Nachi-Katsuura

You already know the picture before you get there — the red pagoda, the white ribbon of the waterfall behind it, the green mountainside holding both. It’s on every poster for this part of Japan. So I braced myself for disappointment, the way you do when a place has been photographed to death. Then we climbed the last steps to Seiganto-ji, turned, and there it was, and the photographs had lied by making it small. Nachi Falls drops 133 metres in a single unbroken plunge, and standing there you feel the sound of it in your chest before you’ve really taken in the sight. Lia just laughed, that involuntary laugh you make when something is bigger than you expected.

The Pagoda and the Falls

The three-story pagoda of Seiganto-ji is the most famous vantage point, and rightly — it frames the waterfall so perfectly it feels staged, though it’s stood there in some form for centuries. We paid the small fee to climb it and looked out from the top balcony, the falls filling the whole window. Later we walked down to the base of the cascade itself, into the grounds of Hiryū-jinja, where the water is worshipped as a deity in its own right. Up close the wind off the plunge pool throws a fine mist over everything, and there’s a viewing platform where you stand and get quietly, happily soaked. I filled a little cup from the sacred spring and drank it, cold enough to hurt my teeth.

Climbing to Kumano Nachi Taisha

Above the falls sits Kumano Nachi Taisha, one of the three grand shrines of Kumano, reached by a long flight of stone steps flanked by cedars and small shops selling grilled rice cakes. We climbed slowly, stopping to buy a skewer of mochi charred over coals, and reached the vermilion shrine buildings just as a group of pilgrims in white were completing their own long walk down from the mountains. There’s an ancient camphor tree there, hundreds of years old and hollow at the base, and you can pay to walk through the gap inside its trunk. Lia did it and came out grinning. From the terrace the whole valley falls away toward the sea, and you understand why people have been climbing up here to give thanks for well over a thousand years.

Katsuura’s Tuna Harbor

Down at sea level, Katsuura is a working tuna port, and if you can drag yourself out of bed the morning fish auction is worth every yawn. We watched rows of enormous frozen tuna laid out on the wet concrete of the market floor while buyers moved between them with hooks and flashlights, inspecting the tail-cuts. Afterward we ate a maguro breakfast at a counter by the harbor — raw, seared, and simmered, three ways on one tray — while the boats that had caught it rocked at the dock outside. The town itself is small and unglamorous in the best way, steam rising from hot-spring hotels along the shore, cats sleeping on upturned crates. It smells of salt and diesel and grilled fish, and I loved it.

Getting There

Nachi-Katsuura sits on the Kii Peninsula’s southern coast. Limited express trains (the Kuroshio) run from Shin-Osaka to Kii-Katsuura station in roughly four hours, hugging a beautiful stretch of coastline for the final leg. From the station, local buses climb up to the Nachi Falls and shrine area in about twenty-five minutes. If you’re walking the Kumano Kodō, the Nachi area is the traditional coastal endpoint. Stay a night by the harbor to catch the early tuna market, and pack a light rain layer — the mist off the falls finds everyone.