Kyu-Karuizawa Rotary

Operated by Karuizawa town, this camera watches the rotary at the entrance to Kyu-Karuizawa — the roundabout where traffic funnels toward the old resort's main shopping street, Kyu-Karuizawa Ginza.

It is a useful spot precisely because it is a bottleneck. Karuizawa's population swells enormously in summer and over holiday weekends, and this rotary is where that shows first: light traffic in the low season, queued vehicles and dense pedestrian flow at the peaks.

The town sits at around 1,000 metres on the southern flank of Mount Asama, so conditions here diverge sharply from the plain below. Winter brings freezing road surfaces and snow, and the camera is a practical check before driving up.