Qualla: Mount Mihara

Mount Mihara: Introduction

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Guilhem Vellut from Annecy, France, CC BY 2.0. In 1933, nine hundred and forty-five people threw themselves into the same volcano. Mount Mihara, the 758-meter active cone at the heart of Izu Oshima island, had become something no one intended -- a magnet for despair, its open crater offering a terrible finality that drew crowds of the suicidal from mainland Japan. Authorities eventually erected fences and barriers, but the mountain's dark chapter had already burned itself into Japanese cultural memory. Today, Mount Mihara is better known for a different kind of drama: the spectacular 1986 eruption that lit the night sky with lava fountains taller than any skyscraper on Earth, and the Hollywood-scale fiction it has inspired.

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Image: Guilhem Vellut from Annecy, France | CC BY 2.0

Mount Mihara: Fire and Basalt

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Immanuel Friedlaender, Public domain. Mount Mihara is a predominantly basaltic stratovolcano that erupts at intervals of roughly 100 to 150 years for its major events, with smaller eruptions cycling every 30 to 40 years. The 1986 eruption was the defining modern event. Lava fountains shot 1.6 kilometers into the air ...

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Image: Immanuel Friedlaender | Public domain

Mount Mihara: The Year of the Crater

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexrk2, CC BY-SA 3.0. The tragedy began on February 12, 1933, when twenty-one-year-old Matsumoto Kiyoko jumped into Mount Mihara's crater. She and her classmate Tomita Masako had traveled to the volcano together as part of a planned joint suicide -- a tradition known in Japanese as shinjuu. But at the...

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Image: Alexrk2 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mount Mihara: Prison for Monsters

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Guilhem Vellut from Annecy, France, CC BY 2.0. Mount Mihara's dramatic crater has proven irresistible to Japanese filmmakers. In the 1965 debut of the Gamera franchise, the military lures the giant turtle to Izu Oshima and traps it inside a rocket built on the island's slopes. Nearly two decades later, the 1984 film The Retur...

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Image: Guilhem Vellut from Annecy, France | CC BY 2.0

Mount Mihara: Walking the Caldera Today

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ippukucho, CC BY 3.0. Modern visitors to Mount Mihara find a landscape transformed by centuries of eruption. The summit area features a broad caldera with stark lava fields, steaming fumaroles, and trails that wind along the crater rim offering views across the Pacific to the distant silhouette of Mou...

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Image: Ippukucho | CC BY 3.0