Live camera
Kushimoto Marine Park live camera — Kushimoto, Wakayama
An underwater camera on coral and fish living in water warmed by the Kuroshio Current. Visibility changes a great deal from day to day.
Sample August 2026What you are looking at
A camera in the water, showing directly the coral and fish that live in the warm sea the Kuroshio carries. Visibility varies enormously from day to day.
Coral grows here, close to the southern end of Honshu, because the Kuroshio runs straight onto this shore. Warm water arriving from the tropics keeps the temperature from falling far enough in winter, so creatures far more southerly than the latitude suggests gather here. As a place where table corals grow in a continuous stand, this is among the most northerly in the world.
This stretch of sea was listed under the Ramsar Convention in 2005, the first coral community in Japan to be entered, at a time when marine sites of any kind were still rare on the list. More than a hundred reef-building coral species have been recorded between Kushimoto and the island of Oshima.
Avoid the days after rain. When murky water runs off the land, an underwater camera goes milky. Midday on a clear, calm day is when you see furthest in. On a very clear day the view reaches more than ten metres; when it is turbid, even the nearest rock is hazy.
The sea off Kushimoto was named a national marine park zone in 1970, among the first such areas in the country. Until then a park meant land, and this was the first arrangement that fenced off the inside of the sea itself in order to protect it. The underwater observation tower and the sightseeing boats that let people look in were put there to go with the designation.
Updates come once an hour. An underwater camera darkens earlier than one on land, and is already hard to read once the sun drops.
About this camera
| Place | Kushimoto, Wakayama |
| Format | Still, hourly |
| Time zone | Asia/Tokyo (UTC+9) |
| Category | Sea · Wildlife |
| Operator | Ministry of the Environment — Internet Nature Institute |
| Terms of use | PDL 1.0 |
The operator's own 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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