Okunikko Yumoto Onsen

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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

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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