Osaka Onsen-kyo — Snowfall and Nearby Ski Areas
小坂温泉郷 · Gifu
Osaka Onsen-kyo (小坂温泉郷) 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
Three springs at the western foot of Mount Ontake in Gifu — Yuya, Shimojima and Nigorigo. The district is 98% forest.
Nigorigo sits at 1,800 m, on the seventh station of Ontake itself — one of the highest hot springs in Japan, with 50°C water in quantity. The drop from there to the town below is about 1,500 m, so within one small municipality you pass from montane to subalpine vegetation.
Yuya and Shimojima are naturally carbonated, which is rare in Japan. Yuya has been a cure spa for over four centuries, and Edo-period documents survive describing how to use it. Its carbonation is among the highest in the country; the water holds heat and has long been drunk for the stomach. There is a saying here that eating rice porridge cooked in the carbonated water in midwinter keeps you well for a year. Shimojima was known as the wound bath.
There is one more thing about this place: 216 waterfalls. In the valleys below Ontake, counting only drops of five metres or more, there are that many. A guided programme run by a local NPO was named the first of the treasures of Gifu in 2008 and has since won national ecotourism awards.
Sources: 環境省 小坂温泉郷 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 152 cm |
| Rank | 32 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 3 of 3 in Gifu |
| Against the median of 77 | +34 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 161 cm 101–262 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.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Neo Falls根尾の滝 | Nature | 10.1 km |
| Zenshō-ji Temple禅昌寺 (下呂市) | Temple | 11.7 km |
| Hida Ichinomiya Minashi Shrine飛騨一宮水無神社 | Shrine | 15.3 km |
| Gero Onsen下呂温泉 | Hot spring town | 15.6 km |
| Nigorigo Onsen濁河温泉 | Hot spring town | 17 km |
| 中山七里 | Nature | 18.9 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Hida Funayama Snow Resort Arkopia | 9 km | 360 of 397 |
| Mont Deus Hida-kuraiyama Snow Park | 13 km | 363 of 397 |
| Meiho Ski Resort | 21 km | 289 of 397 |
| Mia Ski Resort | 23 km | 126 of 397 |
| Hida Takayama Municipal Ski Resort | 27 km | 86 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.