Amakusa Shimoda Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
天草下田温泉 · Kumamoto
Amakusa Shimoda Onsen (天草下田温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Kumamoto. We measured how much snow its winters bring, using the same method as for the 3,069 ski areas on this site.
How this place came to be
On the west coast of Shimoshima in the Amakusa islands, Kumamoto, where a river meets the sea. Steep hills come down to both banks, leaving almost no farmland; the town lives on the spring and on fishing.
About 700 years ago, the story goes, a white egret was seen treating an injury in the river, and that is how the water was found. The place is also called the egret spring, and it is the oldest in Amakusa.
Until a public bathhouse was built in 1913, this is how people bathed here: they made a pool of about three square metres in the river where the water rose by itself, screened it with straw matting, and soaked by lamplight. The bathhouse was rebuilt in 1952 and 1969, and replaced in 1994.
In 1982 the inns formed a cooperative and consolidated their separate sources into four. The flow is generous enough that the baths run free from the source even though the water is pumped.
Offshore, this stretch of coast was made Japan's first marine park in 1970. There are sea stacks designated a national place of scenic beauty, and the Sakitsu village of hidden Christians — a World Heritage site since 2018 — is close by. The local porcelain stone is used for Arita ware.
Sources: 環境省 天草下田温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 3 cm |
| Rank | 71 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 2 of 3 in Kumamoto |
| Against the median of 77 | -115 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 11 cm 0–11 cm, leanest to deepest of twelve |
Find a place to stay · Open in maps
"Find a place to stay" searches Rakuten Travel and contains advertising; we may earn a commission on bookings made through it. The snowfall figures and ranking are calculated independently of that.
We do not link to an official site. We have not verified URLs for all 79 towns, and guessing would send you somewhere wrong. They will be added once checked.
More places to look
Just the bath
Day passes for hot springs are sold through Asoview. Japanese only.
The list covers the whole prefecture — it cannot be narrowed to this town.
Hot springs nearby, as analysed
1 hot spring sources with published analyses lie within 3 km of the centre of this onsen town, nearest first.
| Source | Distance | Temperature | pH | Type | Analysed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 下田 | 0.3 km | 55.4℃ hot | 7.4 neutral | — | — |
These are analyses of hot spring sources, not a list of baths you can visit. They date from 1910 to 2005, many from decades ago, so today’s temperature and chemistry may differ. Names are as recorded in Japanese. Temperature and pH bands follow Japan’s standard for analysing hot springs.
Source: processed from the hot spring analysis data in the Geothermal Information Database (GRES-DB), Geological Survey of Japan, AIST
Worth seeing nearby
Places within 20 km of this onsen town, chosen from those most read about on Wikipedia, favouring places with an English Wikipedia article, and listed nearest first.
| Place | Type | Distance |
|---|---|---|
| Shimoda Onsen下田温泉 (熊本県) | Hot spring town | 0.3 km |
| Myoken Bay妙見浦 | Nature | 3.6 km |
| Tomioka Castle富岡城 | Historic site | 11.8 km |
| Sakitsu Village﨑津集落 | Old streets | 12.4 km |
| Amakusa Christian Museum天草切支丹館 | Museum | 16.4 km |
| Hondo Suwa Shrine本渡諏訪神社 | Shrine | 16.6 km |
Based on the Japanese Wikipedia lists of sights in each prefecture, as compiled in travel-log-data (CC BY-SA 4.0). English names from Wikidata (CC0). The content of this section is available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Ski areas nearby
No ski area on this site lies within 40 km.
These snowfall figures are estimates
The snowfall shown here is an estimate produced by a weather model, not a record of what actually fell.
We compared it against 63 Japan Meteorological Agency weather stations to see how far off it is. On average it comes to about six tenths of the real figure — it runs low. And it runs low by different amounts in different places: some read barely a third of what was measured, others match almost exactly. Mountains tend to read lowest.
We tried scaling everything up by a fixed amount to correct for it. It barely helped, because the error differs from place to place.
So treat these numbers as a guide to roughly where somewhere sits, not a precise figure. There is no meaning in the gap between first and second, or between 30th and 35th. Large differences between regions are real and can be read as they are.
We considered correcting the figures against the observations. But this ranking covers 3,069 ski areas across ten countries, and only Japan can be checked against weather stations. Correcting Japan alone would lift Japanese resorts above the Alps and North America with nothing behind it. Every place here is measured the same way instead.
Where a nearby weather station can be used, we print what it actually recorded on that ski area's own page.