Live cameras in Itō, Japan

Ito is a hot spring city on the east coast of the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture, facing Sagami Bay. Its 124 square kilometers run from a deeply indented, rocky shoreline up into green hills, and about 63,000 people lived here in 2023. Tourism is the main business, built on many onsen inns, with fishing as a second trade. History buffs know Ito as the place where the Englishman William Adams built Japan's first Western-style sailing ships in the early seventeenth century. The lava coast of Jogasaki and the smooth, bowl-shaped cone of Mount Omuro are the best-known landmarks.

The land under Ito is a young volcanic field, the Izu-Tobu (East Izu) volcano group, made of many small vents that each erupt only once. Mount Omuro, 580 m high, is one of them and formed about 4,000 years ago. In July 1989 a new submarine vent, later named Teishi Knoll, broke the sea surface with a short series of explosions only about 4 km northeast of the city, after a swarm of earthquakes. The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) watches the area with cameras at Ohara and Osaki, shown here, plus two more on Izu-Oshima across the water, looking at the northwest caldera rim and the ground north of the central crater of Mount Mihara. These JMA stills update every couple of minutes and help forecasters judge the Volcanic Alert Level, which runs from 1 to 5.

When to look

Ito keeps Japan Standard Time, UTC+9, with no daylight saving. Winter brings the clearest air for spotting Izu-Oshima across the sea, while the June rainy season and summer haze often blur it. On the second Sunday of February, weather permitting, Mount Omuro's dry grass is set alight in the old yamayaki burning, which clears the old growth and leaves the cone dark until new grass sprouts in spring.

Along the same coast, the hiking path above the Jogasaki cliffs is popular. To the north, our Gotemba page has cameras on Hakone's steaming valley near Mount Fuji.

Sources: Ito, Shizuoka - Wikipedia · The 1989 submarine eruption off eastern Izu Peninsula (Bulletin of Volcanology) · Mount Omuro - Explore Shizuoka · JMA volcano monitoring cameras.