Live camera
Owakudani, Hakone live camera — Hakone, Kanagawa
A valley venting steam without pause. Activity rose in 2015 and the area was closed; part of it has since reopened.
Sample August 2026What you are looking at
Owakudani, on Mount Hakone. A pale bare slope fills much of the frame, with steam rising off it.
Owakudani is a collapse scar left by a steam explosion about three thousand years ago. Water heated underground keeps venting as steam, and the whole area carries the smell of sulphur. The black-shelled eggs cooked in its hot springs are a Hakone speciality. A small eruption in 2015 closed the site for a time.
The last magma to come out in this area was the eruption of Kamiyama about 3,200 years ago. The north side of Kamiyama collapsed, which built Kanmurigatake, and the debris that ran down dammed the Haya River. What that made is Lake Ashi. Two of the landscapes Hakone is best known for are the product of one single eruption. In May 1933 a steam vent at Owakudani burst and one person was killed.
Steam reads better the colder it is: the same volume of water vapour condenses white in cold air. In the first light of a December-to-February morning, the whole valley can look as though it is under smoke. Summer afternoons are the opposite — the steam dissolves into the air and barely registers.
Hakone is misty country. When damp air pushes up from the sea the valley disappears entirely, so use the two-minute refresh: leave it a while and open it again.
About this camera
| Place | Hakone, Kanagawa |
| Format | Still, every 2 min |
| Time zone | Asia/Tokyo (UTC+9) |
| Category | Volcano · Nature |
| Operator | Japan Meteorological Agency — volcano surveillance cameras |
| 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.