Saginoyu Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
さぎの湯温泉 · Shimane
Saginoyu Onsen (さぎの湯温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Shimane. 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
In Yasugi, Shimane, on the Iinashi river below Mt. Gassan. It is small compared with the better-known spas of the San'in coast, and because no large development ever came, it still sits among rice fields. Six places offer baths.
The water is said to have appeared in the 720s, and to have been noticed because a white egret was standing in it, healing an injured leg — which is where the name comes from. It served as the private bath of the Amago clan in the warring-states period and of the domain lords after them.
Then the river kept flooding, and the spring was lost. It was found again in 1910, during drainage works, and the present town dates from that recovery. Floods went on troubling it — a cloudburst in August 1959 among them — until a dam upstream and river works brought them under control. In 1995 the city rebuilt the source works to secure enough flow for free-flowing baths.
Next door is the Adachi Museum of Art, whose Japanese garden is known worldwide; more than 600,000 people a year come to it. Within three kilometres are the ruins of the Amago castle and its old castle town. This is also the home of the Yasugi-bushi folk song and its loach-scooping dance.
Sources: 環境省 鷺の湯温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 53 cm |
| Rank | 52 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 2 of 2 in Shimane |
| Against the median of 77 | -65 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 87 cm 12–99 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 鷺湯温泉第3号泉 | 0.2 km | 49℃ hot | 7 neutral | — | 1960 |
| 鷺湯温泉第5号泉 | 0.3 km | 59℃ hot | 7.6 mildly alkaline | — | 1960 |
| 鷺湯温泉 | 0.3 km | 51.2℃ hot | — | radioactive (radon) | 1973 |
| 鷺ノ湯 | 0.3 km | 51.6℃ hot | 8.3 mildly alkaline | chloride, sulphate, radioactive (radon) | 1995 |
| a spring in 浜田市(広瀬町富田) | 2.8 km | 43℃ hot | 7.84 mildly alkaline | chloride | 1993 |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Adachi Museum of Art足立美術館 | Museum | 0.2 km |
| Gassantoda Castle月山富田城 | Historic site | 2.2 km |
| Yomotsuhirasaka黄泉比良坂 | Historic site | 6.2 km |
| Nakaumi中海 | Nature | 9.8 km |
| Kumano Taisha熊野大社 | Shrine | 11.3 km |
| Matsue Castle松江城 | Historic site | 16.9 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Daisen Masumizu Kogen Snow Park | 29 km | 358 of 397 |
| Ibukinosato Ski Area | 31 km | 413 of 397 |
| Daisen White Resort | 31 km | 359 of 397 |
| OkuDaisen Ski resort | 33 km | 322 of 397 |
| Dogoyama-Kougen Ski Resort | 35 km | 403 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.