Minakami — Snowfall and Nearby Ski Areas

The northern edge of Gunma, on the Niigata border. The Mikuni range, including Mt. Tanigawa, runs across it, and the Tone river gathers that water and cuts through the town. The first drop of the water that thirty million people in the Tokyo region drink is made here.

This is one of the snowiest places on earth. The mountains carry landforms that only heavy snow produces — nivation hollows, periglacial features — and although nothing here reaches 2,000 m, traces of glaciers have been identified. It also sits on the boundary between the Sea-of-Japan and Pacific climates. In 2017 it was registered as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

The town has so many springs that they are collectively called the eighteen baths of Minakami; six of them are National Health Resort Hot Springs. They were designated in three rounds — Kamimoku and Namesawa in 1979, Yujuku, Kawafuru and Hoshi in 1999, and in 2018 all of them were combined into one designation with Sarugakyo added. Yujuku carries a founding legend from the middle of the 9th century.

The water rises through green tuff, seabed rock lifted up and left behind, which is why so much of it is a clear, soft sulphate spring. There are 24 sources; ten of them flow without pumping, and together they yield more than 1,600 litres a minute.

The town takes its name from a travel book by the poet Bokusui Wakayama. The valley was always the road between the Kanto plain and Echigo: the Mikuni pass route was improved for Uesugi Kenshin's campaigns and became a highway in the Edo period. Route 17, the Joetsu main line, the Joetsu Shinkansen and the Kan-etsu expressway all still run through it.

Sources: 環境省 みなかみ町 国民保養温泉地計画書

This designation covers the whole of 利根郡みなかみ町 rather than a single spa town (上牧・奈女沢・湯宿・川古・猿ヶ京・法師の6温泉にまたがる), so the snowfall is measured at the centre of the municipality.

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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.

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.

Up to five within 40 km, straight-line, nearest first. Quality rank is out of the 397 Japanese ski areas.

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