Drains of the Oki Islands

Nakanoshima

Chiburijima

Nishinoshima

Okinoshima

Farewell to the Oki Islands

“Once more, homeward bound, I sat upon the cabin-roof of the Oki-Saigo--
this time happily unencumbered by watermelons--and tried to explain to
myself the feeling of melancholy with which I watched those wild island-
coasts vanishing over the pale sea into the white horizon. No doubt it
was inspired partly by the recollection of kindnesses received from many
whom I shall never meet again; partly, also, by my familiarity with the
ancient soil itself, and remembrance of shapes and places: the long blue
visions down channels between islands--the faint grey fishing hamlets
hiding in stony bays--the elfish oddity of narrow streets in little
primitive towns--the forms and tints of peak and vale made lovable by
daily intimacy--the crooked broken paths to shadowed shrines of gods
with long mysterious names--the butterfly-drifting of yellow sails out
of the glow of an unknown horizon. Yet I think it was due much more to a
particular sensation in which every memory was steeped and toned, as a
landscape is steeped in the light and toned in the colours of the
morning: the sensation of conditions closer to Nature's heart, and
farther from the monstrous machine-world of Western life than any into
which I had ever entered north of the torrid zone. And then it seemed to
me that I loved Oki--in spite of the cuttlefish--chiefly because of
having felt there, as nowhere else in Japan, the full joy of escape from
the far-reaching influences of high-pressure civilization--the delight
of knowing one's self, in Dozen at least, well beyond the range of
everything artificial in human existence.”

- Lafcardio Hearn, Glimpse’s of Unfamiliar Japan

My journey to Oki was a culturally rich experience.  It was my first time to venture out to the islands surround the mainland of Japan, and of all the places I could have gone, I picked one of the most remote and cultural distinct places in the country.

Once the 'islands of exile' in the 7th century to the 12th century, Oki continues to be isolated from the mainland, a place few Japanese have ever ventured. This isolation and preserved culturally rich traditions, such as Ama-cho’s Kinya Moniya Dance, and the famous dried quid that came be see hanging from the windows of local shops.

Very few things are imported from the mainland, due to cost and also the desire for self-sufficiency. There are no convenient stores, and almost all businesses are local. The building are made from wood, on islands where trees are abundant and importing raw materials would be costly.

The Oki Three-Day Walk is what I would call “athletic tourism.” This is a form of tourism that focuses on physical activity, but the highlight is actually being in the exotic place. In other words, you get a good workout, but it is still not so rigorous that you can’t enjoy the scenery.

Although I never participated in an organized walk, run, marathon, or any kind of athletic event, I observed some characteristics in the event style and participants that I feel are very different from my home country.

One very noticeable difference was the way women dressed. Although it was over 30 degrees, women covered every inch of their bodies. They wore long pants, long sleeved shirts, gloves, and wide-brimmed hats with detachable veils that draped over the face leaving only the eyes uncovered, as a niqab does. These clothes were not worn out of modesty, but rather to protect the skin from exposure to sunlight. Being pale is still the ideal for women, and they take extreme measures to ensure that not one part of their bodies are exposed to direct sunlight. This is very different from America, where women wear shorts and tank tops when the workout, whether or not they care about tanning. I too would rather just apply sunscreen than walk 60 K underneath a sheet.

Hats, long sleeves, and gloves in 100-degree heat

Back view of the Japanese face veil

Another interesting cultural item is the ubiquitous towel. Long narrow towels printed with the event logo are typically given out at every kind of athletic event. Businesses may also have their own printed towels to give to customers on special occasions. In America, these would be called “hand-towels” and we would use them exclusively in the bathroom after washing our hands. In Japan, they are worn like a fashion accessory. Most people wear the towels around their necks to absorb sweat, or they may tie them around their heads like a bandana. At concerts, people in the audience swing their towels in the air like helicopters. There is no escaping the towel.

Towel in the package

Eating a Japanese bento everyday was also a delight. In America, if lunch were provided at such an event, it would doubtlessly be a sandwich, salad, or tortilla wrap. I dreaded company lunches and picnics in America for fear of these tasteless wraps. In Japan, lunch is always a bento, and it is also always delicious. There is always a healthy mix of meat, vegetables, and rice, with plenty of different flavors to keep the taste buds entertained.

Lastly, I will say that Japanese service really is unparalleled in the world. This extends beyond the expected demeanor and assistance of event staff. Superior service and hospitality can be seen throughout the community. Residents of the islands sat outside on their porches to wave and greet us as we walked past. Restaurants opened their doors to give us free cold tea and miso soup along the way. Rather than being merely tourists, we were treated as guests.

 

When the ferry departs Oki, local residents bid goodbye in a unique way. Colorfully streamers are affixed to the edge of the ship, and they slowly unravel, like a rainbow coming undone in the sky. From the ship’s deck we can see through the colorful streamers to the people on the coastline waving goodbye.

