Futamata, Iwase-Yumoto and Ten-ei Onsen — Snowfall and Nearby Ski Areas
二岐・岩瀬湯本・天栄温泉 · Fukushima
Futamata, Iwase-Yumoto and Ten-ei Onsen (二岐・岩瀬湯本・天栄温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Fukushima. 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
Three spa villages in Tennoe village, Fukushima. The village itself is named for Mt. Ten'ei, once worked as a gold mine.
Futamata lies at about 800 m below Mt. Futamata (1,544 m), in old-growth beech forest on the boundary between the Aizu and Nakadori regions. It is said to date from 969. The name has been written three different ways over the centuries, settling on its present characters only recently. Nihon Meizan Zue, the first book of Japanese mountains, published in the Edo period, lists Mt. Futamata among ninety famous peaks. Fleeing Heike warriors are said to have hidden here — which may explain why the hamlet long forbade festival banners, signal fires, and the keeping of roosters. Nothing that would show smoke, colour, or sound.
Iwase-Yumoto sits between two rivers. Early in the 9th century, the story goes, Emperor Saga fell ill and sent three court brothers to find a spring that would cure him; this is what they found. The Yusen Hachiman shrine in the hamlet still bears the chrysanthemum crest that records the tale. Thatched inns stand quietly along the road, and fireflies come out in summer — the place is also called the village of fireflies.
Ten'ei Onsen dates only from the Meiji era and has a single establishment, on the highway.
Visitor numbers at all three collapsed after the 2011 earthquake and the nuclear accident that followed, and a decade on they have not recovered.
Sources: 環境省 二岐・岩瀬湯本・天栄温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 88 cm |
| Against the median of 77 | -30 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 52 cm 61–113 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.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Sukagawa Peony Garden須賀川牡丹園 | Nature | 12.8 km |
| Komine Castle白河小峰城 | Historic site | 14 km |
| Kōriyama Culture Park郡山カルチャーパーク | Leisure | 14.3 km |
| Hatori Dam羽鳥ダム | Nature | 15.2 km |
| Nanko Park南湖公園 | Park | 16.4 km |
| ブリティッシュヒルズ | Landmark | 16.5 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
Up to five within 40 km, straight-line, nearest first. Quality rank is out of the 397 Japanese ski areas.
| Ski area | Distance | Quality rank |
|---|---|---|
| Grandee Hatoriko Ski Resort | 20 km | 135 of 397 |
| Ski Resort Tenei | 24 km | 244 of 397 |
| Listel Ski Fantasia | 33 km | 204 of 397 |
| Inawashiro Snow Paradise | 39 km | 158 of 397 |
| Family Snow Park Bandai X2 | 39 km | 196 of 397 |
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.