Live camera
Matsuura River live camera — Karatsu, Saga
It crosses the Karatsu plain to the Genkai Sea. Sandbars build near the mouth, and the look of it changes with the tide.
Sample August 2026Watch it here
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What you are looking at
Sand piles up at the mouth like this because the sand the river brings down and the force of the open-sea waves pushing back are in balance. On that sand, in the Edo period, pines were planted to protect the fields from wind and sand. The long belt of pines still running along the coast is that planting, and it is counted among the three great pine groves of Japan. How the land itself came to be and what people did to it are laid over each other here.
On a calm day the tide times are the interesting way to watch. At low water the sandbar shows broadly; at high water it hides. Open it twice six hours apart and the difference is plain.
The source is Mount Seira in Yamauchi, Takeo, only 599 metres high. This is not a river falling from a high mountain, so the gradient is gentle even upstream and bedrock shows through the channel in places. It runs 47 kilometres over a basin of 446 square kilometres, all of it inside Saga Prefecture, with about 100,000 people.
Large floods here take two forms. One is the rainy-season front settling over this basin with a low passing along it. The other is a typhoon out at sea to the southwest feeding moist air into that front. Both fall in the rainy season. In the flood of June 1953 more than 30,000 houses were inundated above floor level, and the floods of July 1967 and July 1990 damaged the whole length of the river.
Rain moves it at the end of the rainy season in June and July, and in typhoons. Leave evacuation decisions to the local authorities.
About this camera
| Place | Karatsu, Saga |
| 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.