Shionoe Onsen-kyo — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
塩江温泉郷 · Kagawa
Shionoe Onsen-kyo (塩江温泉郷) is a nationally designated onsen town in Kagawa. 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 the middle of Kagawa, at the southern tip of Takamatsu — 25 km from the city centre, ten minutes by car from the airport, up in the hills.
The spring is said to be about 1,300 years old, found by the monk Gyoki in the early Nara period. Kukai is said to have trained here later and to have urged the baths on anyone who would listen, which drew people, and a village grew.
Kagawa is famous as the driest prefecture in Japan. Shionoe is one of its wetter corners, and because of that it keeps something rare for the prefecture: stands of beech, zelkova and wild cherry more than a century old. The forest is on the national list of a hundred watershed forests worth keeping, and also on the list of firefly places.
Along the river through the valley there is a cherry festival in spring, a firefly festival in early summer, and a maple festival in autumn. The southern part of the area became Kagawa's first prefectural natural park in 1992.
Sources: 環境省 塩江温泉郷 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 13 cm |
| Rank | 59 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Against the median of 77 | -105 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 26 cm 2–28 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
3 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 塩江温泉 | 0.1 km | 18℃ cold | — | — | 1962 |
| 塩江温泉 | 0.3 km | — | — | — | — |
| 樺川温泉 | 1.1 km | 17.4℃ cold | — | — | 1975 |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 塩江温泉 | Hot spring town | 0.1 km |
| Ōkubo-ji Temple大窪寺 | Temple | 11.4 km |
| Nagao-ji Temple長尾寺 | Temple | 13.5 km |
| Awa Sand Pillars阿波の土柱 | Mountain | 13.9 km |
| Ritsurin Garden栗林公園 | Park | 18.4 km |
| Mannō Lake満濃池 | Nature | 19.7 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Ikawa Ski Resort | 29 km | 414 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.