Otari Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
小谷温泉 · Nagano
Otari Onsen (小谷温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Nagano. 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
Of the 79 onsen towns we measured, this one sits in the deepest snow.
The spring is said to date from 1555, though the stories do not agree. One says a retainer of Takeda Shingen found it during the Kawanakajima campaign. Another connects it to Iimori Morisharu, who had fought the Takeda the year before. Nobody has settled which is true, and probably nobody will — it is a story about a mountain in the middle of a civil war.
Today there is exactly one inn, Yamada Ryokan, whose main hall and five other buildings are registered as national tangible cultural properties. It stands at 850 m at the foot of Mount Amakazari, and in winter it is buried.
Sources: Go NAGANO 長野県公式観光サイト · 日本温泉協会 国民保養温泉地「小谷」
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 690 cm |
| Rank | 1 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 1 of 5 in Nagano |
| Against the median of 77 | +572 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 456 cm 385–841 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
5 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 小谷温泉山田旅館 | 0 km | 45.2℃ hot | 8.2 mildly alkaline | — | 1972 |
| 小谷温泉左その2 | 0.1 km | 60.6℃ hot | 8.2 mildly alkaline | — | 1972 |
| 小谷温泉太田旅館 | 0.1 km | 47.6℃ hot | 8.4 mildly alkaline | — | 1972 |
| 小谷温泉小谷熱湯 | 0.4 km | 84℃ hot | 8.8 alkaline | — | 1972 |
| 小谷温泉雨飾荘 | 0.8 km | 45.5℃ hot | 8.6 alkaline | — | 1974 |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Mount Amakazari雨飾山 | Mountain | 4.8 km |
| Mount Togakushi戸隠山 | Mountain | 12.1 km |
| Mount Myōkō妙高山 | Mountain | 12.2 km |
| Naena Falls苗名滝 | Nature | 14 km |
| Mount Kurohime黒姫山 (長野県) | Mountain | 14.1 km |
| Togakushi Shrine戸隠神社 | Shrine | 16.2 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Itoigawa Seaside Valley Ski Resort | 11 km | 306 of 397 |
| Hakuba Cortina | 13 km | 74 of 397 |
| Hakuba Norikura Onsen Ski Resort | 14 km | 35 of 397 |
| Myoko Suginohara | 14 km | 49 of 397 |
| Ikenotaira Onsen Alpen Blick Ski Resort | 16 km | 75 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.