Asama is the Vesuvius of central Japan near the village of Karuizawa, famous as the resort of American missionaries. Bandaisan is one of a line of volcanic peaks north of Asama, all of which have hot springs and solfataras. The explosion of Bandaisan, where the big natural lake represents the groundwater level of abundant rainfall, occurred when the underground lava column suddenly sank rapidly by the gaping open of the deep rift. The water poured into red hot cavities, while the lava was rising and erupting by frothing up in the depths of one of the other volcanoes. The results of Bandai’s explosion were first, earthquake collapse, which was assisted by vast outjets of boiling steam from groundwater, and then the blowing out of the mountainside. Of special interest is the spacing, twenty to forty miles, between volcanoes along such a system as Asama-Bandai. The underlying cracks must be in echelon arrangement, and the spacing is a function of the thickness of the upper earth crust and its capacity through the ages of producing spaced-out widenings or bends in the crack, above whatever shell confines the lava. The same spacing of the new and old volcanoes is true in the Caribbees and in the Costa Rica-Mexico line. There an old peak might make a Bandaisan by unforeseen breakage and steam development. This applies also to the Ryukyu-Sakurajima line. I visited Kaimon at the extreme south end of Kyushu, a steep dome blocked on top by a lava plug. South of here to Suwanose Island, an active volcano, the spacing of islands is similar to the northward spacing of Sakurajima, Kirishima, and Asosan, following the same law of selected vents and offset cracks. Kirishima thirty miles north of Sakurajima is a treacherous and dangerous volcano that made a bad explosion just prior to the Sakurajima eruption. I saw on the rim of its summit cavity a breadcrust bomb, a triangular block of rock eight feet long, with its surface beautifully tessellated with gaping cracks. This breadcrust fracture indicates that the fragment of glowing andesite was thrown up while pasty, then congealed on its surface to smooth glass and continued to swell evenly with internal gas, so as to rupture the glassy surface as expanding dough. At Aso Volcano farther north I entered a natural gateway into a cauldron nine miles across, surrounded by a wall, and with a hilly country inside, from which a river escaped through the gateway. The summit peak in this landscape proved to contain an active pit on top. The pit was steaming and the source of the steam was boiling puddles of mud at the bottom. This was the “Halemaumau” of Asosan, which has had a record of many eruptions near the city of Kumamoto. The chain of Kyushu volcanoes ends, after the usual spacing, with a volcano at Nagasaki.