We Rank Daisen 284th in Japan for Snow. A Weather Station 500 m Away Measured 677 cm.

Sort our snowfall ranking and western Japan disappears. Forty ski areas across Chugoku, Kansai and Shikoku, with a median of 139 cm a season against a national median of 268 cm. Daisen — the mountain that dominates every photograph of skiing in western Japan — comes in 284th of 395, at 192 cm.

We think our own numbers are wrong there, and we can show you why.

There is a weather station 500 m from the lifts

The Japan Meteorological Agency operates an observation point at Daisen, 875 m above sea level, half a kilometre from Daisen White Resort. It records what actually fell.

	Snowfall, three-winter average
What the JMA station measured	677 cm
What our model reports for the ski area	192 cm
	28%

The ski area runs from 608 m to 1,046 m. The station sits at 875 m — inside that range, 48 m from its midpoint. This is not a case of comparing a valley floor with a summit.

It is the whole region, not one station

We checked 16 JMA stations across western Japan, each within 15 km of a ski area we cover.

Station		Measured	Model	Model returns
Takano	Shimane, 570 m	388 cm	103 cm	27%
Daisen	Tottori, 875 m	677 cm	191 cm	28%
Yahata	Hiroshima, 774 m	442 cm	139 cm	31%
Oasa	Hiroshima, 399 m	238 cm	79 cm	33%
Mizuho	Hiroshima, 327 m	232 cm	78 cm	34%
Kaminagata	Okayama, 430 m	360 cm	158 cm	44%
Uwano Kogen	Hyogo, 540 m	528 cm	241 cm	46%
Yanagase	Shiga, 220 m	326 cm	162 cm	50%

The median across all 16 is 44%. Nationally it is 56%. Western Japan is the worst-measured skiing region in the country, in a model that already understates Japanese mountain snowfall everywhere.

Why the model fails hardest here

A global reanalysis divides the planet into cells roughly 30 km across and assigns each one a single elevation — the average of everything inside it.

That works where the terrain is uniform. It fails where a mountain stands alone.

Daisen rises to 1,729 m out of low country on the Sea of Japan coast. The grid cell containing it also contains farmland and coastline, so the model’s version of Daisen is a low hill. Snow in Japan is made by cold air crossing the sea and being forced upward by terrain — flatten the terrain and you remove the mechanism.

The same shape repeats across the region: Hyonosen, the Geihoku hills, the peaks above Lake Biwa. Isolated high ground surrounded by low ground, which is precisely what a 30 km average erases.

What this means if you are looking at western Japan

Do not read our western Japan snowfall figures as depths. Multiply by something between two and three and you will be closer. Daisen at 192 cm in our table is a mountain that recorded 677 cm at a station on its own flank.

Do read the ordering within the region. Every western ski area is measured the same wrong way, so Hachikita being ahead of Mikata is still information, even though both numbers are too low.

And be careful comparing west against north. This is the one comparison the data cannot support. Our Niigata figures run at roughly 74% of measured and our Chugoku figures at 44%, so the gap between them in our ranking is inflated by the measurement, not only by the weather. Western Japan gets less snow than Niigata — that part is real — but not by as much as our own ranking implies.

Why we publish the number anyway

We could apply a regional correction and make the table look right. We have chosen not to, for a reason worth stating.

The ranking covers 3,108 ski areas across 48 countries, and Japan is the only one where we can check against a dense network of ground stations. Correct Japan and leave everywhere else alone, and Japan rises against the rest of the world for reasons that have nothing to do with snow. A correction we can only apply to one country is not a correction; it is a thumb on the scale.

So the figures stay uncorrected, and we write pages like this one instead.

How this was measured

Station data is the Japan Meteorological Agency’s total snowfall for December to March, averaged across the winters of 2023/24, 2024/25 and 2025/26. Stations were selected mechanically: within 15 km of a ski area we cover, capped at four per prefecture so no single snowy prefecture dominates. That produces 63 nationally, of which 16 are in the western prefectures listed here.

The model figure is the ERA5 reanalysis for the same location and period, computed exactly as it is for every ski area on this site.

Two limits worth stating. Stations sit lower than ski areas as a rule — they are built where people live — so the true gap on the slopes is likely wider than these ratios, not narrower. Daisen is the exception that makes this article possible: 875 m, inside the ski area’s own elevation range. And sixteen stations is a small sample for a region this large; the individual ratios move on one unusual winter, while the median across all of them does not.