The founding decade of the Hawaiian Observatory produced two effective expeditions, one to Japan and one to New Zealand. The Research Association voted to send me to Kagoshima in Kyushu, the south island of Japan, where the volcano Sakurajima made earthquakes, explosions, and lava flows in January of 1914. About the same time Perret was sent to Sakurajima by Friedlaender of Naples, so we met in Japan. Sakurajima, or Cherry Island, is a 4,000-foot cone in Kagoshima Sound, a deep inlet at the southernmost end of Kyushu. The volcano threatened 22,000 persons in villages on Sakurajima Island itself, and 70,000 in Kagoshima. It is a land of orange groves, fisherfolk, Satsuma porcelain, and maritime commerce, situated at the north end of the Okinawa-Ryukyu islands, a volcano chain extending north to Nagasaki. Authorities in Kagoshima knew all about Pelée; and the army, navy, and governor wasted no time. Professor Omori, who had a seismograph at the weather station of Kagoshima, went at once to the volcano, and profiting from the lesson of Pelée, guided the lives of 90,000 persons. The Sakurajima eruption began on a Saturday and Sunday with hundreds of earthquakes locally identified as coming from the volcano. Public and private vessels were called into service to move all the people of the island over to Kagoshima and beyond. With a general of the army in command, this was accomplished in two days. On Monday at ten o’clock the great, picturesque peak, quite like Pelée or Vesuvius, suddenly ejected vertically and quietly, from a crack in its flank, a column of “smoke” 30,000 feet high. This was answered by another, similar column on the opposite side of the mountain; and the two columns joined above into a colossal arch of cauliflower clouds consisting of sand, dust, and boulders. The crack in the mountain which gave vent to all this opened with slight rumble and behaved like two radial ruptures meeting toward the peak, extending southwest and southeast. The sector of the mountain between them appeared to have been lifted like a piece of pie shoved up in the center. But the summit craters played no appreciable part in the eruption, unless it was a gush of steam on Sunday evening. The line of craterlets along the cracks and only half way up the mountain quickly developed lava flows, and these poured down, the one toward Kagoshima Strait, the other toward the narrow Osumi Strait, which separated the volcano from the wilder eastern mainland. This strait was filled up with heavy block lava, or aa, converting the island into a peninsula. A similar aa lava flow, fifty feet high in front, swept down to the beach on the Kagoshima side, with boulders as big as a house tumbling over its andesite front.