Volcano
Mount Kurikoma: 1 Live Camera in Japan
A mountain where three prefectures meet. The Meteorological Agency watches it as a volcano, and the slope above the treeline turns colour in early October.
What you can see
Mount Kurikoma stands where Iwate, Miyagi and Akita meet. The camera is one the Japan Meteorological Agency put there to watch for an eruption, not to show scenery, and it points at the summit and the crater side.
Because of that, what fills the frame is the mountain itself. Most of the picture is above the treeline, so what turns colour in autumn is not foliage but the ground cover. Tall trees do not grow at that height, so low shrubs like rowan and the grasses change across the whole slope at once. From a distance it looks as though the mountainside is moving from summer green to rust.
The peak is pulled in with a long lens, so on a bad day the mountain disappears from the frame. Inside cloud, the picture is a single flat grey.
Every frame has the date and time burned into it. The digits in the corner tell you how old the picture is.
Cameras you can watch now: 1
All 1 are still images. Tap one to open it in the camera list.
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Sample August 2026
Mount Kurikoma
Iwate / Miyagi / Akita border · Volcano · Nature
A mountain shared by three prefectures. Autumn colour from late September into October is intense, and you can watch it move down the slope.
When to watch
It refreshes every two minutes, so what you open is close to now. It is a still, so nothing moves, but wait a little and reload and the picture has changed.
The colour usually comes in the first days of October, though it shifts by a week or two from year to year and runs late after a summer whose heat lingered. It comes down from the top, so the upper and lower halves of the same frame are never at the same stage.
Morning is the time to look. High peaks start growing cloud before noon, and the summit stays visible far longer early in the day. This is a visible-light camera, so after sunset the frame goes close to black.
In winter it is under snow, and snow on the slope makes the gullies easier to read. Where the snow refuses to settle, the ground underneath is warm.
If it isn't showing
Eruption warning levels and access restrictions are not written here. Before going anywhere near the mountain, read what the JMA itself publishes; the provider link on the card goes to the agency's own page.
To see it beside the mountains around it, The Volcanoes of Tohoku. All 49 cameras the agency points at volcanoes are gathered in JMA Volcano Watch Cameras. Ordered by when the colour arrives, Autumn Leaves; by when the first snow settles, First Snowcap.
Every volcano camera on the site is in Volcanoes, and reading a volcano camera is written up on its own.
Where to find Mount Kurikoma
Agencies publishing the cameras on this page
- Japan Meteorological Agency — volcano surveillance cameras (PDL 1.0) — Official site
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.