Yunoko and Yunotsuru Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
湯の児・湯の鶴温泉 · Kumamoto
Yunoko and Yunotsuru Onsen (湯の児・湯の鶴温泉) is a nationally designated onsen town in Kumamoto. 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 Minamata, Kumamoto — one on the sea, one in the hills, and nothing alike.
Yunoko sits on the coast of the Yatsushiro Sea. Its name is explained this way: Emperor Keiko, moving his army south, put his hand into the water from the deck of his ship and found it only lukewarm — so he called it the child of the hot spring.
The water was actually struck in 1925, when a test bore of a little over ten metres brought up a 39-degree spring. By about 1929 local people were collecting it in a boat and bathing in that, and a replica of the boat bath stands beside the beach today. Five kilometres of cherry trees line the shore road, on the national list of a hundred cherry places.
Yunotsuru is nine kilometres inland along a river. Two stories attach to it: that fleeing Heike warriors healed their wounds here, and that a wounded crane was seen bathing in it — which is where the name comes from. Fireflies fill the valley, and the cure-taking tradition runs deep.
How deep is shown by one detail. In the era of indentured service, when a worker lived in the employer's house, it was customary to have written into the agreement that the employer would send them to Yunotsuru to take the waters at least once a year.
Sources: 環境省 湯の児・湯の鶴温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 3 cm |
| Rank | 72 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 3 of 3 in Kumamoto |
| Against the median of 77 | -115 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 11 cm 0–11 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 湯之児三笠屋 | 0.2 km | 50.8℃ hot | 7.1 neutral | — | — |
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 湯の児温泉 | Hot spring town | 0.2 km |
| Tsunagi Art Museumつなぎ美術館 | Museum | 3.9 km |
| Ecopark Minamataエコパーク水俣 | Park | 4.8 km |
| 湯の鶴温泉 | Hot spring town | 9.7 km |
| Kyūsendō球泉洞 | Nature | 19.3 km |
| Izumi crane migration grounds出水ツル渡来地 | 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.