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The Kuroshio Coast: 3 Live Cameras in Japan

The Kuroshio is a warm current that runs west to east along Japan's Pacific side. Three cameras sit on the coast it touches — Kushimoto, Ago Bay and Yumigahama — listed in the direction the current flows.

What you can see

The Kuroshio carries warm water up from lower latitudes, so the coast it reaches runs warmer than other seas at the same latitude. All three cameras belong to Japan's Ministry of the Environment, but they show very different things.

Kushimoto Marine Park is an underwater camera. Coral grows this far north because of the current, and the camera sits among it with the fish. Visibility swings hard from day to day; on a murky day you see almost nothing.

Ago Bay is a view from above. From Mount Yokoyama the camera looks down on a ria coastline of countless islets and inlets. The thin lines on the water are pearl-culture rafts.

Yumigahama is a beach. A bow-curved stretch of sand and a calm inlet: in summer there are swimmers, and the rest of the year only the waves and the pines move.

Cameras you can watch now: 3

All 3 are still images. Tap one to open it in the camera list.

When to watch

For Kushimoto, avoid the days after rain — runoff from the land turns the water milky. A clear, windless midday reaches deepest.

Ago Bay and Yumigahama are best in the morning calm, when the inlets go flat and the islands double in the water. For Yumigahama at its busiest, look on a summer afternoon.

All three refresh hourly. After dark the land cameras show nothing, and the underwater one at Kushimoto goes dark earlier still, as soon as the sun drops.

If it isn't showing

These are cameras from the Ministry's nature-observation service, not beach webcams. They exist to show what the park coastline is normally like — which arguably makes the empty seasons the more honest picture.

For calm inland sea there is Setouchi, for open-ocean islands the Izu Islands, and for a mountain seen across water Mount Fuji.

Where to find The Kuroshio Coast

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 all 173 cameras by format, region, subject and provider.
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