Town of Karuizawa live cams

Karuizawa is a mountain resort town in Nagano prefecture, and its town hall runs the camera that watches Mount Asama from the south. A municipal government is an unusual camera operator for a volcano, and the reason is simple: Asama is one of the most active volcanoes on Honshū, and Karuizawa sits at the bottom of it.

The town

Westerners began summering here in the late nineteenth century, escaping the heat of Tokyo, and the town has been a holiday place ever since — quiet, wooded, and now about an hour from the capital by shinkansen. It also holds an Olympic distinction no other town has: it hosted equestrian events at the Tokyo Summer Games of 1964 and the curling at the Nagano Winter Games of 1998, making it the first place to stage events at both a summer and a winter Olympics.

What the camera shows

The view is the whole south face of the volcano above the town, which is the side most people picture when they think of Asama: a broad, flattened cone of 2,568 metres with a bare grey summit. It is the general view rather than a close one, so a plume shows against the sky and the snow line is easy to follow through the year. The alert level for Asama is not set by the town but by the Japan Meteorological Agency, and it appears on the volcano's page here.