Who Is Buying Japan's Ski Resorts — and What the Snow Data Says They Actually Bought

Between 2021 and 2026, most of the significant money that changed hands in Japanese skiing came from outside Japan. Here is who bought what, and, because we measure snowfall the same way at all 3,065 ski areas on earth — what the mountains they bought are actually like.

The buyers

Buyer	Origin	What	When	Reported figure
Fosun Group (via Shanghai Yuyuan)	🇨🇳 China	Hoshino Resorts Tomamu, in full — ski area, 757 hotel rooms, golf	Dec 2015	¥18.3 bn (Hoshino Resorts stayed on as operator)
Fosun Group (via Shanghai Yuyuan)	🇨🇳 China	Kiroro ski area, two hotels, onsen, golf course	Announced Feb 2023	¥11.0 bn for the holding company, ¥460 m for the operator, plus ¥4.6 bn of investment
Patience Capital Group	🇸🇬 Singapore	Madarao (Nov 2022), Myoko Suginohara (Nov 2023, from Seibu)	2022–23	Undisclosed; states a ¥200 bn, ten-year plan for Myoko
Zekkei Corporation	🇭🇰 Hong Kong	Phoenix Furano condo-hotel	Opened Dec 2020	Sold out in three months; some units above ¥200 m
LGB Group	🇲🇾 Malaysia	NOZO HOTEL, Furano	Opened Dec 2023	Undisclosed
BVR Group Asia	🇮🇩 Indonesia	Inspecting a large resort project at Minami-Furano	June 2026	Not disclosed
Property Perfect	🇹🇭 Thailand	Sold Kiroro (it had been the owner)	Nov 2021	¥15 bn
Marriott International	🇺🇸 USA	Withdrew from Kiroro’s hotels (2022); a Westin is planned in Furano after 2026	2022 →	—
Vail Resorts	🇺🇸 USA	Nothing. Epic Pass access at Hakuba Valley and Rusutsu	—	—

And this is only the recent wave. The purchases that shaped Niseko and Tohoku happened earlier:

Buyer	Origin	What	When
PCPD (PCCW group)	🇭🇰 Hong Kong	Nihon Harmony Resorts — the Hanazono side of Niseko, previously Australian-owned	2007
YTL Corporation	🇲🇾 Malaysia	Niseko Village	2010
Asia Gate Group, with LAOX’s chairman among the investors	🇨🇳/🇯🇵	Iwate Hotel & Resort — the company that runs APPI Kogen — bought from Kamori Kanko	June 2016
Lotte	🇰🇷 South Korea	Lotte Arai Resort, reopened after 11 years closed	2017

APPI is the one with visible friction. Since the change of ownership the resort has added a British boarding school on the mountain, and in 2026 Japanese owners of condominium units there went public over management fees raised by a reported factor of about 1.6 for the main building and roughly three times for villas, with more than a hundred owners preparing civil action (Gendai Business). Foreign capital arriving in a Japanese resort is not only a story about lifts and hotels; it is a story about who sets the rules for the people already there.

Kiroro’s chain is worth following, because it is the clearest case. Thailand’s Property Perfect sold it in November 2021 for ¥15 billion. By February 2023 the buyer was China’s Fosun, through Shanghai Yuyuan, paying ¥11 billion for the asset-holding company and committing ¥4.6 billion more. Fosun also owns Club Med, which is why Club Med Kiroro Peak opened in December 2022 and Kiroro Grand in 2023, in the same year Marriott walked away from the hotels. One group now owns the mountain, the hotels and the brand on the door.

The Fosun–Club Med connection, in detail

The Kiroro deal only makes sense once you see what else Fosun owns.

Fosun bought Club Méditerranée in 2015. A consortium it led paid about €939 million for the French company after what was, at the time, the longest takeover battle in the history of the Paris exchange — more than a year of bidding against the Italian investor Andrea Bonomi, settled at €24.60 a share. The buying vehicle, Gaillon Invest II, was 62.6% Fosun, with Portugal’s Fidelidade at 20%, the French private-equity firm Ardian at 5.8%, Club Med’s own management at 2.9% and the Chinese travel agency U-Tour at 8.7%. Club Med was later folded into Fosun Tourism Group, which listed in Hong Kong.

Club Med reached Hokkaido long before Fosun did. Club Med Sahoro opened in 1987 — the first Club Med in Japan — on a mountain owned by Kamori Kanko, the Japanese company that also owns Rusutsu. That arrangement is unchanged: the brand runs a village, the Japanese owner runs the mountain.

Then Fosun started buying the mountains.

• Tomamu, December 2015. Hoshino Resorts sold 100% of Hoshino Resorts Tomamu — ski area, 757 hotel rooms, golf course — to Shanghai Yuyuan Tourist Mart for ¥18.3 billion. Hoshino Resorts stayed on to operate it and the name did not change, so most visitors never registered the sale. Club Med Tomamu opened inside the resort in 2017.
• Kiroro, February 2023. The same Yuyuan vehicle bought the Kiroro holding company for ¥11.0 billion, the operating company for ¥460 million, and committed ¥4.6 billion more. Club Med Kiroro Peak had opened two months earlier; Kiroro Grand followed in December 2023.

