Sakurajima
Interesting facts
- Between 1955 and 2024 observers counted more than 15,000 eruptions from the Minami-dake and Showa craters alone.
- Earthquakes before the 1914 eruption killed 35 people and the eruption itself 23 more, a toll kept low because most islanders had already fled.
- The 1914 eruption poured out about 1.34 cubic kilometres of lava and lasted until May 1915, with ash falling as far away as Honshu.
- Draining magma in 1914 caused the centre of the Aira caldera to sink by about 60 centimetres.
- The 1914 lava swallowed several small neighbouring islands and made Kagoshima Bay noticeably shallower.
- In 1991 Sakurajima was named one of the Decade Volcanoes, singled out for study under a UN disaster-reduction programme.
- Local schoolchildren wear helmets to protect themselves from falling volcanic stones.
- The name Sakurajima means Cherry Blossom Island, and the volcano appears on the flag of Kagoshima Prefecture.
- In 2004 the singer Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi held an all-night concert on the volcano for about 75,000 people, marked by a statue of him screaming with a guitar.
- In July 2022 Sakurajima received Japan's highest volcanic alert, level 5, for the first time, after cinders flew about 2.5 km from the crater.
Why it is worth it
Sakurajima is a volcano that lives in the middle of a city's view. It rises from Kagoshima Bay just 4 km across the water from Kagoshima, a city of some 680,000 people, and it is the most active volcano in Japan: since 1955 it has erupted almost continuously, with thousands of small explosions a year throwing ash kilometres into the sky. Its summit has three peaks; the northern one, Kita-dake, is the highest at 1,117 m, while the activity is centred on the southern peak, Minami-dake.
The mountain sits on the rim of the Aira caldera, a 25 km-wide hollow left by a colossal eruption some 28,000 years ago, and it draws on the same magma reservoir. Sakurajima itself first grew a few thousand years later; its first recorded eruption was in 963. The greatest in modern times began on 11 January 1914. Warned by earthquakes, almost all the islanders had already fled; the eruption turned from explosive to effusive and poured out lava for months, a rarity in Japan. The flows filled the strait on the east side and joined what had been an island to the Osumi Peninsula, which is why the "island" of Sakurajima is now a peninsula.
The lava fields of 1914 are the landscape a visitor walks through: broken ground slowly being recolonised by plants, which ecologists study as a textbook case of plant succession. The volcanic soil is remarkably fertile, famous for the giant white Sakurajima daikon radish, the size of a basketball, and for tiny komikan oranges; potters make ware from the volcanic ash, and several hot-spring resorts lie around the mountain. Kagoshima lives with its neighbour: ash-shelters line the roads and evacuation drills are routine.
Getting there
The Sakurajima Ferry crosses the 3.5 km from Kagoshima Port in about 13 minutes and runs around the clock, every 10 minutes during the day. The town of Tarumizu is about 12 km away. Kagoshima Airport (KOJ) is about 25 km from the volcano.
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From the encyclopaedia
Sakurajima is an active stratovolcano, formerly an island and now a peninsula, in Kagoshima Prefecture in Kyushu, Japan. It is the most active volcano in Japan.
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