Colorful streamers fly from the boat's deck

Okinoshima-cho, Okinoshima Day 3

The sun setting as I approach Dogo

Okinoshima is the most populous of the four towns, at approximately 15,000 people. The entire population occupies the largest island of Dogo, as well as the uninhabited islets of Okinashima, Obanashima, Tsunameshima, Shijikijima and Ombeshima . This is obvious from the first arrival. The port at Okinoshima was the most prominent and developed of the four ports I had seen on Oki. The most discernable difference was this is was made from glass and concrete, unlike the wooden pavilions I had seen in Dozen.

The port at Dogo on Okinoshima

Over one hundred years ago, famed travelor Lafcardio Hearn was also impressed by the modern appearance of the port of Okinoshima.

“Saigo was a great surprise. Instead of the big fishing village I had
expected to see, I found a city much larger and handsomer and in all
respects more modernized than Sakai; a city of long streets full of good
shops; a city with excellent public buildings; a city of which the whole
appearance indicated commercial prosperity. Most of the edifices were
roomy two story dwellings of merchants, and everything had a bright, new
look. The unpainted woodwork of the houses had not yet darkened into
grey; the blue tints of the tiling were still fresh. I learned that this
was because the town had been recently rebuilt, after a conflagration,
and rebuilt upon a larger and handsomer plan.”

The ferry from Dozen to Dogo

The port also boasted an arrival platform similar to those in airports, where residents can early await the arrival of guests. I spotted my host there. He was easy to find, being blonde and over six feet tall. At the arrival platform I bid goodbye to my ship companions and hopped in the car with my host.

That evening we dined at the home of a local woman from Okinoshima. She was close to seventy, with a grown daughter and grandchildren in elementary school.　The menu was a Japanese-European fusion of croquettes, pasta salad, chawanmushi, and purin. We dined in traditional Japanese fashion, sitting at a low table on the tatami floor. The conversation hovered around the future plans of all foreigners at the table, including myself, who all planned to leave Japan in August. We also talked about our host’s family. The woman’s daughter had married an American man fifteen years ago and moved with him to the United States. She showed us their wedding photos and pictures of their children.

When we returned to the home of my foreign host, we ended the night by eating ice cream and watching an American movie. Just after midnight I made my futon in the guest room and fell asleep just before midnight.

An excellent home-cooked dinner

My bed on Dogo for the night

***

The next morning I struggled to awake even with the blaring ring of my alarm. It was the third and final day of my 3-Day Walk. I had only 12K to walk but I could already tell that it would be challenging. My feet were incredibly sore from the previous days, I had blisters on every toe, and I was drain from a night of restless sleep. I dressed and quietly slipped out of the house at 6:45 am, careful not to wake my still sleeping host.

The house where I stayed was a 20 minute walk from the port, about 1.5 kilometers. I left my suitcase at the house, where I would return to get it later, and quietly walked to the pier.

After reaching the pier I boarded a chartered bus that drove us to the starting point, which took nearly an hour. I napped on the way to catch up from last night’s lack of sleep. The starting point was in an open field in front of a camp site.  Based on the course map, this would be an interior walk through the island, and we would only be briefly near the shoreline.

At 8:30 promptly we started out walking to the coast, were I was met with the same solitary white lighthouse that I had seen from the ferry to Oki. Now I was on the land behind the lighthouse, looking out into the sea that brought me.

The course then had us turn around and walk back through the campsite. It was mostly a flat paved path that ascended only slightly uphill to end at a peaceful lake. The water was so still and calm that it perfectly reflected the green mountains behind it.

The perfect mirror

After walking around the lake, the path lead back down the hill and into town, where I crossed over one final bridge before arriving at the goal. There, my final lunch bento was waiting for me, and it was the largest of all. I ate outside by the shoreline while waiting for the bus back into town.

The bridge at the finish line

My large victory bento

The chartered bus carried us back to the port at 1:00 pm, but my walk wasn’t over. I still had to trek another 1.5 kilometers to my host’s house, shower and pack, then walk 1.5 K back to the port to catch the ferry to the mainland. In total, I walked 16K by the time I reached the ferry to Matsue. I was so exhausted that I grabbed a bamboo matt and fell asleep on the deck for entire 2-hour ride.

The sight of Shichiri Port in the distance only signaled that I was one-third of the way finished with my journey home. I still had to take a bus back to Matsue station, then a train back to Oda station, then drive 45 minutes to my home.

The sun was setting as I boarded the train, and it was dark by the time I started my drive. Along the drive home, my thoughts wandered to the Oki Islands, where the stars would be shining gloriously over a black sea.  

