In heavy rain, where to watch the river cameras

The cameras on this site are for scenery. The entrances for watching a rising river are elsewhere. Here they are, in the order to open them.

River Desk (LiveTokyo) / Checked by opening each entrance on September 7, 2026 / Published September 7, 2026

There are nights when the sound of rain wakes you up and you want to know what the nearby river looks like right now. This site shows the Sumida River and the river at Togetsukyo in Arashiyama, but those are scenery cameras. They do not show the edge of the levee.

Cameras for watching a river are published separately by the national government and each prefecture. They are a little different from what the words “live camera” suggest. Most are not video; they are still images that change every few minutes. And this year, the names of the warning information themselves changed.

This year, a level 5 emergency warning for heavy rain was issued for Chiba on August 13, for Ishikawa and Toyama on August 27, and for Fukui on August 30. In the Hokuriku region the 24-hour rainfall to the morning of August 27 broke the record for the highest ever observed, passing 300 millimetres at some places. On a night like that, where should you open, and in what order? Below are the entrances we opened one by one and checked on September 7, 2026.

The first three to open

There is an order. Open them from the top.

The third page has a button labeled 登録地点 (registered points). It is easier to open it once on a day when it is not raining and find the gauge for your own river.

Chiba prefecture's river page asks residents to use the cameras and water levels “together with the evacuation information issued by your city or town, so you can evacuate quickly” during a storm or heavy rain. That is: the cameras and the water levels are meant to be used along with evacuation information.

This year, the names of the warning information changed

From May 29, 2026, the Japan Meteorological Agency changed the names of its disaster-prevention weather information. The alert level number is now part of the name itself. What used to be called a heavy rain warning (大雨警報) is now a “level 3 heavy rain warning.”

• A new “level 5 emergency warning for river flooding” (氾濫特別警報) was created. It is issued when flooding is imminent on a river covered by flood forecasting.
• Information at level 4 is now called a “danger warning” (危険警報). For example, the landslide alert (土砂災害警戒情報) became the “level 4 landslide danger warning.”
• The alert levels themselves have not changed: 1 means raise your awareness of the disaster, 2 means confirm your own evacuation actions, 3 means evacuation of older people and others, 4 means an evacuation order, 5 means secure your immediate safety.

The Cabinet Office revised its evacuation information guidelines in March 2026, and it requires the public chart to read “be sure to evacuate by alert level 4.” Some older explanations that turn up in a search still use the previous names.

Twenty rivers in Kyushu stream video

The Kyushu Regional Development Bureau of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism runs a YouTube channel for each river and streams video from it. The stream's title says “trial broadcast in progress” (試験配信中). It is positioned as something still being tested, not permanent equipment.

We opened all 20 channels one by one twice on September 7, 2026 (Japan time): from 15:12 to 15:14, and again from 17:35 to 17:51. Both times nineteen were live, and both times only the 五ヶ瀬川 channel had no stream showing. The “Sep 7, 15:00 hour” column below shows the status at the first of those times.

The list is from the Kyushu Regional Development Bureau's “River Cameras (Live Video)” page. The links point to the channels. When a stream changes, the video's address changes, but the channel does not. The river names are written in Japanese, as they appear on the ministry's page.

Many of the streams are set so they cannot be embedded on other sites, so they cannot be played inside this page. Watch them on the YouTube page.

The same thing is starting in Hokuriku. The Hokuriku Regional Development Bureau of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism runs a “real-time stream (rivers under the Hokuriku Regional Development Bureau)” that numbers its rivers ① through ⑤. It shows this process: check the number on the guide page, then open the video with the same number on the “Hokuriku Regional Development Bureau Water Disaster Countermeasures Center” channel. ④ is 常願寺川・神通川・庄川・小矢部川, and ⑤ is 手取川・梯川. The guide page notes: “due to equipment inspections, streaming conditions, and other factors, the URL may change, a filming point may stop streaming, streaming may stop, or the streaming point may change, without notice.”

