Sukayu Onsen

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In 1684 a hunter from what is now Aomori City tracked a wounded deer up into the Hakkoda mountains. He found it three days later — healed, and climbing away over the rocks. Wondering what had mended it, he went looking, and found the spring. For a long time it was called Shika-no-yu, the deer's bath. That is the story told here; it is a legend, not a record.

In 1954 Sukayu was among the first three places designated National Health Resort Hot Springs — together with Shima in Gunma and Nikko-Yumoto in Tochigi. The list this page belongs to exists because of that programme, and this is where it began.

The bath is a single room of hinoki cypress, roughly 260 square metres, and it is still mixed. Of the 184 Japan Meteorological Agency stations we checked, the snowiest was Sukayu, 3.5 km from here — 1,292 cm a winter averaged over three seasons.

Sources: 酸ヶ湯温泉旅館 公式サイト「温泉の歴史」 · 日本温泉協会 国民保養温泉地 · 環境省 奥日光湯元温泉 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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