The 100 Selected Waterfalls of Japan: Chosen by the Public in 1990

Japan has thousands of waterfalls, and in 1990 it officially chose its favourite hundred. The 100 Selected Waterfalls of Japan — Nihon no Taki Hyakusen （日本の滝百選）, also called the Nihon Hyaku-meitaki, "100 Famous Waterfalls of Japan" — were announced that year as part of a national "green campaign", following an earlier selection of 100 forests for forest bathing.

The selection was a public one. The campaign, organised by three environmental groups with the backing of the Environment Agency (today's Ministry of the Environment) and the Forestry Agency, invited nominations from all over Japan — and received 341,292 of them, covering 527 waterfalls. A panel of eight selectors then reduced the 527 to a shortlist of 127, and from those to the final hundred. The certificates were presented on 8 April 1990 at Tateyama in Toyama — fittingly, the town beneath Shōmyō Falls, the tallest waterfall on the list.

Because the public had a hand in choosing, the list is not a simple league table of height. It does include the giants: Shōmyō (350 m) in Toyama and Hagoromo (270 m) in Hokkaidō — but it also includes falls chosen for their beauty, their history and their place in local life. Some are sacred: Nachi Falls in Wakayama (133 m) has been worshipped for well over a thousand years and stands beside the vermilion pagoda of Seiganto-ji. Some are urban: Nunobiki Falls lies a short walk from central Kobe, and Hossawa Falls is in the only village in the Tokyo metropolis. And some are tiny — the selection values character over size.

Every waterfall in this guide is one of the hundred, in the official list order, numbered as in the original selection. Each page gives the fall's drop, location and coordinates, checked against Wikidata, a photograph, and the full text of its encyclopedia article where one exists — so you can read the geology, the legends and the access details of each fall in one place.

Facts in this article are drawn from the Japanese Wikipedia article 「日本の滝百選」("100 Selected Waterfalls of Japan"), CC BY-SA 4.0, and from the list data used throughout this guide.