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Daisetsuzan NP, Hokkaido
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Sounkyo’s Icefall Festival began in 1976 as an idea by local young people and sculptor Toshihiro Takenaka. What is now a celebrated winter event started with the community’s effort to bring life to the quiet season.
About 30,000 years ago, an eruption at Daisetsuzan’s Ohachidaira buried this valley in up to 200 m of hot ash. Cooling cracked it into stone columns; the Ishikari River later carved the gorge through the volcanic fill.
At Sounkyo’s summer Gorge Fire Festival, Upper Kamikawa Ainu performers share traditional dance and fire performance. Ainu songs and dances are living cultural practices, not just echoes in the region’s place-names.
A Sounkyo dinner can taste like the next town over: Choyotei’s 2025 autumn menu used nameko mushrooms from neighboring Aibetsu, known as Hokkaido’s “Mushroom Village,” in a warming hot pot.
In 1921, writer Ōmachi Keigetsu named the gorge while staying at its hot spring, borrowing nearby “Sounbetsu,” an Ainu place-name meaning “stream with many waterfalls.”
An 1854 account by samurai Matsuda Ichitarō noted several hot springs along the river here. Organized development began in 1900, when springs were known by operators’ names, including Shioya Onsen.
A 1900 mineral-water certificate for Sounkyo’s spring listed “carbonic acid: abundant” and “hydrogen sulfide: none”—a surprisingly specific snapshot from before the resort had even taken its present name.
Early Sounkyo had no road: railway contractor Arai Hatsuichi took over Shioya Onsen as temporary quarters for his workers in 1922, then opened the area’s first full-scale inn in 1923 and privately financed a road into the valley.
The festival’s ice forms are grown more than carved: crews spray Ishikari River water onto wooden frames, and weeks of freezing weather build the rough, icicle-draped shapes that fill the riverside site.
At the Icefall Festival’s shrine, visitors press offering coins onto the frozen sacred figure instead of dropping them into a box. The coins cling to the ice, turning a winter visit into a delightfully chilly ritual.
After Keigetsu’s travel writing brought Sounkyo to a national audience, the gorge was selected for Japan’s “100 Scenic Places” in 1927. In 1934, the area became part of Daisetsuzan National Park.
The dramatic Kobako section of Sounkyo Gorge is now closed to visitors. In 1987, a rockslide sent about 11,000 m³ of debris into the Ishikari River, killing 3 people and injuring 6.
On guided winter visits to nearby Daibako, a tunnel test-bore can reveal delicate frost crystals across its ceiling. Water warmer than the cave air evaporates, then crystallizes overhead.
