Tazawako Kogen Onsen-kyo

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At the south-western corner of Towada-Hachimantai National Park, this covers Nyuto Onsen and Tazawako Kogen Onsen. Behind them stand Akita-Komagatake, at 1,637 m the highest mountain in Akita, and Nyuto-san. Nyuto means breast, which is what the mountain looks like from here. Seen from Iwate on the other side it looks like a courtier's cap, and there it is called Eboshi. The same mountain has two names depending on which prefecture you are standing in.

Below lies Lake Tazawa — 423.4 m deep, the deepest lake in Japan, an almost circular caldera about 20 km around.

Nyuto is seven separate springs scattered at the foot of the mountain: Kuroyu, Magoroku, Ogama, Taenoyu, Ganiba, Tsuru-no-yu and the Kyukamura. All seven have different water. Flow ranges from 10 to 650 litres a minute and temperature from 30 to 86°C. It has been a place people came to soak for weeks, not nights.

Tazawako Kogen draws its water down from Nyuto — milky white, simple sulphur. A six-kilometre pipeline from the Karabuki source is what allowed the village to form at all.

In summer it is the base for climbing Akita-Komagatake; in winter, for skiing. A moguls World Cup was held here for three years from 2015.

Sources: 環境省 田沢湖高原温泉郷 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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