Muikamachi Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
六日町温泉 · Niigata
Muikamachi Onsen (六日町温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Niigata. 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
There is no thousand-year legend here. In the autumn of 1957 someone was drilling for natural gas, and hot water came up instead — a lot of it. That is the whole origin. The town was designated a National Health Resort Hot Spring in 1964.
It sits in the Uonuma basin, ringed by 2,000-metre peaks — Hakkaisan, Nakanodake and Echigo-Komagatake, known together as the three mountains of Echigo — with the baths spread along both banks of the Uono river.
The winters here are among the heaviest in Japan. By our own measurements it is the second snowiest of the 79 designated onsen towns. And that snow is the water behind [Japan's most famous rice](/en/guides/snow-country-rice-japan/) — Minami-Uonuma Koshihikari.
Getting here is unusually easy for a snow-country onsen: three expressway interchanges, a Shinkansen station at Urasa, eight local stations on the Joetsu line, and Muikamachi itself is the start of the Hokuhoku line.
The town lies below Sakadoyama and the ruins of Sakado castle, with a free footbath in the street. Naoe Kanetsugu, the subject of a 2009 NHK historical drama, was born here, and people still come to walk the sites connected with him.
Sources: 環境省 六日町温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 546 cm |
| Rank | 2 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 1 of 4 in Niigata |
| Against the median of 77 | +428 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 411 cm 328–739 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
2 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 六日町7号井 | 0.6 km | 58℃ hot | 7.8 mildly alkaline | simple | — |
| 君帰鉱泉君帰鉱泉 | 1.8 km | 16℃ cold | 8.6 alkaline | alkaline simple | — |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Untō-an Temple雲洞庵 | Temple | 4.4 km |
| Hakkaisan Ropeway八海山ロープウェー | Nature | 11.3 km |
| Mount Makihata巻機山 | Mountain | 12.8 km |
| Mount Hakkai八海山 | Mountain | 13.9 km |
| Kiyotsu Gorge清津峡 | Nature | 15.6 km |
| Mount Echigo-Komagatake越後駒ヶ岳 | Mountain | 18.9 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Muica Snow Resort | 3 km | 205 of 397 |
| Chateau Shiozawa Ski Area Yoshizato | 4 km | 281 of 397 |
| Itsukamachi Ski Area | 6 km | 255 of 397 |
| Joetsu International | 8 km | 203 of 397 |
| Maiko Snow Resort | 11 km | 241 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.