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Sea: 62 Live Cameras

Coastlines, straits, beaches — and underwater. Tide and swell rebuild the frame several times a day. Check the tide table, not the forecast.

Sample frame from Kushimoto Marine Park (August 2026)
Kushimoto Marine Park · Sample August 2026

What you can see

Sea cameras were installed for wildly different reasons: some watch a strait for navigation safety, some hold a fixed frame on a beach to measure coastal erosion, and some have simply been sunk underwater for visitors and schools.

What makes them interesting is that the same place changes repeatedly within a single day. A land camera shows the same view until the weather turns; the sea runs on a roughly twelve-hour tidal cycle. Some rocks appear only at low water, and some beaches double in width.

New Zealand's coastal cameras run on the opposite season to Japan's. When it is deep winter here, those are summer beaches.

Cameras you can watch now: 62

30 video, 32 still. Tap one to open it in the camera list.

Hokkaido1

Aomori1

Tokyo7

Toyama1

Fukui2

Shizuoka2

Mie1

Hyogo1

Wakayama1

Okayama1

Ehime1

Kagoshima4

United States13

South Korea4

New Zealand2

Iceland4

Norway4

Taiwan3

South Africa1

Canada3

Honduras2

Kagawa1

Elsewhere2

When to watch

Read them against a tide table. In the hour either side of low water, things that normally sit submerged come up. At high water the swell reaches the structures, and on a rough day you get to watch it break.

By season, the Sea of Japan coast in winter is in a class of its own. A sustained northwesterly builds the swell until whitecaps fill the frame even on a clear day. The Pacific side is the reverse — calmer in winter, with air clear enough to show distant islands.

For time of day, around sunrise and sunset. The sea reflects the sky, so the colour shifts harder than it does on land. Point a camera near the horizon and you get the sun coming out of the water, or going into it.

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Agencies publishing the cameras on this page

The footage belongs to each agency. This site is an unofficial guide, and each sample frame was copied once per camera under that agency's terms of use.

To find other cameras, go to the camera list. You can narrow the cameras by format, region, subject and provider.