Muikamachi Onsen

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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

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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