For the past month or so, my entire feed on Instagram has been overtaken by red spider lilies. Known in Japanese as Manjushage or Higanbana (the term that I’ll opt to use from here on out), these flowers are synonymous with the arrival of fall in Japan. Generally, they are at their best around the autumn equinox. Though short-lived, the Higanbana are a great prelude to the coming of the fall foliage later on in mid-autumn. Should you find yourself in Japan during the latter half of September, I highly suggest you add a locale to your itinerary that features these beautiful flowers.
For all their beauty, Higanbana carry some decidedly tragic associations, and the “death flower” reputation has a practical explanation. The bulbs of Lycoris radiata contain the toxic alkaloid lycorine, which made them useful for discouraging moles and mice along paddy embankments and animals digging around graves. Those cemetery plantings helped cement the connection with death, something also reflected in Buddhist lore. Among hundreds of folk names are shibitobana, meaning “corpse flower,” jigokubana, or “hell flower,” and yureibana, or “ghost flower.” That’s quite a collection of names for something I find so enchanting, yet the poisonous bulbs explain why beauty and mortality became inseparable.
Perhaps my favorite tale linked with the Higanbana comes from the all-important Lotus Sutra. In this Buddhist text, the flowers are described as flora that grow in the bowels of hell. Here, they serve as helpful guides along the route to reincarnation for the deceased. In other Buddhist legends, the Higanbana is said to appear along the path when you are meeting someone for the final time. For this reason, the flower is often used in myths and stories to symbolize someone traveling beyond the veil. Manjushage entered Japanese through the Lotus Sutra as well, its Sanskrit root naming a flower of heaven.
The other name, Higanbana, refers to its appearance around the autumn equinox, during the Buddhist observance of higan, a week whose name literally means “the other shore.” There’s another unusual separation built into the plant’s life cycle: its flowers bloom without leaves, which emerge only after the flowers have died. A folk expression describes this as “never a leaf with the flower, never a flower with the leaf.” Once a sprout appears, it takes roughly a week to reach bloom, and an individual flower looks its best for only about five days. That leaves a fairly narrow margin between hearing that the flowers are coming and discovering that you’ve missed them.
In addition to its use in Buddhism, the Higanbana often pops up regularly in pop culture. As can be seen by looking at the comments on this Instagram post from some years ago about these autumn perennials, there’s a lot of references to the Higanbana in anime and manga (such as in the hit series Tokyo Ghoul). Seeing as they are inexorably tied with death, the flowers are often used to foreshadow when a character is about to meet their end. That death can also be metaphorical, marking the end of a character’s former self as they undergo a transformation.
For an entire landscape devoted to these flowers, there’s Kinchakuda Manjushage Park in Hidaka City, Saitama Prefecture. Here, a broad southward bend in the Komagawa wraps around a flat parcel of land, giving it the outline of a kinchaku, Japan’s old cloth pouch cinched shut for coins. That resemblance supplies the name, while the river explains the shape of this small peninsula. Within it, the Higanbana extend in such numbers that describing them as seemingly endless isn’t much of a stretch. The official count puts the colony at roughly 5 million stems, which goes a long way toward explaining why this is the place to see them.
I’m thoroughly obsessed with these flowers, and nothing else I’ve covered comes remotely close to Kinchakuda for sheer scale. In Miyoshi, Hiroshima Prefecture, the Higanbana appear in separate clusters distributed across the city rather than forming one continuous expanse. Around Anao-ji in Kameoka, Kyoto Prefecture, they’re scattered through rice fields, giving the flowers an entirely different setting. Both have their appeal, but neither offers Kinchakuda’s overwhelming concentration of red. I return every year, and while the park belongs to Hidaka rather than Chichibu, it’s an easy addition to plans for western Saitama that happen to coincide with this brief flowering window.
The Area’s History
Higanbana aside for a second, the “Koma” shared by Koma Station, the Komagawa river, and Koma Shrine preserves the Japanese reading of Goguryeo, the Korean kingdom whose refugees settled here in the early 700s. In 716, the imperial court relocated 1,799 people of Goguryeo origin from seven provinces, including Suruga, to this part of Musashi Province. The new administrative district was called Koma-gun, with the Goguryeo royal Koma-no-Jakko serving as its first governor. He is enshrined at Koma Shrine, which received its first imperial visit in 2017.
The settlers cultivated rice on the fertile ground enclosed by the river’s bend, long before flowers became the reason to come to Kinchakuda Manjushage Park. Those paddies were eventually abandoned, leaving the former farmland overgrown with brush. During clearing work in the late 1970s and 1980s, Hidaka Town uncovered a substantial colony of Higanbana beneath that growth. Apparently, cutting back the weeds was all it took to reveal the beginnings of a tourism attraction. Local maintenance and cultivation subsequently developed the colony into the enormous display found here today, giving former agricultural land a second life with a rather different harvest.
