Miyagi's tourism federation gives the usual peak here as mid-October to early November, about a month ahead of the maples in central Sendai. The falls are twenty-odd kilometres up the Natori river from the city, at the head of a valley that has been a hot spring resort for centuries. The water comes over a single lip of welded tuff and drops fifty-five metres in one unbroken sheet, six metres wide. It was designated a national place of scenic beauty in 1942.

There are two ways to look at it. The viewing platform sits above and to the side, and gives you the whole fall at once, framed by trees on both walls of the gorge. A stairway drops to the plunge pool, ten minutes down and rather longer back up. What changes is less the view than the sound. From the platform the falls are a picture. From the pool they are weather.

By car it is forty minutes from the Sendai-minami interchange. A city bus runs from JR Ayashi station in roughly forty minutes. A direct coach leaves from in front of Sendai station and takes an hour and twenty, but it runs on weekends and holidays only.

The colour report for this valley is published by the Akiu Satocenter rather than by the falls, which is worth knowing in a week when timing matters. Upstream lies Akiu Onsen, one of the older hot spring towns in the north, and most people arrive as part of a longer day. An hour covers the platform, the stairs and the pool. The rest belongs to the river.