Tsukishima, a small island off the coast of Miyazaki Prefecture, was once a thriving fishing community of about 100 people. As of October 2026 it has effectively four residents, leaving it close to uninhabited. No scheduled boat runs between the island and the mainland, and many people living in Miyazaki Prefecture do not know the island exists.
Tsukishima Hiroki was born and raised there. In an interview with Bunshun Online, he described how the island came to be settled and what daily life was like for a boy growing up among a handful of families.
An island bought for 61 yen
Asked how the island came into being, Tsukishima said people who reached it from Uwajima in Ehime Prefecture were the first to open it up. A man named Yamashita Tokichi bought it during the Meiji era for 61 yen and gave it the name Tsukishima, he said.
Yamashita and his siblings then split into the Tsukishima family name and a branch family, Kondo, according to Tsukishima. As a result, almost everyone on the island is named either Tsukishima or Kondo.
The population grew through marriages arranged or introduced across the water. Tsukishima's own mother was born off the island and moved there after an omiai — a formal arranged meeting — with his father. At its peak, around the middle of the Showa era, more than 100 people lived on Tsukishima.
No one to fall in love with
School life offered few prospects of romance. Tsukishima said there were no members of the opposite sex in his age group at all, so a first love on the island was out of the question. The nearest girl older than him, in the sixth grade when he was in the first, was his cousin. The nearest girl younger, in the first grade when he was in the sixth, was also a relative.
He learned what love was from an anime. Azuki-chan, a series about a child roughly his own age falling in love, taught him the concept. "I watched it and thought, so that's what love is," he said.
With no ferry service and a population in single digits, Tsukishima now sits at the end of a pattern familiar across rural Japan, where schools, boats and bus routes close as residents leave and few arrive to replace them.