Okuhida Onsen-kyo

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Okuhida is five villages taken together — Hirayu, Fukuji, Shin-Hirayu, Tochio and Shinhotaka — strung along about 18 km of valley at between 800 and 1,300 m. This is the Gifu-side approach to the Northern Alps, with the Hotaka peaks standing at the head of it.

Each village keeps a different story. At Hirayu, Takeda Shingen's troops are said to have pushed into Hida and seen an old white monkey soaking its wounds in a pool; they bathed there themselves and recovered their strength. In the Edo period the lords of the Hokuriku domains stopped here on their journeys to and from the capital. Fukuji is said to have been visited in secret by Emperor Murakami in the Heian period — one spring is still called the emperor's. At Shin-Hirayu, the wandering monk Enku is said to have arrived in 1690 and stayed about a year.

Hirayu was designated a National Health Resort Hot Spring in 1964, the other four in 1968; the two designations were merged in 2017.

What is striking is how completely the heat is used. Five geothermal plants generate electricity from it, and what is left goes to fish farming, greenhouses, heating buildings — and melting the snow off the roads. In a place with this much winter, the hot spring is what keeps the road open.

Sources: 環境省 奥飛騨温泉郷 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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