The phrase yukiguni — snow country — entered the export lexicon through Kawabata, and it has been stretched ever since. The 1962 Heavy Snowfall Areas Act designates over five hundred municipalities; JR's marketing map runs from Aomori to the Chugoku range; every prefecture with a chairlift now claims the word somewhere in its tourism copy.
We cover six prefectures: Hokkaido, Nagano, Niigata, Yamagata, Akita, and Gifu. The test was simple and we applied it without sentiment. A region qualified if it clears ten metres of typical seasonal snowfall at village height — not summit height — and holds both a functioning ski economy and a municipal akiya bank with inventory a foreigner can realistically transact.
That second clause did the cutting. Aomori's snowfall is heroic but its bank inventory rarely reaches the market before demolition. Toyama's housing stock is interesting but its resorts are day-hills. Gunma and Tochigi ski well and hold almost no deep-snow housing at all. We would rather cover six regions to the depth of a town-by-town road-clearing map than sixteen to the depth of a press release.
The list is not closed. If Aomori's banks modernise their process — there are signs, in Hirakawa, that they might — we will add a seventh chapter and say so plainly. Until then, six is the honest number.
Everything on this site follows from that choice. The resort index compares twenty-five mountains rather than two hundred because those are the ones inside the six. The property index watches the banks of the towns you see named on each regional brief. When the two overlap — a house within twenty minutes of a lift — that is the centre of our coverage, and, we suspect, the reason you are reading.