Which Hot Spring Towns in Japan Get the Deepest Snow?

You do not have to ski to want this. Snow falling on a wooden bathhouse, steam coming off the water, and the specific quiet that arrives when a metre of snow has landed on a village overnight.

The question nobody answers with numbers is which hot spring towns actually get that snow. Plenty of lists tell you which onsen are famous. Fame and snowfall turn out to be almost unrelated.

The ranking

We measured snowfall at 3,069 ski areas worldwide using one method, which gives us a like-for-like figure for every Japanese hot spring town that has a ski area attached, and nearly all the snowy ones do. Alongside it: how many places to stay are mapped nearby, and the nearest city of 200,000 people or more.

Hot spring town	Season snowfall	World rank	Places to stay	Nearest city
Seki Onsen	689 cm	19	2	Nagano, 29 km
Hakuba Norikura Onsen	635 cm	=30	10	Nagano, 30 km
Hakusan Ichirino	526 cm	78	2	Kanazawa, 34 km
Nozawa Onsen	450 cm	=108	36	Nagano, 39 km
Togari Onsen	450 cm	=108	1	Nagano, 37 km
Akakura Onsen	445 cm	=117	31	Nagano, 27 km
Oze Hinoemata	439 cm	=120	6	Utsunomiya, 68 km
Hirayu Onsen	384 cm	=201	46	Matsumoto, 37 km
Amihari Onsen	358 cm	=262	1	Morioka, 21 km
Onogawa Onsen	314 cm	=430	53	Fukushima, 39 km
Asarigawa Onsen	293 cm	=507	6	Sapporo, 26 km
Zao Onsen	258 cm	=673	56	Yamagata, 14 km
Kusatsu Onsen	252 cm	=712	66	Nagano, 36 km

Two numbers in that table do most of the work.

Seki Onsen gets 689 cm a season, 19th in the world, and has two places to stay. Not two hotels and some guesthouses. Two.

Kusatsu Onsen, the one most people outside Japan can name, ranks =712th and has 66. Kusatsu is a genuinely great hot spring town with a famously strong sulphur spring. It is not a place you go for snow depth.

Why the two run in opposite directions

This is not a coincidence and it is not unfair. It is the same fact stated twice.

A town where five metres of snow lands every winter is a town that is hard to reach, hard to build in, and expensive to keep open. Roofs need clearing. Roads need ploughing all night. Nobody builds sixty inns in a place like that, because for four months a year the cost of simply existing there is enormous.

The famous onsen towns are famous partly because they were easy to get to — near a road, near a city, on a route people already travelled. Easy to get to and buried under snow are close to mutually exclusive in Japan.

So the honest framing is a trade, not a ranking:

• Maximum snow means a village with one or two inns, no shops open in the evening, and no plan B if you do not like where you are staying.
• Maximum comfort means less snow, and often a great deal less.

Where the trade is best

Nozawa Onsen is the clearest answer for most people. 450 cm puts it =108th in the world, and it has 36 places to stay and thirteen free public bathhouses run by the neighbourhoods that own them. It is a working village, not a resort, and it is the clearest case in this table of a place that is both genuinely snowy and genuinely equipped.

Akakura Onsen is the runner-up on the same logic: 445 cm, =117th in the world, 31 places to stay, and 27 km from Nagano, a city of about 370,000.

Hirayu Onsen deserves a mention for a different reason. 384 cm is not top-tier by this table, but it has 46 inns and sits in the Okuhida valley, which is one of the few places in Japan where the outdoor baths look out at genuine alpine peaks rather than forested hills.

The part that surprises people

Look at the last column again. Nine of the top ten are under 40 km from a city of 200,000 people or more.

Seki Onsen is 29 km from Nagano. Akakura is 27 km. Nozawa is 39 km. Asarigawa is 26 km from Sapporo, a city of 2.5 million.

Japan’s deep snow is not remote in the way deep snow usually is. The Sea of Japan effect dumps it on the near side of the mountains, within an hour or two of cities that a bullet train already reaches. This is the single biggest practical difference between a Japanese winter trip and the equivalent in the Alps or the Rockies, and it is why a trip here works without a car and without a long transfer.

Nagano is about 90 minutes from Tokyo on the Hokuriku Shinkansen. From there, buses run to most of the names above.

How to choose

If you want the deepest snow and will accept anything else: Seki Onsen. Book early, because there are two options and they are not large.

If you want deep snow and want the trip to be easy: Nozawa Onsen or Akakura Onsen. Both are reachable from Tokyo in about three hours without a car, both have real inventory, and both are in the world’s snowiest 120.

If you want the famous names: Kusatsu and Zao are excellent hot springs. Go for the water and the town. Zao has one thing no other town here has: the juhyo, trees encased in ice on the upper mountain, formed when supercooled cloud freezes onto them. Do not go expecting the snow to be the deepest in Japan, because the data says clearly that it is not.

If you are going in a group with one skier and one non-skier: every town in this table has a ski area attached, which is why we have snowfall figures for it at all. That is the arrangement most of them are built for.

What “onsen town” means here

A hot spring in the hotel is not an onsen town. Most large Japanese ski resorts have a bath fed by a hot spring, and that is genuinely nice, but it is not what these places are.

These are villages where the bathhouses came first, often by centuries, and many are looked after by the residents rather than run as a business. In Nozawa the thirteen public baths are free; you drop a coin in a box. That arrangement survives in villages, not in resorts.

So the etiquette is not optional. Wash before you get in, no swimwear, no towel in the water, and keep your voice down. For the people who live there, this is the neighbourhood bath.

What we cannot tell you

We do not have data on which baths are outdoor. Every town here has hot spring water; whether a given inn has a rotenburo facing the snow is a property of the inn, not of the town, and we do not hold that. Check the inn.

The count of places to stay is a floor, not a total. It comes from OpenStreetMap within 12 km, with each place counted once for its nearest ski area, which undercounts small family-run inns badly — exactly the kind of inn these towns are made of. Nozawa’s real number is higher than 36. The comparison between towns still holds, because every town was counted the same way.

This list ranks towns by their ski areas. Our hot spring snowfall ranking measures Japan’s 79 designated hot spring resorts at the town itself instead, ski area or not, and there Otari Onsen in Nagano comes first at 690 cm. The two lists answer slightly different questions.

A town is not its ski area. We locate each town by the ski area that carries its name, so the snowfall figure is measured at the slope rather than in the bath. In a valley this narrow the difference is small, but it is not zero.

How this was measured

Daily snowfall summed over each of the twelve winters from 2014/15 to 2025/26 and averaged per season, winter defined per hemisphere. Source is Open-Meteo historical data from the ERA5 reanalysis.

The snowfall is modelled and runs low, and Asarigawa’s Hokkaido figure is probably the most understated in the table. How we check the model →

Nozawa and Togari return the same 450 cm because neighbouring places share a grid cell. Treat them as indistinguishable rather than tied.

Nozawa’s thirteen public bathhouses are as described by japan-guide.

Distances to the nearest city are straight-line to a city of at least 200,000 people, not road distance. Kusatsu’s nearest city of that size is Nagano, across the prefectural border, rather than anywhere in Gunma.