Oirase Gorge

Lia has a rule on trails: no headphones, no talking for the first hour, just walking. I usually last about fifteen minutes. But at Oirase Gorge I kept the silence the whole way, because the stream does the talking and it never once repeats itself. We started near the outlet of Lake Towada, up in the mountains of Aomori at Tohoku’s northern end, where the water leaves the caldera and immediately begins to hurry — over boulders furred green with moss, around fallen trees, through narrow chutes where it goes white and loud. The trail runs right alongside it, close enough to feel the cool air the rapids throw off. Within twenty minutes I understood why Japanese travellers speak about this gorge the way they speak about a famous temple.

Walking Beside the Water

The path from Nenokuchi, at the lake, down to Yakeyama runs about fourteen kilometres, gently downhill, and the genius of it is how little separates you from the stream. There’s no railing keeping you back, no viewing platform to herd you — just a soft dirt trail winding through the trees with the water a few steps to your side the entire way. We passed walkers of every age, including an old man with a tripod who had clearly walked this route a hundred times and still stopped to photograph the same bend. The moss is everywhere: on the rocks in the water, on the fallen logs, climbing the bases of the beeches, so that the whole gorge glows a saturated green in summer. Lia crouched to touch a boulder and her hand came away damp and cold. “It’s a rainforest,” she whispered, which in feeling if not in botany was exactly right.

The Waterfalls

The gorge is stitched with waterfalls, some tumbling straight into the main stream, others sliding down the far cliffs from side valleys you never see. Each has a name and a small wooden sign, and half the pleasure is rounding a bend to find the next one. The most famous, Kumoi-no-Taki, drops in delicate white threads down a mossy rock face; the broadest, Choshi-Otaki, is the only true waterfall on the main river itself, a wide curtain of water thundering across the whole width of the stream where we stood spellbound in its cold spray. We stopped counting somewhere in the twenties. What stayed with me wasn’t any single fall but the accumulation of them — the sense of a place absolutely lavish with water, spending it everywhere, all at once, with no thought of running out.

Lake Towada at the Top

We saved Lake Towada for the end, riding a bus back up to Nenokuchi where the gorge is born. After the tight green intimacy of the stream, the lake opens like a held breath released — a vast, deep caldera of startlingly clear water, ringed by forested crater walls, so still in the late afternoon that the far shore hung upside down in it. We took a boat partway across, and Lia went quiet again, this time from the scale of the thing. At the shore near Nenokuchi stands the Maiden of the Lake, a bronze of two women reaching toward each other, weathered green to match the woods. We sat near it and ate the rice balls we’d carried all day, watching the light go long over the water, both of us reluctant to end the walk we’d already ended.

Getting There

Oirase Gorge lies in the mountains of southern Aomori, and the usual gateways are Aomori city and Hachinohe, both served by the Tohoku Shinkansen. From either, JR and local buses run in the green season to Yakeyama and Nenokuchi, the two ends of the trail, taking somewhere between one and two and a half hours depending on your start. A car gives you flexibility, but parking along the narrow gorge road is limited and the point is really to walk — many visitors ride the bus to one end and stroll to the other, letting the current carry them downhill. The trail is at its most famous in autumn, when the maples blaze, but the summer moss season is quieter and, to my eye, just as lovely. Wear shoes you don’t mind getting damp, and give yourself the whole day.