Minamioguni Onsen-kyo — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
南小国温泉郷 · Kumamoto
Minamioguni Onsen-kyo (南小国温泉郷) is a nationally designated onsen town in Kumamoto. 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 plateau between 430 and 945 metres, below the outer rim of Aso and the Kuju range, at the head of the Chikugo river. Forest covers 85% of the town. Three springs — Kurokawa, Tanoharu and Manganji — were designated in 1964; since then each has spread and new springs have been drilled, so the whole town now carries the designation.
Kurokawa lies along a mountain stream. In 1986 it introduced a wooden bathing pass that lets a visitor use any three of the thirty inns' outdoor baths, and the crowds followed. There was never flat land enough for large development, so the wooden inns and shops still stand in a row along the water.
Tanoharu is downstream. The water once rose from the riverbed, so the villagers moved the river to secure the source. Around 1996 that source dried up, and the shared bathhouse closed. The building was never demolished; it still stands. Four inns remain.
Manganji is said to have been opened by Kukai in the middle of the 9th century. The water comes up in the riverbed, so in the Edo period people banked it with clay and stones into an open bath in the river. Floods carried it away again and again, and each time it was rebuilt. After a wall went up in the Meiji era it became more than a bath: people rinsed rice and washed vegetables in it. It was the neighbourhood's kitchen. It is still there by the river.
Aso was recognised as a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2014, and all five springs fall inside one of its geosites.
Sources: 環境省 南小国温泉郷 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 25 cm |
| Rank | 57 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 1 of 3 in Kumamoto |
| Against the median of 77 | -93 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 54 cm 10–64 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
4 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 黒川富士屋 | 0.1 km | 98℃ hot | 3.4 mildly acidic | — | — |
| 田原地獄大朗館 | 1.4 km | 60.8℃ hot | 7.3 neutral | — | — |
| 小田泉の里 | 1.4 km | 62.5℃ hot | 7.9 mildly alkaline | — | — |
| 瀬の本雀地獄 | 2.1 km | 73.1℃ hot | 2.6 acidic | acidic | — |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Kurokawa Onsen黒川温泉 | Hot spring town | 0 km |
| Hatchobaru Geothermal Power Plant八丁原発電所 | Landmark | 5.3 km |
| Kujū-kōgen久住高原 | Nature | 9.1 km |
| Kuju Mountains九重山 | Mountain | 10 km |
| Mount Daikanbō大観峰 | Mountain | 11.4 km |
| Aso Shrine阿蘇神社 | Shrine | 14.6 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Kuju Forest Park | 4 km | 454 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.