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Kamikochi: 2 Live Cameras in Japan

A flat valley floor at 1,500 m on the Azusa river, with the Hotaka range to the north and Mount Yake to the south. Both cameras — Kappa-bashi and the bus terminal — are live video, and both play inside this page.

What you can see

Kamikochi is a long, narrow strip of flat ground on the floor of the Azusa valley. The Hotaka range stands to the north and Mount Yake to the south, and it was Yake's 1915 eruption that dammed the Azusa and created Taisho Pond. That landform is why you can stand on the valley floor and still look up at 3,000-metre ridgelines.

Kappa-bashi is the suspension bridge over the Azusa. Face upstream from it and the Hotaka range is straight ahead — the best-known view in Kamikochi, and also where everybody gathers. The number of people on the bridge tells you how busy the place is that day.

The bus terminal is the gateway to Kamikochi, looking at the same ridge through larch woods. At 1,500 m with no town lights anywhere near, a clear night turns the same framing into a star field.

Both streams come from the people who look after the place: Kappa-bashi from the Gosenjaku Hotel Kamikochi at the foot of the bridge, and the bus terminal from the Nature Parks Foundation, which is contracted to manage grounds inside the national park.

Cameras you can watch now: 2

All 2 are live video. Tap one to open it in the camera list.

When to watch

Kamikochi is open only from mid-April to mid-November (17 April to 15 November in 2026), and even then private cars cannot go in. The cameras open at any season and any hour, so you can have Kappa-bashi at dawn with nobody on it.

Morning is the better bet. Being a valley floor, it pools fog on cold clear nights, but once that lifts the late morning gives the sharpest ridgeline. Cloud builds over the Hotaka side through the afternoon, and in summer it hides the ridge more often than not.

Through the year, the larches turn yellow from mid to late October. For a few days each year there is snow on the upper Hotaka while the valley is still in autumn colour — two seasons in one frame.

If it isn't showing

Kamikochi is a valley floor ringed on three sides by 3,000 m peaks, so its weather differs sharply from Matsumoto down below. The town can be clear while cloud sits in the valley alone, and just after the morning fog lifts the valley can be clearer than the town.

Both are live video, so there is no waiting, but both are equipment standing out in the open. On a rough day water on the lens dulls the picture. Kamikochi is open from around mid-April to mid-November, and outside that there is nobody on site. While the operators have the stream off, nothing plays on this page either.

Nagano has eight cameras, three of them Meteorological Agency volcano cameras. Mount Yake, which dammed the river to make Taisho Pond, is one of them, on Mount Yake and Niigata-Yakeyama — the mountain you look up at from Kamikochi, seen from outside the valley. The ridge continues south to Mount Norikura. All eight are on the Nagano page.

Where to find Kamikochi

Agencies publishing the cameras on this 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.

To find other cameras, go to the camera list. You can narrow the cameras by format, region, subject and provider.