172 monitoring cameras published by government bodies and public research institutes, drawn from 13 agencies. Most of them watch national parks, volcanoes, wetlands, the places migratory birds arrive, and Japan's major rivers. Each card's photo is a single sample image copied from the agency with permission, labelled with the month it was taken. Cards without one show a drawing of the local sky at the camera's own local time. Tap a card to go to the agency's page.
These cameras exist for disaster prevention and observation, and continuous video is expensive in bandwidth, so most agencies still post one fresh frame every 2 minutes to every hour instead. Of the video feeds, 35 are river cameras streamed on YouTube by Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, where a single stream cycles through several cameras along the river (all of them trial streams). The remaining 19 come from public agencies abroad: 14 Korean national parks, plus the erupting Kilauea volcano, the International Space Station, a bald eagle nest, a deep-sea remotely operated vehicle, and a geyser. Every card says which kind it is at the top, so you can tell before opening it. The Format filter above narrows the list to video only or stills only.
Every camera here is published by a government body or public research institute itself.
Only those whose terms (PDL 1.0, CC BY and the like) allow use on a
commercial site with attribution are included.
Agency names and licence terms are listed at the foot of this page. For the images
themselves, follow the link to each agency's own page.
Each prefecture and country has a page on what you can see there, and when it is worth looking.
Some subjects span several prefectures, like Mount Fuji, and some are watched by more than one agency, like Sakurajima. Those have their own pages, with what to look for and the hours that suit it.
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Kanrinin A (run by one person)
Please get in touch through the contact form or by email. Requests from listed agencies to remove or correct an entry, and reports of broken links, come to the same place.
Email: [email protected]
This is a personal site whose purpose is to point people to monitoring cameras published by government bodies and public research institutes. It is not the official site of any listed agency, and it has no permission, sponsorship or partnership from any of them. The images and video themselves are published on the agencies' own sites; this site does not stream, store or redistribute any of it.