Where all the Higanbana came from is basically anyone’s guess. My explanation is that farmers planted the poisonous bulbs around their paddies to discourage rodents, leaving today’s flowers as descendants of those former agricultural guardians. That use of Higanbana is well established, though it doesn’t prove the origin of this particular colony. Another theory credits the Komagawa with carrying bulbs downstream during floods and depositing them within its bend. There’s no need for the two explanations to cancel each other out, either; deliberate planting and river-borne arrivals could both have contributed without settling the question of how the whole thing started.
How to Get There
All things considered, the trek to Kinchakuda Manjushage Park is not all too difficult, with Koma Station on the Seibu Ikebukuro Line roughly an hour from Ikebukuro Station. Some trains reach Koma Station directly, while other departures require a transfer at Hanno Station. Check Jorudan or another route planner if you’d rather choose a through service and dispense with that extra step. Seasonal arrangements also include additional local trains between Hanno Station and Koma Station, plus selected Laview limited express stops on weekends and holidays. Check the applicable timetable before counting on those extras, but the regular route is straightforward enough without them.
If you’re starting around Kawagoe or Omiya, Komagawa Station on the JR Kawagoe and Hachiko lines is another option, though walking from there takes about 40 minutes. Kokusai Kogyo buses from Komagawa Station, traveling via Koma Station toward Hanno Station, serve the Kinchakuda stop; buses from Hanno Station stop there too. From that stop, the flowers are about three minutes away on foot. Drivers pay 500 yen per car for seasonal parking, while travelers coming from Ikebukuro Station can keep things simpler with Seibu.
From Koma Station, allow about 15 minutes on foot to reach Kinchakuda Manjushage Park. One landmark is Aiai-bashi, the wooden truss bridge crossing the Komagawa river, which was completed in 1996 and stretches 91.2 meters. It ranks among Japan’s largest bridges of this construction, so there’s a little engineering interest alongside the flowers. Alishan Cafe is another useful landmark near the entrance, an organic cafe that’s closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. With the crossing, cafe, and park entrance stacked along the last stretch, you would almost have to try to miss the gate.
Note that the best time to visit Kinchakuda Manjushage Park is around the autumn equinox. That said, the caretakers have planned the Higanbana bloomings such that there will be some that crop up both before and after the main window. Even if you’re abysmal with seasonal timings like I am, you can still luck out and get to behold the majestic Higanbana if you visit sometime towards the end of September or early October. The upstream and downstream areas peak at slightly different times, extending the overall display beyond an individual flower’s roughly five good days. Still, check the city’s seasonal bloom forecast before committing to the trip.
The Kinchakuda Manjushage Festival spans roughly two weeks around the equinox, with dates adjusted for flowering: September 21 to October 6 in 2026. Bloom-season admission is 500 yen for adults, collected from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.; junior high students and younger enter free. The fee is hardly the obstacle; on my annual visits, there’s always a moderate crowd to share the flowers with. With approximately 600,000 visitors annually, that’s part of the deal. Outside flowering season, admission is free, with cherry blossoms and rapeseed in early to mid-April, hydrangeas from mid-June into early July, and cosmos from early October. Those are useful alternatives to know about, though the Higanbana are the reason for this particular trip.
Other Nearby Attractions
If you’re coming this far out into western Saitama, it would behoove you to get an early start and make a full day out of it. While you can spend a good several hours wandering about Kinchakuda Manjushage Park, there’s a lot more in this neck of the woods to explore too. The following attractions are some of my suggestions that work logistically well with seeing the Higanbana…
- Moominvalley Park
Koma Station is located just a stone’s throw away from Hanno where you’ll find the Moominvalley Park. If you happen to be a fan of writer and illustrator Tove Jansson’s charming Moomin characters, then you absolutely must check out this spot! - Koma Shrine & Shoden-in
These dual pair of attractions are intrinsically linked to the history of how the area of Koma became a place of refuge for Koreans fleeing Goguryeo. The article linked above does a great job of summarizing the entire history so in the interest of brevity, I’ll just elect to send you there. - Goguryeo Folk Museum
Found on the easternmost extremes of Kinchakuda Manjushage Park, this facility seems to detail the legacy of Goguryeo and the Koreans that fled from there. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to pop in and therefore can’t really comment. - Chichibu
If you’re willing to overnight, I highly recommend that you check out the nearby area of Chichibu. It’s one of my favorite parts of the Greater Tokyo region and I am always down to take people here. In my opinion, Chichibu is highly underrated and sorely deserving of more notoriety overseas.
Until next time travelers…
