Yubara Onsen-kyo — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
湯原温泉郷 · Okayama
Yubara Onsen-kyo (湯原温泉郷) is a nationally designated onsen town in Okayama. 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
Five springs strung north to south along the Asahi river in Maniwa, Okayama — Yubara, Shimo-Yubara, Goroku, Taru and Maga. Four of them were designated in 1956.
The main one, Yubara, has the Suna-yu, the sand bath: an open-air mixed bath where the water pushes up through the riverbed, lifting sand as it comes. A 1980 ranking of Japan's open-air baths put it at the very top for western Japan. Directly above it stands the Yubara dam, finished in 1955. Bathing in a river-bottom spring at the foot of a dam wall is what this place looks like. Local history traces the spring to around 1600; through the Edo period it served cattle traders and pilgrims on the road to Mt. Daisen.
Maga keeps the plain look of an old cure-taking bath and is run by the neighbourhood. Goroku is a single inn where the water rises from a crack in bluish rock. Shimo-Yubara, drilled in 1989 to 27 metres, has something almost no other spa in Japan does: a bath for dogs.
Giant salamanders — a special natural monument — live in these rivers, and Japan's first centre for protecting them was built here in 1971. Beside it is a small shrine to the salamander, said to have been raised to quiet the spirit of an enormous one killed in the 16th century. A festival for it has been held every 8 August for more than fifty years.
Sources: 環境省 湯原温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 86 cm |
| Rank | 46 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 2 of 3 in Okayama |
| Against the median of 77 | -32 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 108 cm 44–152 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
9 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 湯原温泉温泉館下泉 | 0 km | 50.1℃ hot | 9.23 alkaline | alkaline simple | 1986 |
| 湯原温泉旧翠明荘泉 | 0.1 km | 49℃ hot | 9.18 alkaline | alkaline simple | 1986 |
| 湯原温泉湯原元湯 | 0.3 km | 48.5℃ hot | — | — | 1998 |
| 湯原温泉旧藤井泉源 | 0.3 km | 48.9℃ hot | 9.09 alkaline | — | 1998 |
| 湯原温泉旧瀬良泉源 | 0.3 km | 48.5℃ hot | 8.86 alkaline | — | 1998 |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Yubara Onsen湯原温泉 | Hot spring town | 0.2 km |
| Kanba Falls神庭の滝 | Nature | 10.4 km |
| Hiruzen Plateau蒜山高原 | Mountain | 12.8 km |
| Katsuyama Castle勝山城 (美作国) | Historic site | 13 km |
| Okutsu Onsen奥津温泉 | Hot spring town | 17.3 km |
| Sekigane Onsen関金温泉 | Hot spring town | 18.1 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Ski & Board Resort Tsuguro Kogen | 9 km | 424 of 397 |
| Hiruzen Bear Valley Ski Resort | 14 km | 371 of 397 |
| Kagamiganaru Ski Area | 20 km | 310 of 397 |
| OkuDaisen Ski resort | 22 km | 322 of 397 |
| Daisen Masumizu Kogen Snow Park | 27 km | 358 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.