Okuhida Onsen-kyo — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
奥飛騨温泉郷 · Gifu
Okuhida Onsen-kyo (奥飛騨温泉郷) is a nationally designated onsen town in Gifu. 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
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
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 310 cm |
| Rank | 10 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 2 of 3 in Gifu |
| Against the median of 77 | +192 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 218 cm 215–433 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 栃尾温泉栃尾温泉協同組合4号泉 | 1.5 km | 95℃ hot | 7.4 neutral | sulphur | 1964 |
| 栃尾温泉 | 2.2 km | 62.2℃ hot | 7 neutral | — | 1980 |
| 一重ヶ根温泉湯原No.1 | 2.7 km | 37.1℃ warm | 6.2 neutral | — | 1980 |
| 一重ヶ根温泉湯原No.2 | 2.7 km | 46℃ hot | 6.2 neutral | — | 1980 |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Shinhotaka Ropeway新穂高ロープウェイ | Nature | 8.1 km |
| Mount Yake焼岳 | Mountain | 8.2 km |
| Kamikōchi上高地 | Mountain | 12 km |
| Hida Mountains飛騨山脈 | Mountain | 14 km |
| Hotaka Mountains穂高岳 | Mountain | 14 km |
| Mount Norikura乗鞍岳 | Mountain | 16.6 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Honokidaira Ski Area | 9 km | 91 of 397 |
| Hirayu Onsen Ski Area | 9 km | 40 of 397 |
| Hida Takayama Municipal Ski Resort | 13 km | 86 of 397 |
| Blue Resort Norikura | 17 km | 36 of 397 |
| Hida Nagareha Resort | 25 km | 184 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.