Unzen and Obama Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
雲仙・小浜温泉 · Nagasaki
Unzen and Obama Onsen (雲仙・小浜温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Nagasaki. 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
Two springs in Unzen, Nagasaki — one high in the mountains, one at the sea's edge, and nothing alike.
Unzen Onsen traces to 701, when the monk Gyoki is said to have founded a temple here and given the mountain its name. A provincial gazetteer of 713 already mentions the hot water. In 1653 a man named Kato opened a bathing pool and named it.
The place also carries a heavy history. Between 1612 and 1658 the boiling ground at Unzen was used to execute Christians. Ten are recorded as having been thrown into the scalding pools in 1625, and from 1627 to 1630 prisoners were taken up the mountain to be tortured there. After the Shimabara rebellion was put down in 1638, some 35,000 people had died. The word "hell," used here for the steaming ground, carries that meaning too.
Modern Unzen grew as a summer retreat. Seven American officers came in 1870; in 1878 a new bath was fitted out for foreign visitors; a Western-style hotel opened in 1883. After an English-language paper in Shanghai wrote about it in 1890 the foreign trade grew, passing 20,000 visitors by 1927. Japan's first prefectural park opened here in 1911, and on 16 March 1934 Unzen became one of the first national parks in Japan.
Obama Onsen lies on the shore of Tachibana Bay. Its water comes out at 105 °C, and thirty sources yield 15,000 tonnes a day. The Honda family, who moved here from Mikawa in 1614, are said to have begun managing the springs. Along the seafront runs a foot bath 105 metres long — named for that temperature, and the longest in Japan. The sunsets over the bay are what people come for.
Sources: 雲仙観光局「雲仙の歴史」 · ながさき旅ネット「小浜温泉」 · 雲仙市「ほっとふっと105」
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 1 cm |
| Rank | 76 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 2 of 2 in Nagasaki |
| Against the median of 77 | -117 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 4 cm 0–4 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 小浜小浜観光ホテル | 0.1 km | 100.5℃ hot | 8.4 mildly alkaline | — | — |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Obama Onsen小浜温泉 | Hot spring town | 0.1 km |
| Unzen Onsen雲仙温泉 | Hot spring town | 5.2 km |
| Mount Unzen雲仙岳 | Mountain | 9.3 km |
| Hara Castle原城 | Historic site | 11.7 km |
| Unzen-Amakusa National Park雲仙天草国立公園 | Nature | 11.7 km |
| Shimabara Castle島原城 | Historic site | 16.4 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.