This guide page has one more practical entrance. There is a line that reads, in translation, “when you want to compare and check the current condition of a filming point against its normal condition.” Shizuoka prefecture's camera page also places a normal-condition image next to the latest image. Whether what's showing now is normal is clearest when you set it beside the normal-condition image.

Entrances by region

The order below was decided using the Japan Meteorological Agency's published detections of a “senjo-kosuitai”, a band of heavy rain that keeps forming over the same place. The agency publishes a CSV of detection cases from May 25, 2023 onward. We recounted these by “a detection in the same prefecture forecast region on the same day” and sorted from the most to the fewest. Through the update posted at 14:30 on September 7, 2026, the running total was 102. Because a listing condition was added on May 28, 2026, this cannot be used to compare year over year how many or how few there were.

The count is a running total we tallied from the agency's public CSV in units of “day × prefecture forecast region” (May 25, 2023 through the update posted at 14:30 on September 7, 2026). It is not a ranking published by the agency. The “still image” and “every 10 minutes” notes in the camera column are recorded only when the prefecture's page said so. A dash means we could not confirm that cell on the page.

What a river monitoring camera shows

The words “live camera” bring video to mind, but the national river monitoring cameras show still images. The River Disaster Prevention Information site's own explanation says: “from this site, you can access still images from CCTV cameras that the national government has installed for river monitoring and other purposes and made public on the internet.”

The largest number of these are “simplified river monitoring cameras” (簡易型河川監視カメラ). The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism's installation guide (March 2026, Reiwa 8) calls it “a camera system for space monitoring that can mainly deliver still images at fixed time intervals,” and its system diagram says images are collected every 5 minutes. The same guide says there were about 9,000 of them nationwide as of September 2025 (Reiwa 7).

• They are harder to see at night. The guide says: “in daytime, a simplified river monitoring camera can confirm river conditions without a problem, but at night or in bad weather such as rain, visibility varies a great deal depending on the camera's performance, whether there is light nearby, the distance to what's being monitored, and other conditions.”
• Raindrops show up on the image too. Because of cost and power, a simplified camera is not required to have a wiper for raindrops the way a CCTV camera is.
• Some are broken. The guide says that units installed early on have passed the 5-year mark and entered a “wear failure period” (摩耗故障期). A notice on the Ishikawa River Comprehensive Information System also lists water-level stations and cameras that are suspended because of equipment failure, with no set date for repair.

The screen may be dark, show nothing, or still show the image from 5 minutes ago. Watch with that in mind. And do not try to read the water level from the image. For the water level, look at the number from the water-level gauge.

Some prefectures put that number on the same row as the camera. The “River camera information” list of the Kagoshima Prefecture River and Sabo Information System shows, for each of its 52 points, the water-level reading next to the river name and the place name. Its legend runs, from the bottom, 水防団待機 (flood-fighting team standby), 氾濫注意 (flooding caution), 避難判断 (evacuation judgement), 氾濫危険 (flooding danger) and 氾濫発生 (flooding occurring), and it says the colour of the water level changes when a threshold is passed. When we opened it at 17:36 on September 7, 47 of the 52 points showed a water-level number, 2 showed “---[m]”, meaning the reading was missing, and 3 had no water-level gauge with them. That colour and that number tell you more, faster, than the picture does.

For dams, watch the numbers, not the picture

A dam's condition is shown as numbers: the “reservoir level” (貯水位) and the “discharge” (放流量). It is not a camera picture. For dams that include flood control among their purposes, Article 48 of the River Act requires the manager to notify the governor and the mayors of the affected cities and towns, and the public, of the date and time of a discharge and the expected rise in water level when the discharge will change the river's flow significantly. The text of this “dam discharge notice” is published on River Disaster Prevention Information.

Before heavy rain, a “pre-release” (事前放流) lowers the reservoir level in advance. In the Hokuriku heavy rain that began on August 27 this year, as of 05:00 on September 4, records show 12 dams had reached the pre-release trigger, 3 had carried it out, and 31 had performed flood control.

