Gongen Falls / Yonako was added to Your Favorites!
Joshin’etsukogen NP, Nagano
Claim this place to tell your story your way.
Gongen Falls is sometimes called Yonako’s “Black Dragon,” paired with neighboring Fudo Falls, the “White Dragon”; together they’re known as the Twin Dragons. Gongen was also once called Senju-taki, or “Thousand-Hand Falls.”
A 1611 account describes Gongen and Fudo Falls as the ritual washing place of Hakusan Gongen. Swords offered near Mt. Azumaya and dated to the 13th–16th centuries suggest people were making offerings in this mountain landscape centuries earlier.
The plateau facing the falls was once a sulfur-mining town of about 1,500 people, with a clinic, school and even a cinema. A roughly 13-km aerial cableway linked the mine to Suzaka Station.
Nearby, Yonako residents still hold an annual harvest rite before stone Buddhas carved by ascetic Tansho. Beginning in 1611, he spent 12 years here in practice, making stone figures and 1,000 wooden Buddhas.
At a local history outing to Yonako, the group ate takenoko-jiru—bamboo-shoot soup made with nemagari-dake shoots gathered at Takigashira near the falls. It’s a meal tied to the mountain, not just its scenery.
Gongen anchors a 1-km cliffside cascade of more than 10 waterfalls. About 10 flow year-round; several usually dry channels join in after heavy rain, briefly adding extra ribbons of water.
Gongen Falls didn’t grow; the measurement changed. Long listed as 75 m—including when Yonako was selected for Japan’s Top 100 Waterfalls in 1990—it was measured at 82 m by laser surveying in 2017.
Waterfall asceticism continues, but not beneath Yonako’s towering drops: for safety, the temple now holds rites at its town headquarters, where 2 smaller waterfalls are enshrined as sacred counterparts of Fudo and Gongen.
A large boulder along the trail is called Amayadori-iwa, “Rain-Shelter Rock.” Local trail notes say ascetics visiting Yonako once took refuge beneath it when showers swept through the mountains.
