Niseko is where the world skis Japan. This is where Japan skis.

Your children will learn to ski here, properly — but skiing is the admission ticket, not the product. The product is a mountain that has not been rebuilt for foreigners.

Niseko is an international resort now. English menus, Australian-run bars, a village that has arranged itself around visitors. It is very good at what it does. It is also not a reason to fly thirteen hours.

Shiga Kogen is full of Japanese school groups. That is not a line we wrote for this page — it is the reason the local elementary school's ski club is on the same beginners' run as your children on the second morning. We did not arrange that. That is simply who else is on the mountain.

Eighteen ski areas, linked, roughly 2,600 hectares. The high point is Mt. Yokote at 2,307 metres — the highest you can reach by lift anywhere in Japan, which is why the hotel at its foot is called 2307.

Altitude is the whole argument. It is what keeps the snow dry and cold through the season rather than turning heavy in February, and it is why Yokoteyama holds its season later into spring than anywhere else in Shiga Kogen. The snow here is natural.

The alpine events of the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics were held in this resort, at Higashidateyama and Yakebitaiyama. Your children will not be skiing those runs. But it tells you what the mountain is.

The resort's own ski school teaches in English and in Japanese. Five or six children to an instructor. Four lesson periods across the day — two hours in the morning, two in the afternoon, with lunch at the hotel in between.

In January 2025 we brought eighty children here from Guangzhou, a city where it is summer all year and where not one of them had stood on snow. They were skiing an easy run on their own by the afternoon.

The snow is why. It is deep and soft enough that falling does not hurt — so a child falls, gets up, gets back on the skis, and falls again, twenty times in a morning. That is the entire method. A hard, icy slope teaches a child to be afraid of the hill.

What the morning actually looks like

Snowsuits are sized before you arrive — we collect heights in advance — and they are in the room, labelled with each child's name, on the evening you check in. Boots, helmets, goggles and gloves are named and waiting in the equipment room on the basement floor. Nobody queues at a rental counter in a foreign language on the first morning.

One true thing. This is a learn-to-ski programme. A child who already skis well will be bored by the afternoon — tell us in advance and they go in a different group.

For the eighty-child group we ran ten children per group with two instructors each, and we brought in a Chinese-speaking instructor from another Nagano resort so those children could hear everything twice. The English instructors are permanent staff at the ski school and need no special arrangement. The Chinese instructor was ours. That is the kind of thing we will do for a group if it matters.

Yamanouchi Higashi Elementary School has a ski club. On a weekday in January they train on the same beginners' run your children are on, and at about 11:30 they arrive.

They ski together for the last half hour of the morning lesson. Then everybody goes back to the hotel and eats lunch in the same dining room — the Japanese children explaining how long they have been skiing and how often they train, the visiting children explaining what they do after school. Small presents change hands. Somebody takes a photograph.

This is the part that is difficult to buy. It runs through the international exchange division of the Nagano Prefecture tourism organisation, and it needs about three months' notice.

One true thing. This depends on a Japanese school's term calendar and on the prefecture's exchange office. It is not available on demand, it is not available in every week of the season, and it takes about three months to arrange. For groups of ten or more it is usually possible. We will tell you early whether your dates work.

Hotel & Onsen 2307 Shigakogen, at the foot of Mt. Yokote. Four baths, drawing on two separate natural springs.

The large indoor bath in the basement is Hotaru Onsen. The open-air bath on the ground floor is Yokoteyama Onsen — a different spring, different water. There is a panorama bath on the fourth floor and a foot bath by the entrance. Rooms are Japanese-style, tatami, normally three or four to a room; two is possible on request.

You walk back to it in three minutes at the end of the day, in ski boots, carrying skis.

One true thing. Three minutes' walk is not ski-in, ski-out, and we will not call it that. And the onsen is a Japanese onsen: you wash first, you go in with nothing on, and it is shared. For some families that is the best part of the trip. For some it is not, and it is better to know now.

Jigokudani Yaen-koen — the valley where wild Japanese macaques come down and sit in a hot spring. It is the photograph everybody has seen, and it is twenty minutes down the mountain from where you slept.

Both the hotel and the park are in Yamanouchi-machi, Nagano. You go on the way home, and then the coach carries on to Tokyo.

One true thing, and it matters. In winter the lower car park is closed and the forest road is shut, so you walk in from Kanbayashi. The board at the entrance says 1.6 kilometres, about twenty-five minutes. The park itself says about thirty-five. With children who have just skied for two days, allow forty each way, and put them in proper boots. A large coach cannot use the forest road in any season.

And the monkeys are wild. They are fed, which is why they gather, but on some days they do not come down. The park says so itself and so do we.

The resort has a drone company based on the mountain under contract. Not a hobby drone we bring along — the operator the resort itself works with, flying under the resort's permissions.

Each group is filmed separately, roughly five to ten minutes of footage, delivered as the original files by download link within a week. Every photograph on this page that is taken from above came from that.

Optional, quoted separately, and it must be booked in advance. Not every resort has this — this one does because the company is based here.

He ran when he should have walked. We took him to the nearest clinic, they X-rayed it to see how deep it was, and the insurance paid.

The reason that was simple is structural: the ski area, the ski school and the lifts belong to one company. When something happens on the mountain, one organisation coordinates with the local medical services — not three organisations pointing at each other. There is a patrol snowmobile parked outside the hotel.

A private school from Guangzhou — eighty students in grades five and six, three teachers, two coaches, three days. Run in two groups of forty on staggered timings so that neither group ever waited.

The year before, sixty students and two teachers from a school in Shenzhen, one day's skiing at a resort within reach of Tokyo.

We work with the ski school directly, and with the international exchange division of the Nagano Prefecture tourism organisation — who sent two of their own staff to the mountain on the day, to help coordinate.

There is no price on this page, on purpose. The number moves with group size — the coach from Tokyo costs the same for six people as for twenty. Tell us how many you are and when you want to come, and we will price it properly. A range would only mislead you.