Numata's tourism association gives the peak here as late October to early November. Fukiware is not a waterfall in the usual shape. The Katashina river runs over a flat bed of welded tuff, and rather than dropping from a lip it pours sideways into fissures in the riverbed, seven metres deep and over thirty across. The name says the rock looks blown apart, which is close to what you see.

The geology is the reason to walk the loop rather than stand at the rail. The bed is pitted with potholes ground out by stones spinning in the current, the largest six or seven metres across. On the right bank the Byobu-iwa, the folding-screen rock, stands up from the water: hardened pyroclastic flow, about eight and a half million years old, left standing where a fault line made the rock harder.

A footpath around the gorge was completed in 1991 and takes about an hour. Three platforms sit along it, each at a different angle, and the one across the river is the only place you see the fissures head-on. Downstream are the Masutobi falls, named for the trout that could not get past them.

By car it is twenty-five minutes from the Numata interchange, up Route 120 towards Oze. Buses to Kamata leave JR Numata station and take forty-five minutes, and the stop is three minutes from the falls. The path closes at night and again for the winter. Local people will tell you the plunge pool connects to the dragon palace under the sea.