Manhole cover of Okinoshima

Into to Oki: 50 kilometers, 4 islands, 3 days

I had never heard of the Oki Islands before moving to Japan. Then again, few people have. This chain of sixteen islands is one of the most isolated places in the country. This is not just a matter of distance. Although the islands are 2-3 hours away by ferry from the mainland, they are by no means the furthest islands from Honshu. This is not mere isolation by three hours of lonely seas, but they are buffered by the two of most rural and sparely populated prefectures in the country (Tottori and Shimane). These islands were once considered a “land of exile” for emperors who lost power in Japan’s period of political instability. One was banished to the island never to return, while the other one managed to escape.
 
Oki-gun (Oki county) is a set of sixteen islands, with only four of them being inhabited. They are further divided into two regions of Dogo and Dozen. Dogo is the largest island to the east, and Dozen consists of a cluster of smaller islands (three inhabited and seven uninhabited) encircling each other to the west. Although they appear close, it takes over an hour to move between Dogo and Dozen by ferry. Until 150 years ago, Oki was actually its own prefecture, until it became part of Tottori, then Shimane prefecture, where I live.
 
The Oki islands have for centuries remained sparsely inhabited and few Japanese people on the mainland had ever heard of them. Not surprisingly, they are a place of astonishing beauty, and cultural richness.
 
When Shimane’s most famous foreign resident, Lafcardio Hearn, visited the Oki Islands at the end of the 19^th century, he wrote of their unparrelled beauty in his book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan:
 

“The shores on either side at once receded and heightened: we were
traversing an inland sea bounded by three lofty islands. At first the
way before us had seemed barred by vapory hills; but as these, drawing
nearer, turned green, there suddenly opened magnificent chasms between
them on both sides--mountain-gates revealing league-long wondrous vistas
of peaks and cliffs and capes of a hundred blues, ranging away from
velvety indigo into far tones of exquisite and spectral delicacy. A
tinted haze made dreamy all remoteness, an veiled with illusions of
color the rugged nudities of rock.

 

…These landscapes possess charms of color extraordinary,
phantom-color delicate, elfish, indescribable--created by the wonderful
atmosphere. Vapors enchant the distances, bathing peaks in bewitchments
of blue and grey of a hundred tones, transforming naked cliffs to
amethyst, stretching spectral gauzes across the topazine morning,
magnifying the splendor of noon by effacing the horizon, filling the
evening with smoke of gold, bronzing the waters, banding the sundown
with ghostly purple and green of nacre.”

 
 
Flash forward to 2014 and not much has changed. The islands have continued to remain a remote and mysterious place in Japan. However, since being named a World Geopark in 2013, the islands have been trying to promote tourism. It’s a tough sell, given that most of the residents in Tottori and Shimane haven’t even been there, but the ever-growing tourism industry has created a medley of events to attract visitors from all over Japan.
 
In early June, I made the journey that so few of my fellow peers have made, and I ventured across the sea to all four islands. I participated in the Oki Three-Day Walk, a self-guided walking tour of all four islands over the course of three days.  I paid a cheap entrance fee which also included the cost of a inter-island ferry pass and souvenirs. I also ordered lunch for all three days, and signed up for the BBQ Pre-Party the night before. If I was going to make that long journey to Oki, I wanted to take advantage of every possible opportunity.
 
In addition to having the logistical support of participating in a large-scale event, I was also lucky enough to have one friend on each island who could host me overnight. Not only did this prove useful in the evening, when I needed a place to shower and help getting to and from the port, but also it also provided me with an insider’s look into the lives of residents on these islands.
 
Although I only stayed on the islands three days, the entire trip was four days and four nights long, due to the logistics of getting to and from the islands and my house.
 
My schedule was as follows:
Friday morning-afternoon:       Get to Oki via car, train, bus and ferry.
Friday evening:                        Pre-Event BBQ Dinner in Ama-cho
Friday night:                            Stay at a friend’s house in Ama-cho
 
Saturday morning:                   Walk 10 K in Ama-cho, Nakanoshima island
Saturday afternoon:                 Walk 13 K in Chibu-mura, chiburijima Island
Saturday evening:                    Take the ferry to Nishininoshima
Saturday night:                         Stay at a friend’s house in Nishinoshima
 
Sunday morning:                      Walk 20 K in Nishinoshima
Sunday afternoon:                   Take the ferry to Dogo Island
Sunday night:                          Stay at a friend’s house in Okinoshima, Dogo Island
 
Monday morning:                     Walk 10 K in Okinoshima
Monday afternoon-evening:      Return home via ferry, bus, train, and car
 
As the time drew near my anticipation increased. I was excited to test my athletic limits and to explore this off-beaten path in Japan. It would also be my first time traveling　off the mainland, the “mainland”, in this case meaning the four major islands that comprise Japan (Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu). Despite having been to all four islands, I had previously never traveled to any of the 6,000-something smaller islands just off the coast.
 
This would truly be an adventure.