Yunogo Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
湯郷温泉 · Okayama
Yunogo Onsen (湯郷温泉) 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
In the middle of Mimasaka, northeastern Okayama, close to the Tottori and Hyogo borders. In the Nara period the area was known by a name meaning "the salt spring village."
The spring is said to be more than 1,200 years old. The Tendai monk Ennin, the story goes, found an egret bathing an injury in the water, and that is how it began.
Fujiwara no Teika, who assembled the classic hundred-poem anthology, seems to have wanted to come here for his health — but noted that it was too far, and he would make do with Arima instead.
By the end of the Edo period the village lived on the cure trade: 76 of its 80 households worked in it. The water was tested by the Home Ministry in 1914, and in 1950 a Kyoto University professor reported that its fine bubbles made it suited to long immersion, and that water like it was rare anywhere in the world.
Today the town is also a sports town: the women's football club that sent players to the national side plays here, the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi is said to have been born nearby, and a circuit that once held a Formula One race is close at hand. In 2009 the town declared itself a town of toys, and three museums — Showa-era toys, model railways, music boxes — stand together. Five craft workshops make glass, ceramics and deerskin goods.
Sources: 環境省 湯郷温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 8 cm |
| Rank | 66 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 3 of 3 in Okayama |
| Against the median of 77 | -110 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 9 cm 3–12 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
3 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 湯郷鷺温泉第1泉源 | 0.1 km | 40℃ warm | — | chloride | 1987 |
| 湯郷鷺温泉第3泉源 | 0.2 km | 40.2℃ warm | — | chloride | 1987 |
| 林野温泉 | 2.6 km | 17.6℃ cold | 8.5 alkaline | — | 1975 |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Okayama International Circuit岡山国際サーキット | Leisure | 11.8 km |
| Tsuyama Railroad Educational Museum津山まなびの鉄道館 | Museum | 13.9 km |
| Tsuyama Castle津山城 | Historic site | 14 km |
| Kōzuki Castle上月城 | Historic site | 17.4 km |
| Nakayama Shrine中山神社 | Shrine | 17.4 km |
| Mount Nagi那岐山 | Mountain | 19.9 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Chikusa Highland Ski resort | 34 km | 367 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.