The sparsely covered trees, he said, were “not really what I was looking for.”

On good days, the snow-covered trees still look gorgeous, but at the Zao Onsen Tourism Association, where posters adorn the walls showing juhyo in their wide-girthed glory, Hachiemon Ito, a local hotel owner and chairman of the association, acknowledged that what we had seen on the mountain were scraggly editions.

“What you see today, we would not describe as juhyo in the past,” Mr. Ito said. “In the past they used to be so much more beautiful.”

He said the town hoped to survive on tourists attracted to the hot spring baths, known as onsen, and local cuisine, as well as visitors from countries that do not get much snow.

In a sign of some climate change consciousness, the hotel where we stayed had turned on just one space heater in each room, leaving a sign on the other noting that because of global warming, the owners were trying to conserve energy.