Name: Is Japan’s Most Dangerous Volcano About to Erupt? | Tokyo’s Nightmare
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T08:58:00.000Z
Duration: 27 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You know, given the roof over our heads at the moment, it might be tempting to assume that these are artificial homes built to illustrate a point about something truly awful.

And yet, the unfortunate reality is, these are real homes that were once lived in by real families, now buried two to three metres beneath the soil.

Because it just so happens that these homes were in the firing line of a destructive event that seems to hit this part of Japan once every two centuries.

Japan lies on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where four colliding tectonic plates have led to 111 active volcanoes.

In the last three centuries alone, these giants have taken the lives of more than 20,000 people.

And the ultimate question is never if they'll awaken, but when.

We're travelling across Japan, from snowy Hokkaido to subtropical Kyushu, to uncover the stories behind these ticking time bombs.

We'll meet the people who live in their shadow, and those who dare to get closer.

From towns that have taken drastic measures to protect themselves, to the most catastrophic eruption in Japan's recorded history, and the one everybody fears could be next.

It's a story of fire and ash, and an ever-present threat that shape the soul of a nation, as we go in search of Japan's deadliest volcanoes.

The Japan Meteorological Agency runs one of the most sophisticated volcanic warning systems on the planet.

But unfortunately, even the best systems aren't entirely foolproof.

On a clear September morning in 2014, hikers are climbing the trails of Mount Ontake, Japan's second tallest volcano, with seemingly no signs of danger.

Then without warning, at 11.53am, it explodes for the first time in 35 years.

A colossal plume of ash and rock tears into the sky.

Within seconds, the tranquil mountain is transformed into a hellscape.

Shocking footage shows panicked hikers fleeing, as a thick cloud of toxic ash thunders down the mountain.

They try their best to outrun it, but unfortunately the wind isn't in their favour, and they're quickly engulfed in the thick black clouds.

Tragically for many on the mountain, this is the last thing they'll see.

In the days that followed, the world's media turned their gaze to a mountain that had become an unrecognisable desert, while rescue teams desperately dug out survivors on the summit. 63 lives were lost, making it Japan's most lethal eruption in over a century.

Japan is home to 10% of the world's active volcanoes, and the worrying truth is 50 are under constant surveillance, given their proximity to populations and their risk of a potential eruption.

For some communities, the sign of smoke rising is merely a daily occurrence, but for others it's an ominous sign that everything is about to change.

Lake Toya, Hokkaido, a scenic resort town enjoyed by 3 million tourists a year.

Travellers come here to escape, relax and unwind.

Yet concealed beyond the town lies an inaccessible landscape, whispering stories the guidebooks are keen to omit.

Like along the shoreline of the lake and the hotels facing outwards, you can miss it, but turn around, look up, gaze up 700 metres to the towering stratovolcano that looms large overhead, and you can see something fairly unsettling has taken place here, right?

The entire town of Lake Toya is effectively behind a barrier, a vast network of walls and dams separating it from Mount Usu, a terrifying volcano that has unleashed its wrath no less than four times in the last 150 years.

On March 27th, 2000, the Muroran Meteorological Observatory detects a flurry of small earthquakes beneath Mount Usu.

By the hour, they multiply, and by the end of the day, 109 earthquakes have been recorded.

The following day there are 590 earthquakes recorded, and two days later, over 1,600.

A pillar of white smoke and ash bursts through the sky as high as 3,200 metres, sending with it 290,000 metric tonnes of ash and volcanic debris, and reaching as far as Sapporo city, over 180 kilometres away.

In the aftermath, 200 homes are destroyed, but to the locals this doesn't come as a  Mount Usu never stays quiet for long.

The previous eruption in 1977 saw over 20,000 people being evacuated, and with nine major eruptions over the last 400 years, every generation that's lived in this region has been reminded of its destructive power.

Despite their image of explosive momentary destruction, volcanoes don't often return to a state of calm after erupting.

The Mount Usu eruption in 2000 lasted for 18 months.

Imagine one and a half years of ash, steam and tremors, never quite knowing what to expect next.

Lake Toya is also home to a rather spectacular occurrence.

In 1943, a perfectly ordinary wheat field decided it had bigger ambitions, like becoming a mountain.

Over the next two years, the ground steadily ballooned ever upwards, until the crops were replaced by a fully-fledged volcano.

Locals named it Showa-Shinzan, and to this day it remains the only mountain in Japan you could have watched grow while eating your lunch.

But as you'd expect, a volcano seemingly coming out of nowhere and growing in two years led to some bizarre kind of events unfolding.

Number one, it was actually seen as a bad omen, and the Japanese government covered up the birth of Showa-Shinzan back in the day.

It wasn't until 1948, a volcano conference in Oslo, that it was formally announced.

