Japan without bridges

Seven islands you can only reach by boat

Japan has over fourteen thousand islands and tourism visits four. This route goes to seven where the only way in is a ferry or a small plane: Naoshima and Ando's Chichu museum, Shodoshima, Iki, the hidden Christian churches of the Goto archipelago — World Heritage, and half of them on islands with no shop — and Yakushima, where the trail to the Jomon Sugi cedar is ten hours through thousand-year-old trees and moss. Miyajima comes in as a day trip from Hiroshima, which is how it's done.

The itinerary, stop by stop

1. Naoshima3 days

   Contemporary art here is either buried underground or slipped into village houses: Tadao Ando's Chichu museum is subterranean and holds Monet, Turrell and De Maria, with timed tickets booked in advance and no door sales once they run out. In Honmura, the Art House Project occupies traditional homes. Kusama's yellow pumpkin still stands on the pier, and between the first ferry and mid-morning the island is empty.

   We start here because this is the easiest of the seven islands, and it makes sense to break yourself in on a short ferry from Okayama or Uno before the crossings that really do get cancelled. Naoshima also sets the tone by contrast: it is the one stop on the route where everything you have come to look at was put there on purpose. An island that was losing its people turned itself into a museum, and Tadao Ando's concrete buried in the hillside is now the reason the boat docks. Know it from the start: almost everything is bought online with a date and a time slot, and since October 2024 that applies to the whole Benesse Art Site. Sell out and there is no box office.

   Three days is a lot for the size of the island and not much for the way its timetables work. One day goes to the Benesse shoreline, with the Chichu, the Lee Ufan and the museum-hotel above the water. Another goes to Honmura, the village whose old houses have become installations, where Sugimoto's reinterpreted shrine and Turrell's pitch-dark room are paid for and booked separately from the five-house pass. The third day is slack: whatever did not fit into a time slot, the island by bike, Ohtake's bathhouse, which is a sento rather than an onsen and closes on Mondays.

   The argument for three nights is not printed on any ticket. Between seven and ten in the morning there is nobody on the island, and once the day trippers take the last ferry the Benesse shoreline empties again: that is when you see Kusama's pumpkin without a queue. Guests at the Benesse House get into the museum outside public hours, until nine at night. In exchange, this is the most expensive stop of the trip and the one that feels most like a guided visit. If what you want is islands with nobody on them, this is not yet that.

   What puts it in this route: Chichu Art Museum · Benesse House Museum

2. Shodoshima2 days

   The Seto Inland Sea's second island, and far more than a day trip from Takamatsu. Between two of its ports stands a quarter of soy sauce storehouses with four centuries of the trade behind it, where the century-old cedar vats it ferments in are shown free of charge. The Kankakei gorge throws volcanic rock spires up over the sea and is crossed by ropeway or on foot. And twice a day the tide uncovers a 180-metre sandbar out to three islets.

   From Naoshima you cross via Takamatsu, and an hour of sailing changes the category of island. Shodoshima has olive groves, factories, bus routes and people who do not live off art. It is the counterweight to the stop before it, and the first place on the route where you want a car: Olive Bus fares top out at 500 yen and there is a day pass, but services inland are thin. Check the timetable before you count on it, because the fast boat from Takamatsu, the half-hour one, has run only eight crossings a day since May 2026 because of fuel costs.

   Two days divide themselves up. One for the north and east: the Kankakei ropeway over the volcanic rock spires, with the option of walking back down the western trail, and then the belt of soy sauce warehouses between Kusakabe and Sakate, where Yamaroku shows you its century-old cedar barrels for free and asks you not to have eaten natto beforehand. The other for Tonosho and the interior: the Angel Road sandbar, which surfaces only for a few hours around low tide, and the Nakayama rice terraces, flooded and bright in May. Arrive on 3 May and the farmers' kabuki at Hitoyama falls on that day. Most kitchens close by mid-afternoon.

   What puts it in this route: Kankakei Gorge and ropeway

3. Hiroshima2 days

   What the city was is in the Peace Park and also in small things: some hundred and seventy trees that survived the bomb and still carry plaques, two streetcars from that morning still running in commercial service, the chalk messages survivors left on a school staircase. What it is now: the largest tram network in the country, okonomiyaki with the noodles layered inside, oysters from its own bay and the sake breweries of Saijo.

