The Yahiko tourism association gives the peak here as early to mid-November. Two ten-day blocks is a short window, and this park finishes before most of the places listed alongside it.

Yahiko Park was laid out in 1918 by the Echigo Railway, two years after the line reached the village, and it now serves as the outer grounds of Yahiko Shrine. It covers around forty thousand tsubo, but the part people come for in autumn is a single fold of ground called Momijidani. A vermilion bridge, the Kangetsukyo, crosses it. Red paint against red leaves sounds like a mistake and is not: the two reds are different enough that each makes the other legible.

The valley is lit after dark through the season, and the lighting changes the place more than it changes most gardens, because the bridge takes the light and the slope behind it does not. If you have an evening, use it here rather than saving it.

The park runs through the year on a rotation — Somei-yoshino cherry in April, double-flowered cherry into May, fireflies in summer — and this is the last turn of it. Access is as simple as it gets: Yahiko station on the JR Yahiko line sits at the edge of the grounds, and you are inside the park within a minute of leaving the platform.