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Kagoshima Live Cameras in Japan — 9 official webcams

Sakurajima on two cameras, four island volcanoes of the southwest, the cranes of the Izumi plain, and two rivers. No prefecture in Japan has more volcano cameras.

What you can see

Nine cameras puts Kagoshima among the best-covered prefectures in Japan. Six are Japan Meteorological Agency volcanoes, one is the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism's set on Sakurajima, two are rivers, and one is the Ministry of the Environment's cranes. Volcanoes account for seven of the nine because the prefecture runs south as a chain of islands.

Two agencies point cameras at Sakurajima independently. The Ministry's cameras watch plume, ashfall and debris flows; the Meteorological Agency's watches the cone from across the water at Kagoshima city. The angles are different.

The island volcanoes are Satsuma-Iwojima, Kuchinoerabujima, Nakanoshima and Suwanosejima. Satsuma-Iwojima is known for the iron leaching out of it, which stains the surrounding sea red-brown.

9 cameras in Kagoshima

2 video, 7 still. Tap one to open it in the camera list.

When to watch

Sakurajima has two cameras, one from the ministry and one from the Meteorological Agency. Watch the summit for a while and you can tell whether it is venting. Cloud and ash plume are genuinely hard to tell apart; the plume is the one that rises straight off the summit before the wind takes it.

The cranes of the Izumi plain are a special case even among the bird cameras here. Most of the world's hooded cranes winter on this one plain, arriving between late October and November and heading north from around February. Nowhere else on earth gathers them in these numbers.

The four southwestern island cameras sit on small islands surrounded by sea and are heavily weather-dependent. Catch a clear day and you get the rare sight of a volcano and the ocean in one frame.

Closer looks at cameras here

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.

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