Booking Japan for Christmas? Hokkaido's December Has Never Collapsed. Honshu's Has.

A Christmas trip is the one booking you cannot move. Flights are dated, the family is off work that week and nobody is rearranging it because the snow arrived late. So the question is not which Japanese resort gets the most snow in December. It is which one has never failed to.

Those turn out to be different resorts.

We counted the December total for each of the last twelve winters at all 397 Japanese ski areas, on one method. That is enough to ask the only question that matters for a fixed date: how bad has December actually been?

The two islands answer differently

Take the ski areas that average 60 cm or more in December, which is roughly the line where a resort can expect to open properly. Then look at each one’s worst December of the twelve.

	Ski areas	Kept over half their normal December in their worst year
Hokkaido	46	40 (87%)
Honshu and west	196	23 (12%)

Honshu gets more December snow. Its median December is 71 cm against Hokkaido’s 62 cm. What it does not have is a floor. In its worst December of twelve, the typical Hokkaido ski area still saw 53% of its normal month. The typical Honshu one saw 37%.

That gap is the whole argument for booking Hokkaido at Christmas, and it is invisible in the season averages every other site quotes.

What this looks like at resorts you have heard of

Resort	Typical December	Worst of the twelve	Worst as % of typical
Kiroro	86 cm	56 cm	65%
Rusutsu	53 cm	34 cm	64%
Tomamu	62 cm	35 cm	57%
Sapporo Teine	60 cm	35 cm	58%
Furano	69 cm	42 cm	61%
Niseko Grand Hirafu	83 cm	40 cm	48%
Hakuba Happo-One	126 cm	55 cm	44%
Naeba	120 cm	52 cm	43%
Nozawa Onsen	127 cm	51 cm	40%
Myoko Suginohara	98 cm	43 cm	44%
Madarao	121 cm	45 cm	37%
APPI Kogen	111 cm	36 cm	32%
Zao Onsen	67 cm	17 cm	26%

Read the last column, not the first. Nozawa averages half as much again as Kiroro in December and has still delivered a 51 cm month. Zao, in a bad December, has delivered 17 cm.

Niseko is the interesting case. It is the Hokkaido name everyone books, and it has the weakest December floor of the Hokkaido resorts here. Rusutsu, about 40 minutes’ drive away, and Kiroro, about an hour and a half, hold up better.

The December that shows why this matters

December 2015 fell inside the strongest El Niño of the twelve winters. Nationally it was the worst December of the twelve by a distance: the median Japanese ski area managed 34 cm, against 76 to 95 cm in the good years. 250 of the 397 ski areas we measure came in below half their own normal December.

It did not land evenly.

Region	Ski areas	December 2015, as % of normal
Hokkaido	87	63%
Chubu, Joetsu and Nagano	172	44%
Tohoku	89	38%
Western Japan	49	11%

Western Japan effectively had no December. Hokkaido had a poor one and kept skiing.

The reason is the same one that shapes the whole Japanese winter. Hokkaido’s December snow comes from cold air crossing the Sea of Japan, and the cold arrives there first and hardest. Honshu’s December depends on that pattern setting up early, which in a warm year it simply does not.

NOAA currently puts a very strong El Niño at better than 90% for this winter. That is their forecast, not ours, and what a strong El Niño has actually done to Japanese snow is a separate question we have measured. It is worth knowing that the last very strong one took its largest bite out of December, and out of the south.

The resorts with the steadiest Decembers in Japan

Rank every Japanese ski area by how much of its normal December survived its worst one, and the top ten are all in Hokkaido. The eleventh is Kusatsu Onsen, on a high plateau in Gunma. The table shows the Hokkaido ones with a typical December of 68 cm or more. The two a foreign visitor might actually book are in bold, 12th and 13th, just behind Kusatsu, and they share a row: Kiroro and Sapporo Kokusai sit 6 km apart in the same weather-model cell, so they get one figure.

Ski area	Typical December	Worst of the twelve
Bifuka	85 cm	60 cm (71%)
Shakotan	87 cm	61 cm (70%)
Wassamu Higashiyama	74 cm	51 cm (68%)
Asarigawa Onsen	77 cm	51 cm (66%)
Otaru Tenguyama	77 cm	51 cm (66%)
Kamui Ski Links	68 cm	45 cm (66%)
Asahigaoka	89 cm	59 cm (66%)
Kiroro · Sapporo Kokusai	86 cm	56 cm (65%)

Sapporo Kokusai sits 23 km from Sapporo station in a straight line, on the bus route out of the city. Kiroro is 14 km from Otaru and has two all-inclusive hotels on it. The rest are small local hills with a lift or two, which is why nobody writes about them.

What we would do

• If your dates are locked to the Christmas and New Year weeks, book Hokkaido. The floor is the reason, not the average.
• If you want the Honshu snow and can move, go in January instead. January is where Honshu’s advantage actually lives, and it is the biggest month almost everywhere in Japan.
• If you are already committed to Honshu in December, pick high. Within the same valley, the higher base has the better December, and our area pages now show each ski area’s base and top elevation alongside its snow.
• Check the opening dates before you book flights. Several Hokkaido resorts open on 28 November, and every date we have confirmed on a resort’s own site is listed here, with the date we checked each one.

How this was measured

December snowfall is the 1 to 31 December total at each ski area’s coordinates, from ERA5 reanalysis via the Open-Meteo Historical Weather API, summed on Japan time for each of the twelve Decembers from 2014 to 2025 separately rather than averaged first. “Typical December” is the mean of those twelve; “worst” is the lowest single one. The 60 cm threshold for the island comparison is our choice, set to exclude ski areas whose December is marginal in every year, where a percentage of a small number is not informative.

Regions are by prefecture, the same as in our El Niño article: Tohoku is the six prefectures from Aomori to Fukushima, Western Japan is Kansai, Chugoku, Shikoku and Kyushu, and the rest of Honshu is Chubu, Joetsu and Nagano. Each figure is the median ski area’s December 2015 as a share of its own normal December.

These are model figures and they run below what resorts report, by roughly half in Hokkaido. Comparing one resort’s Decembers with each other, which is what this article does, is what the method is good for. The El Niño outlook is the US Climate Prediction Center’s, published 10 September 2026. JAPANSNOWLINE publishes no forecast of its own; check the Japan Meteorological Agency and the resort before you travel.

Sources: Open-Meteo historical weather data, based on the ERA5 reanalysis (Copernicus Climate Change Service); Japan Meteorological Agency, past weather data; NOAA Climate Prediction Center, ENSO diagnostic discussion.