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Nikko NP, Tochigi
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Yudaki pours over the Mi-dake lava that dammed the Yukawa to form Lake Yunoko. The same volcanic barrier holds the lake above and gives its water a 70-m-high, 110-m-long way out.
Yudaki feeds the Yukawa, where Thomas Glover imported 25,000 brook-trout eggs from Colorado in 1902. A typhoon wiped out the first hatch; a later release survived, and the river became a cradle of Japanese fly-fishing.
In 1875, Kasahara Bunpei and fellow villagers cleared a path through brush to reveal Yudaki. An 1882 inscription by scholar Otsuki Fumihiko commemorates their work at the falls.
The introduced brook trout are also called Parlett trout, after Harold Parlett, the British embassy official who helped arrange their import with Thomas Glover. His surname lives on in the local name for the fish.
湯 means hot water, but Yudaki is Lake Yunoko’s outflow, not a spring gushing straight from the cliff. The sulfurous hot springs are at nearby Yumoto Onsen.
Brook trout introduced to the Yukawa also reproduce naturally. The 2026 fisheries guide reports spawning near Odaishiro Bridge around late October, downstream from the river’s beginning below Yudaki.
From Yudaki, the Yukawa winds across Senjogahara and continues over Ryuzu Falls before reaching Lake Chuzenji, about 12.4 km from its source. One cascade leads into a whole river-and-wetland journey.
Downstream from Yudaki, the Yukawa crosses Senjogahara, or “battlefield plain.” Tochigi’s local legend says the gods of Mt Nantai and Mt Akagi fought over Lake Chuzenji as a giant snake and centipede.
Lake Yunoko, which feeds Yudaki, once became so polluted and nutrient-rich that its central transparency fell to 1.8 m. Suction dredging began in 1992, and clarity reached 3 m by August 1994.
Beside Yudaki’s basin viewing platform is a trout memorial stone. It is a quiet marker of the fishing culture on the Yukawa, the celebrated stream that begins just below the falls.
