Shimobe Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
下部温泉 · Yamanashi
Shimobe Onsen (下部温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Yamanashi. 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
A cure-taking town in Minobu, Yamanashi, along the Shimobe river, a tributary of the Fuji.
The name comes with a story attached. In the reign of the twelfth emperor, Keiko, the governor of Kai province was touring his territory when he noticed steam rising from a fold in the hills, stopped, and called the water Shiobe-no-yu. Over the centuries the writing shifted, and it became Shimobe.
Its record as a place of recovery is long. Legends tell of a provincial lord's son cured of a skin disease in the Heian period, and of Shinra Saburo Yoshimitsu healing a wounded retainer here in three days. Then came Takeda Shingen, who sent injured soldiers to these baths. In 1548 he appointed one of them — Sano Shinsaemon-no-jo Masataka, wounded at the battle of Uedahara — as keeper of the spring. This is why it is called one of Shingen's hidden baths, and the Gensenkan inn still holds the land and bathhouse licences issued by Shingen, by his father Nobutora, and later by the Tokugawa.
Upstream, on the flank of Mt. Kenashi, lies the Yunooku gold mine, said to have been Shingen's hidden mine; a settlement of some three thousand miners is remembered as having lived up there. The finds are displayed at a museum by Shimobe-Onsen station.
The novelist Masuji Ibuse came here often and wrote three works at his usual inn. The town was designated a National Health Resort Hot Spring in 1956. It has eight sources — one hot, six cool, one cold mineral — fifteen places to stay and six day-use baths. For two months from June, three species of firefly rise in the park along the river.
Sources: 環境省 下部温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 58 cm |
| Rank | 51 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 2 of 2 in Yamanashi |
| Against the median of 77 | -60 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 136 cm 5–141 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
15 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 下部温泉下部ホテル | 0.1 km | 25℃ lukewarm | 7.4 neutral | simple | 1969 |
| 湯沢温泉長生館 | 0.8 km | 12℃ cold | 5.8 mildly acidic | — | 1977 |
| 湯沢温泉不二屋 | 0.8 km | 19℃ cold | 5.6 mildly acidic | — | 1977 |
| 湯沢温泉 | 0.8 km | 16.5℃ cold | 8.03 mildly alkaline | sulphur | 1985 |
| 下部温泉古湯源泉館 | 0.9 km | 30.5℃ lukewarm | 8.77 alkaline | alkaline simple | 1987 |
| 下部温泉湯元ホテル3号泉 | 0.9 km | 32.5℃ lukewarm | 8.6 alkaline | alkaline simple | 1955 |
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 Minobu身延山 | Mountain | 5.9 km |
| Kuon-ji Temple久遠寺 | Temple | 6.5 km |
| Mount Kenashi毛無山 (山梨県・静岡県) | Mountain | 6.6 km |
| Lake Motosu本栖湖 | Nature | 11.1 km |
| Aokigahara青木ヶ原 | Nature | 14.2 km |
| Lake Shōji精進湖 | Nature | 14.3 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Fujiten Snow Resort | 20 km | 368 of 397 |
| Fujiyama Snow Resort Yeti | 31 km | 411 of 397 |
| Kamui Misaka Ski | 31 km | 430 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.