Japan is an island nation. That fact is well known. What it tends to obscure is another fact: Japan is also a nation of islands — more than 6,800 of them, of which around 420 are permanently inhabited.
These inhabited islands —離島, ritō, the remote islands — are not simply the edges of Japan. They are places where things that have disappeared from the mainland have survived: traditions, ways of relating to each other, relationships with food and sea and season that urban Japan largely lost in the decades of rapid growth. And they are places that are now, quietly, attracting a new kind of attention.
The Basic Picture
Japan’s island count, depending on definition and survey methodology, runs between roughly 6,800 and 14,000. Of those, approximately 420 are continuously inhabited. The range in scale is enormous: from Okinawa’s main island with its population of over a million, to islands where a few dozen elderly residents form the entire community.
Remote island policy in Japan operates under the Island Promotion Act, which provides support for transportation, medical care, and education to address the gap between island and mainland living conditions. The gap has narrowed in some respects over the decades. In others — emergency medical access, ferry frequency, the cost of goods inflated by transportation — it persists.
The Diversity of Japan’s Islands
Japan’s remote islands are not a single thing. Geography, climate, history, and culture vary enormously across the archipelago.
The Ryukyu Islands — Okinawa and beyond. Okinawa’s main island anchors a chain that extends southwest through Miyako-jima, Ishigaki-jima, Iriomote-jima, and Yonaguni-jima — the westernmost inhabited point in Japan, roughly 100 kilometers from Taiwan. The islands of this chain sit in a different cultural world from mainland Japan. The Ryukyu Kingdom maintained its own distinct civilization for centuries before annexation, and its traces remain: in the sanshin music, the eisa dancing, the food, the language, the architecture. This is Japan, but it is also something else.
The Seto Inland Sea. Enclosed by Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu, the Seto Inland Sea contains hundreds of islands in a mild, sheltered environment. Shodoshima, Naoshima, Teshima, Oshima — these are islands of olive groves, fishing villages, and unhurried pace. Naoshima in particular has become internationally known through the Setouchi Triennale, a contemporary art festival that has brought artists, architects, and visitors from around the world to islands that were, not long ago, simply aging and emptying.
The Izu and Ogasawara Islands. Administratively part of Tokyo while lying hours to days away by ferry, the Izu chain — Oshima, Miyake-jima, Hachijo-jima among them — and the Ogasawara Islands occupy a different relationship to the capital than their address suggests. The Ogasawara Islands, a UNESCO World Natural Heritage site, are sometimes called the Galapagos of the Orient: an ecosystem that evolved in isolation over millions of years, with species found nowhere else on earth.
Nagasaki and the western islands. Tsushima and Iki sit in the Korea Strait, historically significant as points of contact between Japan and the Korean peninsula. The Goto Islands carry a more unusual history: during the Edo period, when Christianity was suppressed, communities of hidden Christians — kakure kirishitan — maintained their faith in secret on these remote islands for generations. The cultural legacy of that history is now recognized as a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site.
Hokkaido’s islands. Rebun and Rishiri, off the northern tip of Hokkaido, are known for alpine flowers that bloom briefly and intensely in the short summer. Further north and east, the Northern Territories — Kunashiri, Etorofu, and others — remain under Russian administration and the subject of an unresolved territorial dispute that has outlasted the Cold War by decades.
The Challenges
The difficulties facing Japan’s remote islands are real and have been accumulating for a long time.
Depopulation follows a pattern that is by now familiar. Young people leave for education and work on the mainland, find reasons to stay, and do not return. The population shrinks and ages. Schools close when enrollment falls below viable thresholds. Shops close when the customer base is no longer sufficient to sustain them. Medical facilities reduce hours or disappear entirely. Each reduction in services makes the island less viable for the remaining residents, which accelerates departure, which reduces the population further.
Medical access is the sharpest edge of this. Emergency evacuation by helicopter or boat to mainland hospitals is routine in communities where most residents are elderly. Many islands have no resident physician; regular care depends on visiting doctors who travel from the mainland on a scheduled basis. The gap between what is available on the island and what might be needed in a crisis is something island residents live with as a background condition.
Transportation is both a practical constraint and a psychological one. Ferry schedules are fixed, flight options limited, and weather cancellations routine. Typhoon season brings periods of effective isolation lasting several days. The cost of goods, inflated by the expense of getting them to the island, runs above mainland prices across most categories. These are not insurmountable conditions, but they are conditions, and they shape who chooses to stay and who finds reasons to leave.
The People Who Are Choosing Islands
Against this backdrop, something has been shifting.
