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Shiretoko NP, Hokkaido
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No river feeds Furepe: rain and snowmelt from the Shiretoko Range soak underground, then seep from a crack in the cliff into the Sea of Okhotsk. Its gentle trickle earned the nickname “Maiden’s Tears.”
Furepe’s spring emerges around 80 m above sea level, where groundwater meets an impermeable layer in ancient Mount Rausu lava. The Geological Survey of Japan describes this buried boundary as the source of the seep.
Furepe’s Ainu name, hure-pe, means “red water,” but winter turns its seep into blue-white ice. Groundwater keeps trickling beneath the frozen spray, gradually adding to the ice until it grows heavy or warming temperatures make it collapse.
The forest-and-grassland approach crosses former homestead land: several houses stood nearby until 1966, and the meadow was cut for livestock feed and grazed. The 2-km Furepe trail was laid out in 1987.
A 6-year survey and archive search assembled the Furepe trail area’s first full plant list: 192 species. It also documented Liparis japonica, an orchid not previously recorded anywhere on the Shiretoko Peninsula.
Researchers first recorded rare Shikotan chickweed flowering at 1 spot, with just 1 plant, in 2015. In later surveys, they found it flowering at 3 locations—a small but memorable change in Furepe’s meadow.
In Furepe’s meadow, 8 of the 31 plants recorded in 1980 were not found in later surveys. Researchers suggest increased sika-deer browsing may have helped shift the vegetation toward deer-avoided bracken and tall herbs.
The cliffs around Furepe Falls are also nesting walls: cormorants and slaty-backed gulls breed on their ledges. These sheer faces give seabirds places to nest that are difficult for people and land predators to reach.
