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Towada-Hachimantai NP, Iwate
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The trail passes the remains of 2 vents from the eruption, which likely involved 5 vents and lasted 9 days. It follows the path of a flank eruption, not a summit eruption.
Older cultural records date Yakehashiri to 1719, but a 1998 study judged that eruption report unreliable and linked the lava to 1732 records. Japan’s Meteorological Agency now dates the flow-producing eruption to 1732.
In “The Tale of Tsuru and the Great Serpent”—folklore, not a historical eruption account—a hunter saves a little snake but is swallowed by lava. His grieving daughter later vanishes, leaving a great serpent’s shed skin where she used to sit.
Almost 300 years after the eruption, the lava is still mostly treeless: mosses and lichens have colonized it, but plant recovery remains unusually slow. This rare, intact landscape became a National Special Natural Monument in 1952.
The upper scree holds one of Japan’s largest pink komakusa colonies. Iwate Prefecture says this rare alpine flower grows naturally only on Mt. Iwate and Akita-Komagatake within the prefecture.
Poet Miyazawa Kenji made this lava field the subject of “Yōganryū” (“Lava Flow”). A monument bearing the poem was erected near the flow’s northeastern edge in 1981.
The lava is not a smooth, frozen river: its black surface has wave-like ridges, and an old cultural-property description notes moss-covered features called “tiger forms.” Some porous lava blocks reach 1 m across.
The Yakehashiri climbing route was developed in the mid-1960s. Farther up, at Hirakasa Fudo, a hospitality hut built in 1823 once gave people climbing for religious reasons a place to rest.
This trailhead has long been more than a place to start hiking: former Nishine Town held Mt. Iwate’s opening prayer and hikers’ send-off here from 1968, and Hachimantai City continued the ceremony at Yakehashiri after its formation.
