The land outside your train window grows steadily greener as you travel the 80 kilometers northwest from Ikebukuro to Chichibu, Tokyo's suburban sprawl giving way to steep forested slopes. When you alight at Seibu Chichibu station you'll find yourself surrounded by mountains and, depending on the hour, by the hikers, campers, and day-trekking rock hounds this area attracts in droves. Geopark Chichibu, an 89,250-hectare conglomeration of national and prefectural parks and a growing center of geotourism in the Kanto area, is headquartered right here at the station.

You're standing at the southeastern edge of a primordial seabed, and those peaks all around you are the result of seismic forces pushing up hundreds of millions of years ago from Izu Peninsula 200 kilometers to the south. The diverse strata of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rock that converge here have made the Chichibu Basin a thriving center of geologic study and, from olden times, a major source of precious metals and building materials. Japan's first copper coins, minted in 708, were made of ore mined here, and the limestone quarries of Mount Buko are where much of the cement you just left behind in Tokyo comes from. A 1,300-meter-high mass of sediment from ancient coral reefs, this muscular mountain is Chichibu's symbol and popular with hikers, but its strip-mined face is a harsh reminder of all that we take from our environment.

A short taxi ride away in Kami Kagemori, Yoshiko Hayama runs Chichibu Chinsekikan, or the Hall of Curious Rocks. Established in 1990 by her father, Shoji Hayama, the museum holds well over 1,000 specimens he collected over five decades before his death in 2010. Some 700 of those on display are jinmenseki -- stones whose pockmarks, holes, and otherwise weatherworn features resemble faces.

The endearing quirkiness of the collection has made the museum a darling of Japanese television and print media. Much of that interest has to do with the inspired captions naming the rocks for the celebrities, politicians, and anime characters they resemble -- Elvis Presley, Mikhail Gorbachev, and John F. Kennedy among them. Even if you don't follow Japan's entertainment world closely enough to get all of the likenesses and inside jokes, you can still enjoy the whimsy behind these accidents of nature.

Yoshiko's husband, a retired sushi chef, drove me to one of the riverbank rock fields his father-in-law frequented, and demonstrated how Shoji spent his Sunday mornings. As a rock hound and beachcomber myself I had imagined him covering miles along the river on each excursion but in fact his method was to sit and -- you guessed it -- leave no stone unturned. Once he had picked up each rock within reach and flipped it over for signs of some telltale expressive feature, he would stand up and move on to the next patch. The specimens he collected this way over some 50 years average to about two finds a month. Shoji must have been a very patient man.

Shoji's first passion as a collector was suiseki, the classic Chinese art of stone appreciation. Through naturally occurring serendipities of shape, markings, color, and texture, these viewing stones or scholars' stones (gongshi in Chinese) evoke distant mountain ranges, islands at sea, waterfalls, and seaside cliffs. Still others represent flora, fauna and mythical creatures. More than just pretty objects to look at, as uncontrived representations of the universe and its workings in miniature, suiseki are also a means of meditation. Chinsekikan has about 60 or so on display. To explore such auguries of innocence further, mark your calendar for the 57th annual Exhibition of Japanese Suiseki Masterpieces at Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, 7 to 11 June. Some 80 prized stones submitted from around the country will be shown.