Gozu Onsen-kyo

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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）

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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