Goten Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
碁点温泉 · Yamagata
Goten Onsen (碁点温泉) 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
On the bank of the Mogami river in Murayama, Yamagata. The name comes from the river, not the spring.
Three stretches of the Mogami were notorious among boatmen, known together as the three hard places: Goten, Mikase and Hayabusa. Goten is named for the rocks on the riverbed, which sit in a grid like the points on a go board. Basho recorded the passage in The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
The baths stand beside it. In 1982 Japan's first purpose-built Kurhaus opened here — from the German Kur, a course of treatment, and Haus — combining exercise, bathing and rest in one facility. In 1990 it became the first in the country certified as a health promotion facility by what was then the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
So this is not a place with a thousand-year legend. It is where the idea of using hot springs deliberately for health first took institutional form in Japan.
Sources: 環境省 碁点温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書 · 日本温泉協会 国民保養温泉地「碁点」
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 217 cm |
| Rank | 20 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 6 of 8 in Yamagata |
| Against the median of 77 | +99 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 192 cm 103–295 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 碁点稲下金谷1号 | 0 km | 40℃ warm | 7.6 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Hiroshige Museum of Art広重美術館 (山形県) | Museum | 3.2 km |
| Higashine-no-Okeyaki東根の大ケヤキ | Nature | 6.9 km |
| Jion-ji Temple (Sagae)慈恩寺 (寒河江市) | Temple | 11.7 km |
| Tendō Station天童駅 | Landmark | 14.1 km |
| 山形県野球場 | Leisure | 17.2 km |
| Ginzan Onsen銀山温泉 | Hot spring town | 18.7 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 | 15 km | 220 of 397 |
| Kurobushi Kogen Snow Park Jangle Jungle | 18 km | 98 of 397 |
| Mount Gassan Ski Resort | 30 km | 20 of 397 |
| Asahi Shizenkan Snow Park | 32 km | 240 of 397 |
| St. Mary | 33 km | 257 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.