Remote work, which became normalized during the pandemic, loosened the assumption that productive working life required proximity to an urban center. People who had never seriously considered living outside a city began to consider it. Islands, which had previously registered mainly as vacation destinations or places people left, began to appear in a different light.
Some islands have been deliberate and skilled in responding to this shift. Ama-cho on Nakanoshima in Shimane Prefecture has become something of a national model for rural revitalization — a small island community that developed a coherent strategy for attracting new residents, retaining young people, and building an identity around what the island specifically offers. The Goto Islands in Nagasaki and Tokunoshima in Kagoshima have developed their own approaches. The results are uneven, but the direction is real.
The concept of “kankei jinko” — related population, people who maintain ongoing connections with a place without fully relocating — has gained traction as a way of thinking about island sustainability that goes beyond the binary of resident versus tourist. People who visit regularly, buy island products, do seasonal work, or simply maintain an active relationship with a community contribute something that pure visitor numbers do not capture.
Island schooling has attracted attention as a specific form of this. Programs that allow middle and high school students from urban areas to spend a period enrolled in island schools have found an audience among families seeking small-class education, close relationships between students and teachers, and environments where young people are genuinely embedded in a community. Oki-Dozen High School in Ama-cho, which reversed near-closure through aggressive recruitment of students from the mainland, is the most cited example of what this model can accomplish.
What Makes Island Culture Distinct
Isolation produces distinctiveness. The same sea that makes island life difficult also functions as a filter — slowing the homogenization that has flattened much of mainland Japan’s cultural landscape.
Festivals and performing traditions that have disappeared from the mainland survive on islands where there was never the disruption that modernization brought elsewhere. Okinawan island communities maintain ritual practices — shinugu ceremonies, harvest festivals — that connect living communities to very old ways of marking time and relationship. The hidden Christian culture of the Goto Islands is an extreme example of what geographical isolation can preserve: a community that maintained a suppressed religion through more than two centuries of prohibition, adapting it in the process into something that no longer quite resembled the Catholicism it had started as.
The social texture of island life differs from mainland norms in ways that visitors often notice immediately. Communities where everyone knows everyone operate by different rules than cities where anonymity is the default condition. The obligations and reciprocities are more visible, the care more immediate, the expectation of mutual support more explicit. This can feel constraining to people accustomed to urban privacy. It can also feel like something that urban life has lost.
Island food is its own argument for distinctiveness. What is caught or grown on a particular island, prepared according to traditions specific to that place, tasted in the context of the sea visible from the table — this is not replicable elsewhere. The specific fish of specific waters, the fermented products developed from particular local ingredients, the cooking methods adapted to what the island has always had: island food tables carry the history and geography of their location in ways that restaurant menus in cities do not.
Islands as Destinations
Remote islands have become significant attractions for travelers seeking a Japan that does not resemble the standard itinerary.
The UNESCO-listed sites draw visitors with specific interests: the Ogasawara Islands for wildlife and marine environments, the Amami and northern Okinawa forests for their endemic species, the Goto Islands for their layered religious history. These are not casual stops but deliberate destinations for people who know what they are looking for.
The Setouchi Triennale has created a different kind of island tourism — one organized around contemporary art installed in and around the communities and landscapes of the Seto Inland Sea islands. The collaboration between artists working at international scale and small island communities has produced something that neither could have generated alone, and that has given places like Naoshima a global profile disproportionate to their size.
Ecotourism has developed across multiple island contexts: jungle trekking on Iriomote, whale watching in the Ogasawara Islands, wildflower hiking on Rebun. These offer experiences that simply do not exist in accessible form elsewhere in Japan, and that draw visitors specifically because of what the islands have not become.
What Islands Ask
Japan’s remote islands hold a question that the rest of the country is slowly beginning to take seriously.
The depopulation is real. The hardship is real. The structural disadvantages of island life relative to the mainland are not going to disappear. But the islands also hold, in concentrated form, things that mainland Japan has been losing for decades: community that is visible and reciprocal, nature that is immediate and present, culture that has not been standardized into interchangeability, ways of living that are shaped by specific place rather than optimized for generic convenience.
The people choosing to move to islands are not, for the most part, romantics fleeing reality. They are people making a considered trade — accepting genuine difficulties in exchange for something they have decided matters more. What that something is varies by person. But the fact that increasing numbers of people are making that trade suggests that the islands are asking a question that the cities have not yet answered.
What is a good place to live? What do you need, and what can you give up? The islands have been working on those questions for a long time. The rest of Japan is starting to listen.