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Owakudani, Hakone: 1 Live Camera in Japan

The steaming valley behind the hot-spring resorts of Hakone — a volcano with a town inside its caldera. Owakudani is watched every two minutes.

What you can see

Hakone is known as a resort, but Lake Ashi and the hot-spring towns are all inside a volcanic caldera. The part still active is Owakudani, which is where this camera points.

At Owakudani, sulphurous steam vents from points all across the ground, and the slope is bleached and bare where nothing will grow. White smoke rising from an entire valley is a rare sight in Japan. It is also where the black eggs are made, boiled in the spring water.

Activity picked up in 2015, the eruption alert level was raised and the area was closed off. This camera exists to watch for exactly that kind of change.

Cameras you can watch now: 1

All 1 are still images. Tap one to open it in the camera list.

When to watch

Steam shows better the colder it is, because the same volume of vapour condenses white in cold air. On a winter morning, particularly just after dawn from December to February, the whole valley can look covered in smoke.

On a summer afternoon the opposite: the steam dissolves into the air and barely registers, leaving a frame of pale ground and patchy green.

Hakone gets a lot of fog, and when damp air comes up from the sea the valley disappears wholesale. A clear forecast is no guarantee, so use the two-minute refresh and come back later.

If it isn't showing

Hakone is a foggy place. When damp air climbs from the sea side the whole valley disappears, so a clear forecast is no guarantee. The two-minute refresh is what helps most: leave it and open it again. Nothing is visible after sunset.

This is the only camera in Kanagawa. Nearby, Mount Fuji has four to the west and Izu Oshima lies offshore to the south. Hakone and Fuji sit in the same airflow, so opening both shows which side the cloud is coming from.

Where to find Owakudani, Hakone

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.