Naruko Onsen-kyo — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
鳴子温泉郷 · Miyagi
Naruko Onsen-kyo (鳴子温泉郷) is a nationally designated onsen town in Miyagi. 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
Five spa districts taken together — Naruko, Higashi-Naruko, Kawatabi, Nakayamadaira and Onikobe — in the hills of north-western Miyagi where the prefecture meets Yamagata and Akita.
Japanese hot spring water is classified into eleven types. Naruko has seven of them. There are about 380 sources across the district, and the oldest of the springs counts a thousand years. Nowhere else in Japan gathers this range in one valley.
It is also a crafts town: Naruko kokeshi dolls, and a lacquerware tradition running back more than 380 years. Visitors can watch the dolls being turned, paint one, or make lacquered chopsticks.
Basho passed through here on the journey that became The Narrow Road to the Deep North; his verse stones and the ruins of the Shitomae barrier are still on the road.
When the earthquake and tsunami struck on 11 March 2011, this town became a shelter. It took in evacuees from the coast, tankered its hot spring water to the bathing facilities at other shelters, and sent out eggs boiled in the springs. Three years earlier, in January 2008, the city and the innkeepers' associations of all five districts had signed an agreement to open the inns as shelters for elderly and disabled people in a disaster. They could act because the arrangement already existed.
Sources: 環境省 鳴子温泉郷 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 121 cm |
| Rank | 38 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Against the median of 77 | +3 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 115 cm 80–195 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 鳴子鳴子分院1号 | 1.6 km | 98.5℃ hot | 8.2 mildly alkaline | — | — |
| 東鳴子土蔵わき | 1.7 km | 83.5℃ hot | 6.9 neutral | — | — |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Katanuma潟沼 | Nature | 1 km |
| Naruko Dam鳴子ダム | Nature | 1.9 km |
| Naruko Canyon鳴子峡 | Nature | 2.1 km |
| Onikōbe Caldera鬼首カルデラ | Mountain | 10.2 km |
| Kurikoma Quasi-National Park栗駒国定公園 | Nature | 14.9 km |
| Yūbikan有備館 | Historic site | 15.7 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
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Uenono Ski Area | 1 km | 404 of 397 |
| Onikobe Ski Area | 8 km | 206 of 397 |
| Yakurai Garden Ski Area | 18 km | 429 of 397 |
| Hanagasa Kogen Ski Area | 29 km | 220 of 397 |
| Green Valley Kamuro Ski Area | 34 km | 331 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.