Some prefectures do publish dam cameras. The Kagoshima Prefecture River and Sabo Information System has a “Dam camera information” menu listing 14 points across three dams, 西之谷, 川辺 and 大和: the dam management office, the downstream side of the dam, a park, and bridges below the dam. Toyama prefecture's list also has dam cameras alongside rivers and the coast. What they show, though, is the dam and its surroundings, not the water level itself. For the level, read the number.

Even the entrance itself goes out of date

“River Water Level Information” (川の水位情報, k.river.go.jp), which used to show crisis-management water-level gauges and river cameras, now shows just one line when you open it: “this site has ended its operation.” It points you to River Disaster Prevention Information for water-level data.

The trouble is that official prefecture pages still point there. Chiba prefecture's “Rainfall, River Water Level, and River Video Information” page (last updated May 31, 2024, Reiwa 6) still says “crisis-management water-level gauge readings and river monitoring camera video are provided on the website ‘River Water Level Information’,” and it lists the address of the site that has ended. Okayama prefecture's list of river monitoring cameras also still has one link to the same address, and the “Links” panel of the Kochi Prefecture Flood Control Information System lists the same address under the name “River Water Level Information”.

In Ishikawa's case, this matters more. The “Crisis-management water-level gauges / simplified river monitoring cameras” link on the top page of the Ishikawa River Comprehensive Information System still points to the address that has ended. A level 5 emergency warning for heavy rain was issued for this prefecture on August 27 this year. The same top page also says “if the display is slow, you can check the same information on ‘River Disaster Prevention Information’,” so if you want to watch a river camera in Ishikawa, open River Disaster Prevention Information directly.

Kagoshima prefecture, by contrast, has announced that it changed its system's address. It says the old address will still connect automatically through the end of September 2026, but will stop connecting from October onward. The notice asks users to re-register.

What appears in this article is only the entrances that came up when we opened them on September 7, 2026. Entrances move. Open your bookmarks once on a day when it is not raining, and check them.

When you can't see anything

In this year's August 13 heavy rain in Chiba, up to 46,980 power outages were counted in the Kanto region (as of 22:00 on the 13th). A power outage caused by a flooded substation was not resolved until 22:47 the following day, the 14th. If the power goes out, both the camera and the line you use to watch it stop working.

So have a TV, a radio, the disaster-prevention wireless system, and your city or town's disaster-prevention app ready on the same night. And do not go look at a river or irrigation channel with your own eyes. That is what the cameras are for.

About the river cameras on this site

This site also has cameras that show rivers. Skytree & Sumida River, Sumida River at Night, Arashiyama, Togetsukyo, Kintaikyo Bridge, Dotonbori. All of them are scenery cameras. None of them show the edge of a levee or a water-level marker. On a rainy day, open the official entrances above instead.

Sources

• 国土交通省 川の防災情報
• 国土交通省 川の防災情報（スマートフォン版）
• 川の防災情報 提供情報の解説
• 気象庁 キキクル
• 気象庁 新たな防災気象情報について
• 国土交通省 新たな防災気象情報の運用について（令和7年12月16日）
• 内閣府 避難情報に関するガイドラインの改定（令和8年3月）
• 気象庁 線状降水帯の事例
• 国土交通省 簡易型河川監視カメラ設置の手引き（案）令和8年3月（PDF）
• 国土交通省 配信を停止している簡易型河川監視カメラの再開について（令和5年3月31日）
• 国土交通省九州地方整備局 河川カメラ（ライブ動画）
• 内閣府 令和８年８月千葉豪雨による被害状況等について（令和8年8月31日17時現在・PDF）
• 内閣府 令和８年８月27日からの大雨、令和８年台風第24号及び前線による大雨に係る被害状況等について（令和8年9月4日7時現在・PDF）
• 千葉県 雨量・河川水位・河川映像の情報提供
• 千葉県 河川監視カメラについて