Hachimantai Onsen-kyo

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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

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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