Gozu Onsen-kyo — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
五頭温泉郷 · Niigata
Gozu Onsen-kyo (五頭温泉郷) is a nationally designated onsen town in Niigata. 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 springs on the western foot of Mount Gozu in Niigata — Deyu, Imaita and Murasugi — spaced about a kilometre apart along the road. Gozu means five heads, for the five peaks; it rises to nearly 1,000 m and is said to have been opened by Kobo Daishi, so it has been a mountain of religious practice for a long time. The three baths began as places for those pilgrims to soak.
What is unusual is that they opened in completely different centuries.
Deyu claims twelve hundred years. Kobo Daishi is said to have struck the ground with his staff and brought the water up. It is regarded as the oldest hot spring in Niigata.
Murasugi is said to have appeared in 1335, in the grounds of a temple hall. Its fortunes turned in 1914, when analysis showed the water carried a high concentration of radium, and it became known for that.
Imaita is the youngest: a spring that had been surfacing on its own at the foot of the mountain, formalised into a bath in 1913.
Kobo Daishi's era, the fourteenth century, and the year before the First World War — three springs a kilometre apart, separated by eleven hundred years.
Sources: 環境省 五頭温泉郷 国民保養温泉地計画書 · 五頭温泉郷旅館協同組合 · にいがた観光ナビ（新潟県公式）
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 253 cm |
| Rank | 14 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 3 of 4 in Niigata |
| Against the median of 77 | +135 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 309 cm 104–413 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
4 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 出湯旧温泉 | 0.8 km | 41℃ warm | 8.4 mildly alkaline | simple | — |
| 今板鉱泉湯本 | 1.3 km | 20℃ cold | — | — | — |
| 真光寺真光寺山温泉 | 1.6 km | 36.5℃ warm | 8.2 mildly alkaline | — | — |
| 村杉薬師の湯 | 1.9 km | 26℃ lukewarm | — | radioactive (radon) | — |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Lake Hyōko瓢湖 | Nature | 6.7 km |
| Tsukioka Onsen月岡温泉 | Hot spring town | 7.6 km |
| Northern Culture Museum北方文化博物館 | Museum | 13.7 km |
| Shibata Castle新発田城 | Historic site | 16 km |
| Banetsu MonogatariSLばんえつ物語 | Landmark | 16.3 km |
| Niitsu Oil Field新津油田 | Historic site | 18.3 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Mikawa Onsen | 13 km | 317 of 397 |
| Ninox Snow Park | 20 km | 160 of 397 |
| Fuyudorigoe Ski Garden | 25 km | 395 of 397 |
| Tainai Ski and Snowboard area | 27 km | 269 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.