Tawarayama Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
俵山温泉 · Yamaguchi
Tawarayama Onsen (俵山温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Yamaguchi. 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 Nagato, Yamaguchi. Seen from the park above, the valley is filled with red tiled roofs, laid to shed snow. They show best against new leaves in spring and against snow in winter.
Four separate stories explain how the spring was found. Counting from the oldest of them, dated 916, the town marked its 1,100th year in 2016. By 1610 the public bath was run directly by the domain, and a land survey of that same year valued Tawarayama's bath at 86 koku of rice — higher than any other spring in the province. For a place this far from anywhere, that is the mark of a seriously developed spa. From 1688, when the lord Mori Yoshinari first bathed here, until 1771, when the Mori family moved their rest house to another spring, it served the domain for 83 years.
What shaped the town, though, was a great fire in 1851. Reduce every source of flame you can; share what water there is — from that came an unwritten rule that no inn would build a bath of its own. So guests walk out to the public baths instead. Even now only a handful of inns have their own bath. Twenty-three wooden inns, most of them sending their guests down the street to bathe: there is no other town in Japan still shaped this way.
The fire left one more thing. Kabuki. During the rebuilding, performances began as a prayer at the shrine and as an apology to the bathers whose town had burned. The performers are ageing now, so the effort has gone into a children's troupe.
Each June a free bus runs from the town to see the fireflies.
Sources: 環境省 俵山温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 11 cm |
| Rank | 61 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 1 of 2 in Yamaguchi |
| Against the median of 77 | -107 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 26 cm 3–29 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
4 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 俵山温泉町の湯 | 0.1 km | 41.5℃ warm | 9.8 alkaline | simple | 1958 |
| 俵山温泉 | 0.1 km | 38.5℃ warm | 9.7 alkaline | radioactive (radon) | 1962 |
| 俵山温泉 | 0.2 km | 32℃ lukewarm | 9.68 alkaline | simple | 1970 |
| 俵山温泉 | 1 km | 21.5℃ cold | 9.5 alkaline | — | 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Mara Kannon Temple麻羅観音 | Temple | 0.7 km |
| Tainei-ji Temple大寧寺 | Temple | 6.9 km |
| Nagato Yumoto Onsen長門湯本温泉 | Hot spring town | 7.6 km |
| Ōmijima青海島 | Nature | 18.8 km |
| Akiyoshidai秋吉台 | Nature | 18.8 km |
| Akiyoshidō秋芳洞 | Nature | 19.8 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
No ski area on this site lies within 40 km.
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.