Live camera
Chikugo River live camera — Fukuoka / Saga / Oita
The largest river in Kyushu, nicknamed the wild river. Near the mouth the tides of the Ariake Sea reverse the direction of flow.
Sample August 2026Watch it here
Play the stream
Nothing is requested from YouTube until you press it. What plays is the operator's own stream; this site neither records nor rebroadcasts it.
What you are looking at
The flow reverses because of the sea this river runs into. The Ariake has the largest tidal range in Japan, moving some six metres at spring tides. That difference reaches inside the river, so the downstream cameras show the level rising and falling within a single day even without rain, and on a rising tide the water can move upstream.
On a calm day the interesting thing is exactly that difference between low and high water. Look up the tide times, then open it twice six hours apart, and you get pictures that do not look like the same place.
This is the longest river in Kyushu, 143 kilometres. Water gathers from 2,860 square kilometres across four prefectures, Kumamoto, Oita, Fukuoka and Saga, and 1.09 million people live in the basin. The source is the Senomoto plateau in Aso; the river comes down through mountains built of volcanic deposits, passes the gorge at Yoake and cuts across the Tsukushi plain. Whether the rain falls on the Aso side or the plain side changes how the water comes.
Nineteen large floods are on record since the Meiji era. Three of them, in 1889, 1921 and 1953, are called the three great floods of the Chikugo and did damage across the whole basin. The flood of June 1953 killed 147 people, and the peak discharge at Yoake upstream is estimated at 9,000 to 10,000 cubic metres per second. Recently too, the river passed its flood danger level twice in July 2012 and ran far above its design high-water level in July 2017.
In rain, on the other hand, the size of the catchment shows. The end of the rainy season in June and July, and typhoons, move it most. Leave evacuation decisions to the local authorities. The feed rotates between points.
About this camera
| Place | Fukuoka / Saga / Oita |
| Format | Live video, rotating |
| Time zone | Asia/Tokyo (UTC+9) |
| Category | River |
| Operator | MLIT river live streams |
| Terms of use | Government Standard Terms 2.0 |
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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