Iiyama: one town, more than 15 noteworthy ski areas within range

Iiyama is a small city in northern Nagano with a Shinkansen station, a few supermarkets, a short street of bars and no ski resort of its own. It has been called "Snow Country's Little Kyoto" because of its history and temples.

It also has more ski areas within an hour's drive than pretty much anywhere else in Japan, including Nozawa Onsen, Madarao, the five ski areas of Myoko Kogen, Arai, Ryuoo, Shiga Kogen and Togakushi. If you rent a vehicle and stay here, you pay a fraction of what the same dates cost in a resort village, and can drive each morning to whichever mountain caught the most snow overnight.

If you aren't comfortable with driving, there is an extensive bus network from Iiyama station to most of the big resorts, as the station is the gateway to the area, but the buses may not be frequent.

If you are comfortable with driving, few bases in Honshu give you this many mountains for this little money.

The driving, honestly

Rental cars in this part of Nagano come with winter tyres as standard, and it's definitely best to get all-wheel drive. It is not really about the main roads, which are cleared and well maintained. It's that the snow here is light and dry, so a two-wheel-drive car can struggle for grip on an incline, and after a heavy night of snow it's easy to get stuck in a car park.

Finding parking is rarely the problem foreign visitors expect it to be. Even Nozawa over New Year usually has spaces, and driving in can be less hassle than walking to the lifts from a village hotel. Shiga Kogen at peak season can be tricky, but there is always another village and another car park somewhere in the network.

A powder day in the trees

Madarao, 15 minutes away, is the natural first stop after fresh snow. It sits in a bowl that piles up snow, leaves around 60 per cent of its 31 runs ungroomed, and has some of the best marked tree skiing in Nagano, with proper designated zones rather than a grey-area tolerance. One pass links it over the top to Tangram, for about 125 hectares between them.

Seki Onsen, up in the Myoko group 35 to 40 minutes out, is two chairlifts and not much else, but it holds deep snow and takes a relaxed view of the ropes, and there is a small, fast crowd that sprints for the upper chair the moment it spins. Ryuoo, 25 minutes the other way, is packed with locals and almost unknown to foreign skiers. A 166-person ropeway lifts you to a cloud terrace at 1,770m; below it is more than 1,000m of vertical and a big, steep, well-spaced tree zone you sign in for at the top. Lap it early and leave once it is tracked.

A big day out

Nozawa Onsen is the region's serious resort: 36 trails, 1,085m of vertical, a fast gondola, and a genuine onsen town at the bottom with a dozen free public bathhouses. It is 20 minutes from the station, five from the northern edge of Iiyama, and it is also the busiest mountain here and the reason beds in the village sell out by summer. Shiga Kogen, 40 minutes to the nearest gate at Sun Valley, is the largest linked ski area in Japan, 18 fields on one pass running from nursery greens to the narrow 1998 Olympic courses. It deserves its own trip but works as a long day.

A bad-weather backup

When it is blowing through and the trees are a whiteout, the low, sheltered ski areas earn their place. Togari, across the valley from Nozawa, is wide, gentle and quiet, about 13 runs and 650m of vertical. Cupid Valley, locally nicknamed Yukidaruma Kogen or Snowman Highland, sits just over the Niigata border under near-constant snowfall, with snow walls along the approach road and one of the fastest quad chairs in the country. X-JAM and neighbouring Yomase, on a shared ticket 25 minutes away, are the answer when half the group wants park laps and the rest want easy runs.

Cupid Valley and Cupid of Romance are two different ski areas, despite the names. Cupid Valley is the one above, over the border in Niigata. Cupid of Romance is in Nagano, at Kijimadaira, and it is the same ski area that was called Kijimadaira until the 2023 season, when it took the title of Kohmi Hirose's 1993 song "Romance no Kamisama" under a naming rights deal. They are about 27km apart, in different prefectures, and share nothing but the word.

Arai, when it dumps

Arai is 45 minutes away and a different kind of place: Lotte reopened it in 2017 as a polished, high-end resort, and an unusual amount of its in-bounds terrain is marked free-ride zone, so the accessible off-piste is huge. It takes up to 18 metres of snow a season and shows you the Sea of Japan from the top on a clear day. Everyone in the region knows this, so on a powder day the car park is full by mid-morning. Go early or not at all.

A day off the powder chase

Togakushi, 45 minutes out past Nagano city, is a small ski area, but the 400-year-old avenue of cedars leading to Togakushi Shrine runs right beside it, and there is handmade soba at the bottom of the path. Ski the morning, walk the shrine path in the afternoon. On a trip built around chasing snow, a planned day like this one is worth more than it sounds.

Where to base, and what it costs

Iiyama has far less lodging than the terrain around it deserves, which is the one real weakness of the plan. It falls into three loose areas. North Iiyama, five to ten minutes from Nozawa and Togari, has guesthouses and two-bed houses, very roughly ¥20,000 to ¥45,000 a night. Central Iiyama, around the station, has two plain business hotels you can book online, guesthouses at ¥6,000 to ¥10,000, and hostels at ¥4,000 to ¥6,000 still run on the 1990s budget-Japan ski-tour model. West Iiyama and the neighbouring towns turn up the occasional larger house, and Airbnb fills gaps. Prices move fast from season to season, so treat any figure as a rough guide and book as far ahead as you can.

Eating, and the one rental point

There is enough here to eat well for a week without ever hitting a tourist menu: hotpot inside a snow igloo at Kamakura Village, which is winter-only and needs booking; Kyoto-style obanzai at Waremokou; handmade soba at Shioiri; sushi at Matsumi or Satomi. The bars are gathered in Minamimachi, ten minutes' walk from the station, and Bar End is the pick, a small European-style room with a real wine list.

The one thing to plan around is gear: there are no rental shops in Iiyama town. Hire at whichever resort you ski, and start and finish the trip at the same one so the return is simple. If you are moving mountains daily, Japan Snowsports will bring instructors to whichever resort you have chosen that morning.

The feel

What Iiyama has, mostly, is a station, a supermarket, a few izakaya, and the best spread of skiing in the country on its doorstep. That is the entire pitch: nobody built this place for visitors, so nothing here is priced or performed for them. Anyone chasing the resort-town version of Japan should drive the twenty minutes to Nozawa instead. Anyone who would rather put that money into the car and the lift tickets, and wake up each day picking a different mountain, will struggle to do better anywhere else in the country.

Need to know

Getting there

Hokuriku Shinkansen from Tokyo, about 1h40, into the centre of town. Resort buses run to the major resorts and are timed to the early trains.

Getting around

A car with all-wheel drive and studless tyres to use the cluster properly. Rentals in Iiyama, more in Nagano; book ahead.

In range

Madarao and Tangram, Nozawa, Togari, the five Myoko ski areas, Arai, Ryuoo, X-JAM and Yomase, Cupid Valley, Togakushi, and the near edge of Shiga Kogen. All under an hour on dry roads (12 to 50 minutes); winter driving on the furthest ones will run longer.

Lift passes

Per resort. Madarao and Tangram share a pass; X-JAM and Yomase share a ticket; one pass covers all of Shiga Kogen (also on the Ikon Pass).

Rentals

At the resorts, not in Iiyama town.

Snow

Northern Nagano is one of the snowiest inhabited places in Japan; the Myoko resorts regularly clear 14 metres a season.