Hachimantai Onsen-kyo — Snowfall and Nearby Ski Areas
八幡平温泉郷 · Iwate
Hachimantai Onsen-kyo (八幡平温泉郷) is a nationally designated onsen town in Iwate. 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
A group of springs scattered across the border country of Akita and Iwate, centred on Kazuno. The ground here was made by volcanoes — Iwate-san, Akita-Komagatake, Mokkodake, Akita-Yakeyama — and at Goshogake and Tamagawa the steam, boiling water and bubbling mud are still going. You walk past vents in the ground.
This is not a resort. It is a toji district: places where people come to stay and soak for weeks. Fukenoyu, Goshogake, Toshichi, Tamagawa — all of them long-stay houses, visited since the Edo period, and reached by travellers from all over the country once the railways arrived.
The water is not one water. There is a mild simple spring, a strongly bactericidal acidic spring, and a sulphur spring with the smell that people associate with onsen.
Tamagawa is the remarkable one. A single source yields 9,000 litres a minute, and it is the most strongly acidic water in Japan, containing radium. The mineral that forms here, hokutolite, is designated a Special Natural Monument by the state, and this is one of its few sources.
Sources: 環境省 八幡平温泉郷 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 235 cm |
| Rank | 18 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 1 of 2 in Iwate |
| Against the median of 77 | +117 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 147 cm 167–314 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.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Matsukawa Geothermal Power Plant松川地熱発電所 | Landmark | 5.4 km |
| Mount Iwate岩手山 | Mountain | 5.5 km |
| Yakehashiri lava flow焼走り熔岩流 | Mountain | 6.8 km |
| 鏡沼 | Nature | 12 km |
| Hachimantai八幡平 | Mountain | 12.2 km |
| Koiwai Farm小岩井農場 | Nature | 16.8 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Hachimantai Resort Panorama Ski Are | 2 km | 66 of 397 |
| Hachimantai Resort Shimokura Ski area | 3 km | 47 of 397 |
| Iwate Kogen Snow Park | 8 km | 52 of 397 |
| Amihari Onsen Ski Resort | 8 km | 31 of 397 |
| Appi Kogen | 9 km | 33 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.