Okunikko Yumoto Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
奥日光湯元温泉 · Tochigi
Okunikko Yumoto Onsen (奥日光湯元温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Tochigi. 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
At about 1,500 m, ringed on three sides by Mount Shirane, Onsengatake and Mitake, and open to the south onto Lake Yunoko. It runs five to seven degrees cooler than Tokyo, and people have come here to escape the heat for a very long time.
The spring is credited to Shodo Shonin, the monk who opened Nikko to Buddhism in the Nara period, roughly twelve centuries ago; he is said to have named it the Medicine Buddha's bath. A 1791 account and a later Edo-period gazetteer both describe nine large bathhouses standing where the village is now.
Isabella Bird stayed here in June 1878. She came up during her time in Nikko, lodged at the Yoshimiya, and recorded how busy the place was. This is the hot spring town that the author of Unbeaten Tracks in Japan found deep in mountains where almost no foreigner had been.
In 1954 Nikko-Yumoto was designated one of the first three National Health Resort Hot Springs, alongside Sukayu in Aomori and Shima in Gunma.
The source lies north of the village in the Yunodaira marsh, where nineteen springs are sheltered under roofs. Most rise on their own, at 50–80°C, together yielding about 1,456 litres a minute. The water is a sulphur-bearing sodium-calcium sulphate and bicarbonate spring.
Sources: 環境省 奥日光湯元温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 213 cm |
| Rank | 22 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 1 of 2 in Tochigi |
| Against the median of 77 | +95 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 159 cm 116–275 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
1 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 日光湯元日18 | 0.3 km | 77℃ hot | 6.8 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Senjōgahara戦場ヶ原 | Nature | 3.6 km |
| Mount Nikkō-Shirane日光白根山 | Mountain | 4.5 km |
| Mount Nantai男体山 | Mountain | 8 km |
| Lake Chūzenji中禅寺湖 | Nature | 8.1 km |
| Kegon Falls華厳滝 | Nature | 10.4 km |
| Nikkō Tōshō-gū日光東照宮 | Shrine | 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Nikko Yumoto Onsen Ski Park | 1 km | 70 of 397 |
| Marunuma Kogen Ski Resort | 7 km | 41 of 397 |
| Snow Park Oze Tokura | 17 km | 89 of 397 |
| Katashina Kogen Ski Resort | 18 km | 111 of 397 |
| White World Oze Iwakura | 19 km | 83 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.