Shirakawa-go Hirase Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
白川郷平瀬温泉 · Gifu
Shirakawa-go Hirase Onsen (白川郷平瀬温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Gifu. 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
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
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 347 cm |
| Rank | 7 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 1 of 3 in Gifu |
| Against the median of 77 | +229 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 345 cm 256–601 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
1 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 大白川温泉 | 0.2 km | 51℃ hot | 6.4 neutral | sulphur | 1953 |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Miboro Dam御母衣ダム | Landmark | 4.2 km |
| Historic Villages of Shirakawa-gō and Gokayama白川郷・五箇山の合掌造り集落 | Old streets | 9.1 km |
| Shirakawa-gō白川郷 | Old streets | 9.3 km |
| Wada House和田家住宅 | Landmark | 9.5 km |
| Hakusan National Park白山国立公園 | Nature | 10.6 km |
| Mount Haku白山 | Mountain | 12 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Hida Kawai Ski Resort | 17 km | 155 of 397 |
| Hirugano Kogen Ski Resort | 19 km | 266 of 397 |
| SAM Hakusan Ichirino Ski Resort | 20 km | 235 of 397 |
| Takasu Snow Park | 20 km | 114 of 397 |
| Dynaland | 21 km | 108 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.