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Daisetsuzan NP, Hokkaido
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To fill Sounkyo’s quiet winter season, local shopkeepers’ young people and sculptor Toshihiro Takenaka started the Icefall Festival in 1976. Inn staff, builders and Self-Defense Force troops helped create its early ice art.
Ginga and Ryusei Falls were once called Meoto (“Wedded”) Falls; in 1916 they were renamed “male” and “female” falls. Forestry scholar Yoshinao Niijima’s poems in 1923 helped today’s names catch on.
The Ainu name Nisei-noshiki-omap means “thing in the middle of the gorge.” A Ministry ranger notes that 3 nearby rivers with “nisei” names may preserve an Ainu way of mapping the streams as parts of a body.
Writer Keigetsu Omachi coined “Sounkyo” in 1921, borrowing it from nearby Sounbetsu, an Ainu-derived name meaning “river with waterfalls.” Its Japanese characters add a poetic picture: “layers of cloud” and “gorge.”
Hot springs here were noted as early as 1854, when foot soldier Matsuda Ichitaro recorded “several hot springs” by the Ishikari River. Development began in 1900—before the gorge had its present name.
These cliffs are not cooled lava: they are welded volcanic-ash deposits from a Daisetsuzan eruption about 30,000 years ago. Some deposits reached roughly 200 m thick before the Ishikari River carved the gorge through them.
At Sounkyo, “Little Box” (Kobako) can look taller and larger than “Great Box” (Obako)—and the Environment Ministry calls it one of the area’s largest columnar cliffs. Early writers even seem to have swapped the labels.
At Obako, ice columns can reach about 10 m high across a 200 m wall. Long icicles need more than extreme cold: seepage freezes from top to bottom, and repeated thaw–freeze cycles help them grow.
Ginga Falls is taller at 120 m, yet descends in delicate threads; Ryusei Falls drops 90 m in a stronger stream. The pair are nicknamed “female” and “male” falls, though older records disagree on which is which.
Sounkyo’s summer fire festival has featured the Ainu Fukurō shinji: the owl, a high-ranking kamuy, is thanked and its spirit sent back to the gods’ world, with the hope that it will return.
Just 6 years after Keigetsu Omachi gave the gorge its name, Sounkyo was selected for Japan’s “100 Scenic Views” in 1927. The area joined Daisetsuzan National Park in 1934.
