ends, and whether it reaches Motohakone. On the official map the free Hakone Shindo route is drawn continuing to Lake Ashi and Hakonemachi, but the Turnpike line runs off the right-hand edge of the map. Treat it as one of the two detours the organisers named and confirm the routing yourself with navigation.

If you want to visit Hakone Shrine too

That lakeside road runs one-way from the evening of 31 December through 3 January, and it has nothing to do with the race. It has nothing to do with the race, so no Ekiden document will warn you about it.

The shrine's own New Year traffic-restriction map is specific. The restricted section is the road it calls Motohakone Shimizu-dori, running from the shrine's banner flags toward Hakone-en as far as the former Lakeside Annex. The hours are 23:00 on 31 December to 16:00 on 1 January, plus 10:00 to 16:00 on each of 2 and 3 January. The permitted direction runs from the shrine banners toward the former Lakeside Annex. The shrine adds that because of the restriction, buses cannot use the precinct car park from the 1st to the 3rd and must use the dedicated bus park beside the second torii; from the 4th, the precinct park reopens.

Put the timelines next to each other and the significance is obvious: the Ekiden restriction is a few hours, while the shrine's one-way system is six hours a day across all three New Year days. The famous torii standing in the lake sits on this road. On the middle of 2 January, when the race window and the shrine window overlap, that stretch is among the hardest driving in Hakone all year.

Two caveats. The shrine's PDF is a file reused year to year that does not print a year on it, and the Reiwa 9 (2027) version has not been published, so read the hours as "the fixed annual arrangement, per the 2026 version." And on road numbering: neither the shrine nor the police print a route number, calling it only Motohakone Shimizu-dori and Jinja-dori. Kanagawa Prefecture's road section table lists this lakeside road as Prefectural Route 75 (Yugawara-Hakone-Sengokuhara), running from the Oshiba intersection on Route 1 to the Koshiri junction — but that is a cross-reference between two documents, not something either the shrine or the police published.

For how a New Year shrine visit actually works — the order of things, the offering, what to do with last year's charms — see the hatsumode walkthrough. For what is open across the three New Year days, see the New Year opening-hours guide.

If you actually want to watch the race

There is no ticket, no seat, and no such thing as a paid viewing stand. A full-text search of the organisers' site and the four regulation PDFs returns nothing for reserved seating, tickets, or paid spectator areas; the only paid item anywhere is the Turnpike toll. Watching means finding a stretch of pavement and standing on it.

The roadside rules are more numerous than most people expect:

• Do not leave belongings to reserve a spot. All four PDFs carry this, note that the start, finish, and relay points are especially dangerous because of crowds, and state that organisers may remove belongings. The phrasing is worth comparing with how officials word the same problem for cherry-blossom season — see the hanami spot-reservation rules.
• No step ladders. The organisers call them dangerous.
• Stand on the pavement, never in the roadway.
• No drones or radio-controlled aircraft anywhere near the course, and no selfie sticks.
• Tying banners or flags to guardrails, bridges, or other public roadside fixtures without permission breaks road-traffic law, per the organisers.

If you cannot get roadside, Nippon TV broadcast live from 07:00 on both days last year — the outbound broadcast ran 07:00 to 14:05 and the return 07:00 to 14:18, with NHK Radio covering 07:40 to 14:15 on both. The organisers themselves recommend TVer for watching on a phone. Whether TVer or Nippon TV are viewable from outside Japan was not verified here, so do not plan around it.

If you want to make the race itself a stop, the Hakone Ekiden Museum sits beside the finish at Lake Ashi: ¥750 for adults, ¥550 for school children. ⚠️ But the museum deliberately does not publish its hours for 2 and 3 January — its own listing says winter operating hours must be confirmed by contacting them directly. Do not extrapolate from the weekday and weekend hours; phone ahead.

What is different about the 2027 running

It is the last running with 21 teams. The organisers have confirmed the 103rd Tokyo-Hakone Round-Trip College Ekiden Race for Saturday 2 and Sunday 3 January 2027, from the Yomiuri Shimbun building in Otemachi to the Lake Ashi car park entrance in Hakone. The qualifying race is Saturday 17 October 2026, running from the JGSDF Tachikawa Garrison through Tachikawa city streets to Showa Kinen Park.

In December 2025 the organisers published a reform notice with two layers, and the arithmetic is easy to get wrong. First, the commemorative edition moves from every five years to every four, with the next one being the 104th in January 2028, and subsequent ones falling whenever both the edition number and the year are multiples of four — that is, at the start of each Olympic year. Second, from the 104th running, both regular and commemorative editions add three teams each: regular editions go from 21 to 24, commemorative from 23 to 26. The notice adds in brackets that the 103rd runs with the pre-change total of 21.

Here is the trap. Copying "21 to 24 from the 104th" at face value misleads, because the 104th is itself a commemorative edition and fields 26 teams. The correct sequence:

Commemorative editions also change structurally in two ways: their qualifying race opens to universities nationwide, with qualifiers advancing to the main race, and in the main race the Kanto Student Union team is replaced by a Japan Student Select team assembled from qualifying results. Separately, for the 103rd running the entry roster grew from a maximum of 14 to a maximum of 16, with no change to the number who actually run.

Some background numbers worth having. The 21 teams comprise the top 10 schools that earned seeded places at the previous edition, the 10 that came through the October qualifier, and the Kanto Student Union. The course is five outbound legs totalling 107.5 km and five return legs totalling 109.6 km — ten legs and 217.1 km. Leg 5 climbs about 834 m of elevation difference. Schools submit their leg entries on 29 December, and reserve runners can be slotted into any leg at a final entry one hour before the race starts. The first running took place at 1 p.m. on 14 February 1920, with four schools: Waseda, Keio, Meiji, and Tokyo Higher Normal, now Tsukuba.

