Nature Observatory

458 live cameras published by government bodies, prefectures, public organisations and local operators, drawn from 41 sources. Most of them watch national parks, volcanoes, wetlands, the places migratory birds arrive, Japan's major rivers, the temples, shrines and approaches of Kyoto, and street crossings and station fronts. Each card's photo is a single sample image copied from the operator 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 operator's page.

295 are live video; the other 163 are still images.

Cameras run by public agencies exist for disaster prevention and observation, and continuous video is expensive in bandwidth, so most of them still post one fresh frame every 2 minutes to every hour instead. Of the video feeds, 98 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 rest of the Japanese ones are 27 crowd cameras on the temples, shrines and approaches of Kyoto, 4 on Kenrokuen and Kanazawa Castle from Ishikawa Prefecture, the night sky from the Ishigaki Island observatory, and 28 that local operators publish under their own names. That last group is the mountain huts and hotels of Kamikochi and Aso, the street corners of Shinjuku and Shibuya, the precincts of Senso-ji, Zenko-ji and Kinpusen-ji, and the station squares and temple approaches of Fukui, Toyama, Kamakura and Izumo. 137 come from 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. Beyond that, the 25 cameras whose broadcasters allow embedding play right here, without leaving the page. Their cards carry a Play here label, and the same Format row will show only those.

About the cameras listed here

Listed here are 430 cameras published by national agencies, prefectures and public bodies themselves, and 28 published under their own names by the owners of the places or by local broadcasters. Every one of them is published by the operator; nothing here has been picked up from somebody else's camera without asking. A sample image is shown only where the terms (PDL 1.0, CC BY and the like) allow use on a commercial site with attribution. Where the operator does not permit reproduction, the camera is listed as a link only, with no sample. Source names and licence terms are listed at the foot of this page. For the images themselves, follow the link to each source's own page.

Format

Region

Subject

Browse by region58 places

Each prefecture and country has a page on what you can see there, and when it is worth looking.

Browse by subject177 sites

Some subjects span several prefectures, like Mount Fuji; some are watched by more than one agency, like Sakurajima; some move with the season, like the autumn leaves. Rivers, temple approaches and station crossings are gathered here too, with what to look for and the hours that suit it.

Browse by category8 categories

Volcanoes, rivers, migratory birds, the night sky. When you want a kind of camera rather than a particular place, each category has its own page, with what to look for and the season to look in.

Reading12 articles

Things the camera list alone cannot tell you. Tap a heading to read.

Every camera, listed458 cameras

The list above is filtered as you click. This one never moves: every camera, grouped by prefecture and country. Tap a name for that camera's own page.

Hokkaido17

Aomori4

Iwate2

Miyagi2

Akita2

Yamagata2

Fukushima4

Tochigi4

Gunma7

Saitama3

Tokyo19

Kanagawa2

Niigata4

Toyama4

Ishikawa6

Fukui13

Nagano8

Yamanashi2

Shizuoka5

Mie2

Shiga2

Kyoto34

Hyogo5

Nara3

Wakayama3

Tottori11

Shimane10

Okayama10

Hiroshima9

Yamaguchi6

Tokushima4

Ehime4

Fukuoka5

Saga3

Nagasaki2

Kumamoto7

Oita5

Miyazaki5

Kagoshima9

United States89

South Korea14

New Zealand11

Iceland6

Norway5

Taiwan40

South Africa9

Canada8

Kenya6

Costa Rica3

DR Congo3

Botswana2

Panama2

Honduras2

Elsewhere4

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External links

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About the operator

Operator

Kanrinin A (run by one person)

Contact

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]

What this site is

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.

Sources and licence terms in full