Japan's Largest Ski Area Has 65 km of Runs. France Has One With 971.
Measured across 1,800 ski areas: the median Japanese one has 12 km of piste against France's 26. What Japan has instead is 26 cm of seasonal snow for every kilometre of run — three times France and four times the United States.
The pictures do Japan no favours. Bottomless snow, empty trees, a skier disappearing to the chest — and nothing in the frame to tell you how big the mountain is.
It is smaller than you think. We hold the mapped run network of 2,888 ski areas, and the size gap between Japan and the Alps is not close.
The median Japanese ski area is half the size of the median French one
| Ski areas | Median piste length | Median seasonal snowfall | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sweden | 34 | 27 km | 130 cm |
| France | 188 | 26 km | 264 cm |
| Austria | 188 | 23 km | 202 cm |
| Italy | 151 | 23 km | 209 cm |
| Switzerland | 168 | 19 km | 262 cm |
| United States | 364 | 19 km | 135 cm |
| Canada | 118 | 15 km | 150 cm |
| Norway | 52 | 13 km | 200 cm |
| Japan | 184 | 12 km | 312 cm |
Japan is last on size and first on snow.
At the top end the gap becomes absurd. Japan’s largest mapped network is Niseko Grand Hirafu at 65 km. The largest in the world is Les 3 Vallées in France at 971 km — fifteen times larger. Paradiski, also French, has 553 km. Nothing in Japan is within an order of magnitude.
Only 27 of Japan’s 184 ski areas — 15% — are bigger than the median French one.
What Japan has instead: snow per kilometre of run
Divide a season’s snowfall by the length of the run network and you get a number nobody publishes: how much snow falls onto each kilometre of piste.
| Snow per km of piste | |
|---|---|
| Japan | 26 cm |
| Norway | 17 cm |
| Switzerland | 13 cm |
| Canada | 11 cm |
| France | 9 cm |
| Austria | 9 cm |
| Italy | 8 cm |
| United States | 7 cm |
| Sweden | 6 cm |
Japan gets three times as much snow per kilometre of run as France, and nearly four times the United States.
That is what the photographs are actually showing. Not a vast mountain — a small one, buried.
Why this matters more than the size number
A big resort and a snowy resort are answers to different questions, and it is worth knowing which one you are asking.
If your week is about covering ground, Japan will disappoint you. Twelve kilometres of marked piste is a morning. There is no equivalent of linking six valleys before lunch, and the lift networks are simple by design — the median Japanese ski area runs 7 lifts against France’s 12.
If your week is about the snow itself, size stops being the point. Fresh snow is a resource divided among the people on the hill, and Japan’s ratio of snowfall to terrain is the best in this table by a wide margin. Small mountains that get buried repeatedly behave very differently from large mountains that get buried occasionally.
This also explains something visitors notice and cannot place: in Japan you tend to ski the same runs many times in a week, and it does not feel repetitive. The run is not the same run. It snowed again.
The fourteen that are both
If you want size and snow, the overlap is narrow. These are the Japanese ski areas with more piste than the median French resort and more than 400 cm of snow a season:
Madarao Kogen · Tangram Ski Circus · Hakuba Norikura · Tsugaike Kogen · Appi Kogen · GALA Yuzawa · Hakuba Happo-One · Kagura · Seki Onsen · Nozawa Onsen · Maiko Snow Resort · Yuzawa Kogen · Tashiro · Hakuba Iwatake
Fourteen out of 184. If somebody has told you that Japan is all deep snow and endless terrain, this is the list they were describing — and it is 8% of the country’s ski areas.
How this was measured
Run lengths are the total of every marked downhill run drawn on OpenStreetMap within a radius of each ski area’s centre that scales with its mapped size. These are not the resorts’ own published kilometres and will not match them. Resorts measure differently from one another and generally more generously; what makes the comparison work here is that all 2,888 were measured the same way.
Snowfall is the three-winter mean from the ERA5 reanalysis, again computed identically for every ski area. The model understates mountain snowfall everywhere, so the absolute centimetres run low — but the ratio between countries is unaffected, because the same understatement applies to all of them.
One real limit on the ratio. Snow per kilometre of piste is the supply side only; how quickly fresh snow gets tracked out also depends on how many people are on the hill, and we do not hold visitor numbers. The figure tells you how much snow there is per unit of terrain, not how long it survives.
Ski areas with fewer than ten marked runs are excluded, along with countries with fewer than fifteen qualifying ski areas. Linked networks that sell one lift pass are counted as one ski area where OpenStreetMap draws them that way, which is why Les 3 Vallées appears as a single entry.
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