Ryuzugataki Falls

A visit to Ryuzugataki Falls is easy to underplan — bring more time, and less certainty about what you'll find, than you'd expect.

Ryuzugataki is two waterfalls: the female fall at 30 metres and the male fall at 40, the larger of which is described as the finest in the Chugoku region. Together with the nearby Yaedaki they are on the national list of one hundred notable waterfalls.

The reason to make the walk is that you can get behind the male fall. A cave in the rock face behind the water holds a Kannon figure, the Taki Kannon, and you stand in it with the fall coming down in front of you — a form known in Japanese as urami no taki, a fall seen from behind. From the car park the path climbs on a gentle forest track and then a stepped section: about five minutes to the female fall and another ten to the male one. It is a short walk to something genuinely unusual, in a valley that sees almost nobody outside the August festival.

The forest walk leading in does a good deal of the work before the falls themselves come into view — moss-covered boulders, filtered light through cedar and maple canopy, and the sound of water building gradually as the trail climbs, so that the female fall's initial appearance feels like a pause rather than the destination. Continuing on to the male fall, the roar becomes noticeably louder well before the cave entrance appears, and the temperature drop inside the spray zone is immediate, a welcome shock in midsummer and a bracing one in cooler months. Standing behind a forty-metre waterfall, looking out through a curtain of falling water toward the sunlit valley beyond, is a rare enough vantage point in Japan that even visitors who have seen dozens of waterfalls elsewhere in the country tend to describe Ryuzugataki as something categorically different, less a view to photograph from a platform than a small, damp, thundering room you're briefly allowed to stand inside.