Shirakawa-go Hirase Onsen

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This is up the valley from the thatched houses of Shirakawa-go, the UNESCO World Heritage village. If you have seen the winter photographs — steep straw roofs under a metre of snow — this is the same river, further upstream.

Shirakawa village is 96% forest. Farmland accounts for 0.4% of it. The spring lies at the southern end of the village on the eastern edge of Hakusan National Park, between 500 and 1,300 m.

The water does not come from the village. It rises at Ohashirakawa, on the shore of Lake Hakusui at the foot of Mount Haku, and is piped roughly 14 km down the Shokawa river to reach the baths. Two sources yield about 1,000 litres a minute each. Locals often call the baths by the source's name rather than the village's.

The water is a sulphur-bearing sodium chloride spring. The conditions posted for it include skin complaints, rheumatism and poor circulation. By long tradition it has also been called a bath that helps people have children.

Sources: 環境省 白川郷平瀬温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書

Up to five within 40 km, straight-line, nearest first. Quality rank is out of the 395 Japanese ski areas.

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 are working on replacing these estimates with observed values.

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