Goten Onsen

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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」

Up to five within 40 km, straight-line, nearest first. Quality rank is out of the 395 Japanese ski areas.

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 are working on replacing these estimates with observed values.

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