Live camera
Kamikochi bus terminal live camera — Matsumoto, Nagano
The Hotaka range through larch woods, seen from the gateway to Kamikochi. At 1,500 m with no town lights nearby, on a clear night the same frame fills with stars.
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What you are looking at
The square at the entrance to Kamikochi. Private cars cannot come in here, so the buses and taxis pulling up are the whole of the traffic in and out — how crowded this screen looks is how crowded Kamikochi is.
The mountain ahead is Mount Yake, an active volcano of 2,455 metres. Its 1915 eruption dammed the Azusa River and created Taisho Pond, a little downstream. The scenery Kamikochi is famous for was shaped by that eruption.
Buses arrive in a steady line through the morning, dropping walkers off; by late afternoon the queue is people coming down off the mountain. The direction the crowd flows reverses over the course of a day.
Private cars were first restricted in 1975, and shut out year-round from 1996. It was an early case of banning cars inside a Japanese national park; today you leave the car at Sawando or Hirayu and change to a bus. The only way into the valley is the single road through the Kama Tunnel, so if that closes, the whole of Kamikochi closes with it. Whether this square is packed or empty is a readout on the state of that one road.
The valley is only open from spring to late autumn. Outside that window the camera shows an empty square — and a snowed-in bus terminal is a sight you can only get in the months when nobody can go. It is a live feed, so you can see how long the queue actually is.
About this camera
| Place | Matsumoto, Nagano |
| Format | Live video |
| Time zone | Asia/Tokyo (UTC+9) |
| Category | Nature |
| Operator | Nature Parks Foundation |
| Terms of use | Links free, no reuse |
The operator's own page
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