I am not giving you a start time. The organisers' about page, course page, all four regulation PDFs, and the Yomiuri Shimbun's dedicated site were searched, and none of them states one. What you do get with direct official wording is the Tokyo start-area restriction window (06:00 to 09:00 on 2 January) and the broadcast start (07:00) — which are more useful for planning anyway.

Seen from a distance, these two days belong to the same family as Japan's other holiday traffic measures, just at a much smaller scale. The nationwide ones — all-reserved bullet trains, suspended expressway discounts — are collected in the guide to holiday crowd structure and transport measures.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1：Can I still visit Hakone on 2 and 3 January 2027?

Yes. The organisers have never asked visitors to stay away. Their own English-language notice is unambiguous about who it is addressed to: it asks motorists to avoid the course roads, and the very next line tells spectators to use public transport when they come to cheer. Three things genuinely change. National Route 1 through the mountain section is closed to traffic around the time runners pass. Some bus routes are suspended, diverted, or turned back partway. And Hakone-Yumoto Station may impose platform entry restrictions. What does not change is the loop most visitors actually ride: the mountain railway, the cable car, the ropeway, and the Lake Ashi cruise run on rail, cable, and water, and the official maps draw them as separate lines from Route 1. Roughly eighty per cent of a normal Hakone day is untouched. The part that breaks is the bus leg back from the lake.

Q2：Is the Hakone Free Pass still worth buying on those two days?

Yes, but you will not use the bus leg. Of the eight transport modes the pass covers, the mountain railway, cable car, ropeway, and pirate-ship cruise all ran normally on 2 January last year, so you can complete the outbound half of the golden loop without trouble. The problem is the return. In the bus operator's own notice, services from Hakonemachi Port toward Hakone-Yumoto and Odawara were suspended between roughly 10:00 and 14:30 — precisely the bus most people want after stepping off the cruise. The fix is to retrace your steps: ropeway back from Togendai to Sounzan, cable car down to Gora, mountain railway down to Hakone-Yumoto. All of it is covered by the pass, and none of it touches Route 1. So buy the pass; just draw that day as an out-and-back rather than a loop.

Q3：Are there grandstand seats or tickets for the race?

No. Searching the organisers' site and all four traffic-regulation PDFs turns up no reserved seating, no ticket, and no paid spectator area of any kind. The only paid item anywhere in those documents is the Hakone Turnpike toll. Watching this race means standing on a pavement and waiting. The roadside rules are stricter than at most Japanese festivals: do not leave bags to reserve a spot (organisers state they may remove them), do not use step ladders, do not stand in the roadway, no drones or selfie sticks anywhere near the course, and do not tie banners or flags to guardrails or bridges — that last one, the organisers note, breaks road-traffic law. If you cannot get roadside, Nippon TV broadcast live from 07:00 on both days last year, and the organisers themselves recommend TVer for phone viewing. Whether TVer works from outside Japan was not verified here, so do not count on it.

Q4：If I am not watching the race, when is it safe to move?

After 15:00 on 2 January, and after 09:30 on 3 January. On the outbound day the mountain-section restriction runs roughly 11:00 to 14:00, the longest bus suspension stretches to 14:30, and the official congestion window at Hakone-Yumoto Station ends at 14:00 — so mid-afternoon is when everything finally clears at once. On the return day the whole pattern flips to early morning: Hakone-Yumoto is flagged for 07:30 to 09:30 only, and moving after 09:30 is genuinely the smoothest travel of the two days. The people most likely to get caught are those who spent New Year's night in a Hakone ryokan and check out on the morning of 2 January, because 09:30 to 14:00 covers that window completely. Either come down before 09:00 or have lunch and leave after 15:00. The one thing not to do is drag a suitcase to a bus stop at 11:00.

Q5：Hakone Shindo or Hakone Turnpike — which detour should a driver take?

Hakone Shindo is free; the Turnpike is ¥900 for a standard car and does not accept ETC. These are the two detours the organisers name by name in their visitor notice, with the toll status written in the original Japanese. The Turnpike carries three traps worth knowing before you reach the barrier. First, the operator states plainly that ETC is not supported — the only cashless option is ETCX, which requires prior membership registration, so the ETC card in your rental car will not work and you need cash. Second, ¥900 buys one one-way passage and U-turns are prohibited, so taking the wrong direction costs you a second fare. Third, it is a motor-vehicle-only road: motorcycles of 125cc or under, mopeds, electric kick scooters, bicycles, and pedestrians are all barred. Separately, highway interchanges themselves close — on the outbound day that includes Hakoneguchi IC on the Odawara-Atsugi Road and nine interchanges on the Seisho Bypass.

Q6：Do I need to change my plans for 3 January?

No. On the return day the bus operator listed no suspended sections at all — only a note that two routes may fail to run on schedule around the time runners pass. That is delay, not cancellation. Do two things: widen your connection buffers, and avoid the early window. Hakone-Yumoto Station is flagged for 07:30 to 09:30, and the crush is specifically in the Odawara-bound direction, so it eases after 09:30. The thing that genuinely deserves attention on 3 January has nothing to do with the race: the lakeside road beside Hakone Shrine runs one-way from 10:00 to 16:00 on both 2 and 3 January because of New Year shrine visits, and the shrine states that buses cannot use the precinct car park from the 1st to the 3rd.

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