Asia's First Members-Only Ski Resort Costs ¥25 Million a Year. We Measured the Mountain It Sits On.

Togari Onsen, a 65-year-old ski area in Iiyama, Nagano, has done something no other resort in Asia has: it has walled off part of the mountain and sold it by subscription.

THE CLUB TOGARI opened its first membership tranche in January 2026 — 40 places at ¥20.4 million a year before tax — and sold out in 14 days. A second tranche of 60 places goes on sale on 16 December 2026 at ¥25 million including tax (Travelspot, 18 September 2026). Members get a private slope called White Dragon Field, a clubhouse, a heated garage, a car service from Iiyama Station, Vector Glide rental gear, and the right to buy a slope-side house.

For context, a normal adult day ticket in this valley is around ¥7,800.

So: what is the mountain actually like? We measure every ski area in Japan on one method, so this is checkable.

The snow is Nozawa’s snow — literally

	Togari Onsen	Nozawa Onsen
Season snowfall	450 cm	450 cm
World rank (of 3,065)	107	107
Rank in Japan (of 393)	50	49
Worst of the last 12 winters	301 cm	301 cm
Best of the last 12 winters	635 cm	635 cm

Those columns are identical for an honest reason: the two resorts are 6.3 km apart and fall inside the same ERA5 grid cell, which is 10–30 km across. Our method cannot separate them, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What it does tell you is that this is genuine Iiyama snow country — top 50 in Japan, top 110 in the world, and a floor of 301 cm even in the worst of the last 12 winters. The club is not built on a marginal hill.

The mountain is a different story

	Togari Onsen	Nozawa Onsen	Madarao
Runs	16	55	35
Pisted length	12.3 km	41.9 km	15.4 km
Lifts	7	17	9
Base elevation	387 m	565 m	918 m
Top elevation	845 m	1,644 m	1,339 m
Vertical	458 m	1,079 m	421 m
Snow quality rank in Japan	212	133	63

Togari has under a third of Nozawa’s terrain and 458 m of vertical against Nozawa’s 1,079 m. Its base sits at 387 m — low for snow country — which is why it ranks 212th in Japan on our snow-quality measure while Nozawa ranks 133rd and Madarao, whose base is 918 m, ranks 63rd. Mean temperature on snow days is −1.9°C at Togari against −4.2°C at Madarao.

The mountain is small, low and warm at the bottom, in a place that gets a lot of snow.

Which means the product is not the mountain

Nozawa is one of the busiest inbound resorts in Japan. Togari is 6 km away, shares its weather, and has almost nobody on it. That is the asset. A membership at ¥25 million a year buys separation from the crowd that its neighbour attracts — an empty slope in a valley where the snow shows up every winter.

Whether that is worth 3,200 day tickets is a question for the 60 people considering the second tranche. But it is worth being precise about what is being sold: the scarcity is the emptiness, not the snow, and certainly not the terrain.

It also tells you something about where Japanese skiing is going. Madarao and Myoko Suginohara were bought by a Singapore fund. Niseko’s land is priced in foreign currency. Furano’s land rose 27% in a year. Togari’s answer to the same pressure is to sell the quiet itself.

If you are not a member

Togari Onsen still runs as a normal ski area, and the renewal that came with its 65th anniversary was aimed at everyone: Japan’s longest mogul course at over 300 m, a new freestyle park, a renovated onsen, and a ski academy overseen by Olympic gold medallist Tae Satoya (company release, 27 November 2025).

And the snow that the club is selling falls on the public side of the same hill — and on Nozawa, 6 km away, where a day ticket was ¥7,800 last season.

How this was measured

Snowfall is the December–March total at each ski area’s coordinates, from ERA5 reanalysis via the Open-Meteo Historical Weather API, averaged over the 12 winters from 2014/15 to 2025/26. Runs, lifts and elevations come from OpenSkiMap (OpenStreetMap data, ODbL). Snow quality is our own measure, built from observed temperature and rain-day share at the nearest weather station, ranked across 393 Japanese ski areas. Membership terms and resort renewals are as reported by the sources linked above.