But the second bizarre thing that happened was, as there was no public knowledge of this volcano and no scientists on hand to kind of monitor it, a postmaster called Masao Mimatsu, who worked at a neighbouring town, kept track of it and actually kept diaries and kept a really kind of comprehensive report on it.

Best of all though, he actually bought the land that the volcano is on, so technically this is private property.

So if you ever see a volcano growing in your back garden, buy the land and keep a reading of it.

There is a tragic irony to life in Toyoko, a hot spring town whose very existence depends on the geothermal energy of Mount Usu, yet where residents live with the constant awareness that they may have to evacuate at a moment's notice.

And to the locals, such events haven't been simply consigned to history.

Around the base of Mount Usu, a 2km stretch of land has been deliberately preserved, left exactly as it was in the aftermath of the 2000 eruption.

Among the ruins stands the Toyoko Kindergarten, a silent, haunting reminder of just how suddenly normal life can be swept away.

It's very eerily quiet up here, apart from the snow gently falling around.

Most Japanese towns that are affected by disasters tend to get rid of the destruction that was left thereafter.

The town of Toyoko has kind of embraced it, and around the volcano you can see places like this that have been left up as a sort of ominous reminder to the locals and to travellers coming to this region.

There's lots of rocks strewn throughout the playground, and that was what led to the damage here on this building.

They flew out the volcano and crashed into the side of the building, smashed windows, the roofs caved in.

From a distance, the building looks mostly structurally intact, but inside it looks like a real horror show.

And the playground is also littered with burnt out, broken vehicles, like the old school bus, which is a pretty haunting sight to witness.

The towns surrounding Mount Usu have been shaped both physically and culturally by their uneasy relationship with the volcano, which raises the question, why would anyone choose to live in the shadow of something so volatile?

To find the answer, we travel 1,300 kilometres south, to a Japanese island with a volcano that doesn't just erupt occasionally, it breathes fire almost every single day.

Sakurajima is Japan's most active volcano.

Since 1955, it's erupted almost continuously, with some years seeing over a thousand eruptions.

For the half a million residents of Kagoshima city, life means living at the mercy of the  On a bad day, it can rain a blizzard of volcanic ash straight into the heart of the metropolis.

Nowhere else in Japan offers such a front row seat to both the beauty and the menace of living beside a volcano.

Once a true island, Sakurajima was separated from the mainland of Kagoshima Prefecture until the Great Taisho Eruption of 1914.

One of the most powerful in Japan's history, that the landscape changed forever.

Almost 10 billion tonnes of lava poured forth, with the molten flood filling the 400 metre strait, separating it from the mainland, permanently welding the island to the Osumi Peninsula.

Sakurajima's fusion with the mainland may have been a geological marvel, but it came at a terrible cost, with 58 islanders losing their lives.

And today, scars from the 1914 eruption remain etched into the communities through landmarks that survived the event.

Honestly, one of the most beautiful yet haunting torii gates that I've ever seen.

You know, red wooden torii gates get all the acclaim, but it's actually the stone ones that I think are more poignant, because you get a sense of the sheer passage of time.

In the case of this torii gate, it's actually three metres tall.

You just wouldn't know it because two metres of it are buried beneath the soil, and the volcanic ash that fell here in 1914.

In just the space of one day, two metres of ash fell from the sky, smothering 687 homes.

Luckily, the villagers knew it was coming.

Due to water in the wells actually boiling in the days ahead, fish dying in the sea, Sakurajima sort of announced what was about to happen in the days leading up to it.

After the 1914 eruption, the town was thinking of excavating it, and then one of the elders of the community decided, why not leave it as a reminder to future generations?

It's one of the few reminders of what happened back over 100 years ago, and become the tallest attraction in its own right.

And yet the constant clouds of smoke that eject from Sakurajima go mostly unnoticed by the people living here.

When filming this documentary, the island was at an eruption warning level of three, preventing people from going within close proximity of the volcano due to the likely event of an eruption.

With level five being an all-out evacuation, something made possible by the 24-hour ferry that runs to and from Kagoshima City across the sea every 20 minutes.

Still on a good week, the only sign of the volcano's wrath lies in the government-issued ash removal bags that quietly fill the island's streets.

Just another part of everyday life for those who live here.

But what's it really like to live and grow up in the shadow of Japan's most active volcano?

I spoke with Hikari-san, who helps promote tourism in the region, Fukushima-san, the director of the Sakurajima Museum, and Nomoto-san, a local who's given kayak tours around the volcano for many years.

It's called kokuhai-bukuro, meaning overcoming volcanic ash.

Yeah, this bag is distributed by the city, Kagoshima City.

So the residents sweep the volcanic ash and put them inside a bag.

Some areas, they have to clean almost every week.

I mean, I'm bad enough cleaning my house as it is.

I'll take that home to my partner, Charlotte.