Kushiro City Live Camera

This camera covers Kushiro, a fishing port city on Hokkaido's Pacific coast known for dense summer sea fog, a strong fisheries industry, and its nearby Kushiro Shitsugen wetlands, Japan's largest marsh and a refuge for the red-crowned crane.

The city's climate keeps summers unusually cool for Japan, while fog can roll in off the Pacific and blanket the waterfront within an hour.

The fog has a specific cause worth knowing. Warm, moist Pacific air moves over the cold Oyashio current just offshore and condenses, which is why it arrives most days from June through August and why Kushiro's summer highs sit near 20°C while much of Japan is well above 30°C. The result is a city that people elsewhere in Japan treat as somewhere to escape to in August rather than from.