So Fosun’s position in Hokkaido has three different shapes at once:

Resort	Who owns the mountain	Who operates the ski area	Club Med on site
Tomamu	Fosun (Shanghai Yuyuan), since 2015	Hoshino Resorts	Yes, since 2017
Kiroro	Fosun (Shanghai Yuyuan), since 2023	Fosun’s own operating company	Yes, two properties
Sahoro	Kamori Kanko (🇯🇵)	Kamori Kanko	Yes, since 1987

Note also which Fosun arm is which: Club Med sits under Fosun Tourism Group, listed in Hong Kong, while the Japanese mountains were bought by Shanghai Yuyuan Tourist Mart, Fosun’s listed consumer and retail company. Same ultimate parent, different balance sheets, which is why the hotel brand and the land can arrive years apart, as they did at both Tomamu and Kiroro.

Kiroro is where Fosun owns every layer: the ski area, the hotels, the onsen, the golf course, the operating company and the brand that fills the beds. That is unusual in Japan, where a resort is normally split between a railway company, a hotel company and a lift operator.

For a visitor the practical consequence is that Kiroro’s lodging is sold the way a Club Med is sold — all-inclusive, with lift pass, meals, drinks and lessons in one price — rather than the way Niseko’s is, where every element is bought separately from a different owner.

What the snow record says they bought

This is where our data does something the press releases cannot. Snow quality here is our own measure — how cold it is on snow days and how often it rains — ranked across 393 Japanese ski areas.

Ski area	Owner / partner	Season snowfall	World rank	Snow quality rank in Japan	Rain days in winter
Kiroro	Fosun (owns)	331 cm	350	24	6.0%
Myoko Suginohara	PCG (owns)	357 cm	267	48	11.5%
Madarao	PCG (owns)	432 cm	128	63	16.5%
Niseko Grand Hirafu	mixed foreign ownership	289 cm	521	38	6.9%
Hakuba Happo-One	Vail (Epic access)	414 cm	154	102	22.0%
Rusutsu	Vail (Epic access)	212 cm	1,036	125	8.0%
Furano	Seibu (hotel money arriving)	220 cm	949	115	8.2%
APPI Kogen	Asia Gate (owns since 2016)	377 cm	209	33	9.9%
Tomamu	Fosun (owns), Hoshino (operates)	228 cm	888	95	5.5%
Lotte Arai	Lotte (owns since 2017)	663 cm	24	155	29.1%

The pattern is clean, and it runs the opposite way to what the headlines suggest.

The companies buying land bought cold: Kiroro is 24th in Japan for snow quality, with a mean temperature of −8.0°C on snow days — colder than Niseko’s −6.2°C, and rain on only 6% of winter days. Suginohara is 48th, Madarao 63rd.

The company selling passes rather than buying land took the famous names: Hakuba Happo-One ranks 102nd for quality and sees rain on 22% of winter days; Rusutsu ranks 125th. Both have brand, lift capacity and airport access. Neither has the snow quality of what the buyers bought.

Lotte Arai is the exception that proves how the measure works. It is 24th in the world for snowfall — one of the snowiest lift-served mountains on earth, and 155th of 393 in Japan for quality, because it sits low and warm: −2.2°C on snow days, with rain on 29% of winter days. Volume and quality are different products, and a buyer picking one is making a different bet from a buyer picking the other.

That difference makes sense once you see the two business models. A buyer is exposed to the mountain for thirty years; a pass company is exposed to it for a season at a time. If you own the land, cold matters, because warm rain at the base is what destroys an asset’s value. If you sell days on someone else’s lift, what matters is the number of people who already want to go.

What Kiroro actually is

Since Kiroro is the most concentrated bet on this list, it is worth describing properly. The resort sits inside Akaigawa, a village of 1,159 people spread across 280 km² of caldera and forest, 14 km from Otaru, 21 km from the Yoichi whisky distilleries and 29 km from Sapporo.

By our measurements it is 37 runs over 25.2 km, 657 m of vertical, and 331 cm of snowfall a season — 124th in Japan for volume, but 24th for quality. Its worst winter in the last 12 was 209 cm and its best 442 cm. Four official live cameras are linked on our Sapporo area page.

It is not one of Japan’s snowiest resorts. It is one of its coldest and driest, half an hour from a city of two million, with an all-inclusive French resort brand on the slope and a whisky region down the valley. As a thing to own, that is a more coherent proposition than the snowfall ranking alone suggests.

The seller side, and the domestic answer

The other half of this story is Japanese companies selling. Seibu Holdings sold Myoko Suginohara to PCG in 2023 and told investors in 2024 that it was reviewing sales across its portfolio, Furano included. Kiroro passed from Thai to Chinese hands. Daisen White Resort changed operators in April 2026.

Not everyone is selling to the outside. Togari Onsen’s answer to the same pressure was to wall off part of its mountain and sell memberships at ¥20.4 million a year — 40 places, gone in 14 days. Different capital, same underlying bet: that scarcity in Japanese snow is worth more than it is currently priced at.

What it means if you are just going skiing

• Price separation is widening. A day at Niseko United costs ¥13,500 in peak weeks; Myoko Suginohara was ¥8,000 last season and Akakura Kanko is ¥7,000. The resorts with foreign capital and international hotels are pricing towards their guests, not towards the local market.
• The valleys being bought are snowier than the ones being marketed. Madarao gets 50% more snow than Niseko Grand Hirafu, and the Myoko valley holds Seki Onsen, the 19th-snowiest ski area on earth.
• Expect construction. PCG’s plan runs about ten years; Fosun committed ¥4.6 billion in upgrades at Kiroro; a Westin is due in Furano. Off-season visits in the next few winters will meet cranes.

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, identically for all 3,065 ski areas on this site. Snow quality is our own measure, built from observed temperature and rain-day share at the nearest weather station and ranked across 393 Japanese ski areas. Ownership, prices and dates are as reported by the sources linked in the table and in our related articles; undisclosed figures are marked as such.