Hayato and Shinkawa-keikoku Onsen-kyo — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
隼人・新川渓谷温泉郷 · Kagoshima
Hayato and Shinkawa-keikoku Onsen-kyo (隼人・新川渓谷温泉郷) is a nationally designated onsen town in Kagoshima. 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
Ten minutes by car from Kagoshima airport, along the Amori river. The springs fall into two groups: Hinatayama, and Myoken and Anraku.
Hinatayama is said to be the oldest spring in Kagoshima, and Saigo Takamori came here often. The river beside it is one of the best in Japan for running sweetfish, and the bathhouses line both banks. What sets the place apart is the number of private family baths — unusual anywhere in the country.
Myoken and Anraku lie upstream in a gorge below the Kirishima range: Myoken with its traditional inns, Anraku with old cure-taking lodgings where guests still cook for themselves, and a third spring called Shiobitashi.
That third one was the lodging of Japan's first honeymoon. In 1866 Sakamoto Ryoma and his wife Oryo stayed there eighteen nights, with stops at Hinatayama before and after.
The Kagoshima shrine holds a festival that is an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property: horses decked with bells dance to drums and shamisen at the head of a procession of dancers. It is said to date from the warring-states period, is held on the Sunday following a date in the old lunar calendar, and draws a hundred thousand people.
Nearby are a wooden railway station, unchanged since it opened and on the national register, and a waterfall Ryoma is recorded as having admired. In spring a thousand cherry trees line two kilometres of irrigation channel; in early summer, fireflies.
Sources: 環境省 隼人・新川渓谷温泉郷 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 1 cm |
| Rank | 77 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 2 of 2 in Kagoshima |
| Against the median of 77 | -117 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 3 cm 0–3 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
5 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 日当山大観2号 | 0.4 km | 49.5℃ hot | 7.6 mildly alkaline | simple | — |
| 姫城ホテル天降川 | 0.5 km | 56℃ hot | 7.4 neutral | — | — |
| 国分塩川クリニック | 0.9 km | 54.8℃ hot | 7.3 neutral | simple | — |
| 新川南部ホテル渓谷 | 2.6 km | 46.6℃ hot | 7 neutral | carbon dioxide | — |
| 隼人中部だるま温泉 | 2.8 km | 41.1℃ warm | 7.8 mildly alkaline | — | — |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Kagoshima Jingū鹿児島神宮 | Shrine | 2.2 km |
| Kirishima City Saigo Park西郷公園 | Park | 5 km |
| Inukai Falls犬飼滝 | Nature | 6.2 km |
| Uenohara上野原遺跡 | Historic site | 7.5 km |
| Kirishima Jingū霧島神宮 | Shrine | 15.1 km |
| Takachiho-gawara高千穂河原 | Nature | 18.7 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
No ski area on this site lies within 40 km.
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.