Ginzan Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
銀山温泉 · Yamagata
Ginzan Onsen (銀山温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Yamagata. 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
The name means silver mountain, and that is literally what this was. The Nozawa silver mine was one of Japan's largest in the early 1600s, and the spring began as the bath the miners used. When the silver ran out and the miners left, the people who stayed made their living from the water.
In 1913 the Ginzan river flooded and destroyed nearly every inn. Then in 1926 a borehole struck hot water in quantity — and the inns rebuilt all at once, in the same year. Three and four storeys, wooden, with Western detailing, facing each other across the river. Ginzan looks like nowhere else in Japan because it was built in a single moment and never rebuilt again.
A townscape preservation ordinance has protected it since 1986.
Sources: 銀山温泉 公式サイト「歴史と温泉」
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 321 cm |
| Rank | 9 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 2 of 8 in Yamagata |
| Against the median of 77 | +203 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 310 cm 140–450 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 銀山共同組合3号泉 | 1.4 km | 62.4℃ hot | 7.5 mildly alkaline | — | — |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 東沢バラ公園 | Nature | 14.3 km |
| Hiroshige Museum of Art広重美術館 (山形県) | Museum | 15 km |
| 赤倉温泉 (山形県) | Hot spring town | 15.3 km |
| Mount Yakurai薬萊山 | Mountain | 16.3 km |
| Funagata Renpō Prefectural Natural Park県立自然公園船形連峰 | Nature | 17.1 km |
| Higashine-no-Okeyaki東根の大ケヤキ | Nature | 17.9 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Hanagasa Kogen Ski Area | 5 km | 220 of 397 |
| Kurobushi Kogen Snow Park Jangle Jungle | 16 km | 98 of 397 |
| Yakurai Garden Ski Area | 17 km | 429 of 397 |
| Uenono Ski Area | 25 km | 404 of 397 |
| Spring Valley Izumi Kogen | 25 km | 333 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.