Japan has a lot of ski resorts! In fact, snowjapan.com states Japan has about 450. For me, Japan is the most perfect place in the world. It is an archipeligo of 4 main islands stretching significantly north, south, east and west. The geography, the weather and seasons are amazing. Winter is of course my favorite. In February in Tokyo, it is often sunny but cool. Not shorts’ weather at all but certainly not excessively cold. Jump in a bullet train for 1.5 hrs and *poof*, you are at a ski resort where it is snowing! Japan is blessed with a mountain range through the middle of Honshu, the big island. On the Pacific side, sunny and warmer. The mountain range which runs north and south acts like a great big wall, protecting its Pacific side from cold, snowy weather. It also means, as the clouds come over the cold Asian continent and picks up moisture in the Sea of Japan, it dumps heavy snow when it hits these ski mountains, 450 of them!
I have tried to pull in data from openstreetmaps.org. With that data, I have used QGIS to further calculate interesting attributes of each ski mountain or resort such as maximum elevation, minimum elevations, total vertical, length of all ski runs, number of ski runs, same for lifts, and so on. After that, I have place everything over a digital elevation model to make it interactive. Each map comes with a corresponding datatable which displays this info. Zooming in and out of the map makes the datatable refresh with only objects in the rendered window. It is an interactive Japan ski resort map. Try it out!
Regards
RIchard / freshsnow.jp