Hot Springs in the Snow
Japan's nationally designated spa towns, ranked by snowfall
Japan's Ministry of the Environment designates 79 towns as National Health Resort Hot Springs. We placed each one on the map and measured its snowfall exactly the way we measure our 3,108 ski areas. Nobody else has put both on the same ruler.
| Rank | Hot spring town | Prefecture | Snowfall | Nearest ski area | Distance |
|---|
Distances are straight-line, not by road. 0 of the 0 ranked towns have a ski area within 30 km. There is nothing special about 30 km — we picked it as roughly "you could go and come back".
How this was measured
The list is the Ministry of the Environment's register of National Health Resort Hot Springs (79 as of October 2022), designated under the Hot Springs Act. The point is that we did not choose which hot springs appear — the selection criteria belong to the ministry, not to us.
Snowfall is the sum of daily snowfall from December to March, averaged across the three most recent completed seasons (2023/24, 2024/25, 2025/26), from Open-Meteo historical data on the ERA5 reanalysis. This is the identical definition used for the ski area rankings on this site — they would not be comparable otherwise.
Coordinates come from OpenStreetMap. OSM has no concept of a "hot spring town", so the name is attached to a road in one place, a hotel in another and a railway station in a third. Where the name could not be resolved we checked each one by hand and recorded which OSM feature was used in data/onsen-coords.json.
The nearest ski area is the straight-line distance to the closest of the 395 Japanese ski areas on this site.
What these numbers cannot tell you
Snowfall here is model output, not an observation. ERA5 runs on a 10–30 km grid, so mountain hot springs read low. Ranks travel; centimetres do not.
These centimetres carry no information about how heavy the snow is. The source converts precipitation to snow at a flat 7:1 — we checked, and a −11°C day and a −0.5°C day both come back at exactly 7.0. So "snowfall" here is a restatement of water. Real snow is lighter and bulkier the colder it falls, which means cold towns read low here and mild ones read high.
A coordinate is a single point. A hot spring "kyo" is usually a whole valley, and some — Hijiori is one — include inns some distance apart. At this grid size that rarely changes the number, but it can where the valley climbs steeply.
Three winters only. Big years and small years differ enough that neighbouring ranks swap around depending on the period.
This says nothing about whether you can bathe in the snow. It measures what falls from the sky — not whether there is an outdoor bath, whether the inn opens in winter, or whether the road is passable. Check with the town before you travel.