   Day trip to Miyajima

   This is where the route steps off the boat, and it may as well say so: Hiroshima is not an island, it is the port of embarkation. It is here because you have to cross from Honshu to Kyushu, because the shinkansen comes straight in from Osaka and Kyoto, and because Miyajima sits right across the water. That the only two cities on this route are the two cities that were bombed is no coincidence of the planner's either: both were ports, and ports were targets. Two days is enough, and one of them is not spent in the city.

   The city day works better in reverse order from how most people do it. The Peace Park and museum are the most crowded place in Hiroshima; a few minutes away, Fukuromachi primary school, with the messages survivors chalked on the stairwell walls to look for their families, is almost always empty, and the basement of Honkawa school fits into the same morning. These are places of active mourning, with families who still come: no posed photographs. The museum is hard going for small children and that is decided beforehand, not at the door. In the evening, the twenty-three okonomiyaki griddles stacked inside Okonomi-mura.

   The other day is Miyajima, as a day trip because that is how it is done, even though the catalogue itself points out that the island only gets good once the ferries leave, after six. Swap a Hiroshima night for one there if you can. The torii has been fully visible since the restoration finished in December 2022, and since October 2023 there is a hundred-yen visitor tax. What has changed is the summit: the Reikado, the hall of the unextinguished flame on Mount Misen, burned to the ground on 20 May 2026. The flame itself was saved, but rebuilding will take well over a year and the stretch between the Reikado and the Sankido is still closed, with a detour by the Daisho-in route.

   What puts it in this route: Climb up Mount Misen

4. Iki2 days

   A low, green island of rice paddies, white-sand beaches and over a thousand shrines, an hour by boat from Fukuoka, once home to the 'Iki kingdom' recorded in third-century Chinese chronicles. People come for sea urchin, Iki beef and barley shochu, which the island claims to have invented.

   Hiroshima to Iki is the leg where the route really changes: shinkansen to Hakata, a bus to the port, and a jetfoil of a little over an hour out into open water. Book it, because until at least March 2027 the fast service runs on a single vessel with very few departures for lack of crew; the slow ferry takes around two hours twenty and sails once or twice a day. On the island you need a car. Iki is the first stop where tourism is not the main business: it is flat, it grows rice, it has more than a thousand shrines and the memory of a kingdom that third-century Chinese chronicles already wrote about.

   Two days is the stated minimum and it shows. One for the centre and the south: the Iki Kingdom museum, its grass roof low over the plain of the Harunotsuji site, the reconstructed Yayoi village beside it and, at dusk, Monkey Rock out on the Kurosaki headland, next to the pit of the 1933 coastal battery that mounted two 41-centimetre guns recycled from a battlecruiser. The other for the north: the morning market at the squid port of Katsumoto, which does not happen in bad weather, and the boat out to the uninhabited island of Tatsunoshima. May is purple sea urchin season, and Kojima shrine can only be reached on foot at low tide. The tide table outranks the plan.

   What puts it in this route: Monkey Rock (Saruiwa) and Kurosaki Battery

5. Nagasaki2 days

   The port Portugal, the Netherlands and China came in through, and it shows everywhere: Oura is the oldest standing Christian church in Japan, shippoku is a round-table banquet fusing Japanese, Chinese and European cooking, and castella is a Portuguese sponge cake rebuilt with rice molasses. The Peace Park and the atomic bomb museum are places of active mourning, not attractions. Offshore lies the mine-island of Gunkanjima.

   Second gate, second city. You arrive in Nagasaki by train from Fukuoka and sleep two nights fifteen minutes' walk from the quay the Goto boats leave from. The stop does earn its place, though, because the prologue to what comes next is here: Oura cathedral, finished in 1864, the oldest standing Christian church in the country and the place where the so-called discovery of the hidden Christians happened in 1865. It belongs to the same World Heritage listing as the Goto villages, and seeing it first changes a good deal of what you understand when you get there.

   The rest is two city days with an island inside them: Gunkanjima, the mine island abandoned in 1974, where visitors reach only a walkway of a little over two hundred metres and where the landing is often cancelled even in fine weather, so book it for the first possible day of the trip. On land, the Peace Park and the atomic bomb museum, places of active mourning rather than attractions, and Urakami cathedral, which stood five hundred metres from the hypocentre and is a 1959 rebuild. To eat, sara-udon rather than the champon of the guidebooks; shippoku is expensive and has to be ordered days ahead.

6. Goto Islands3 days

   Japan's far-western archipelago, where Hidden Christians held on through two and a half centuries of persecution: some fifty wooden, brick and stone churches by the sea, white-sand beaches and grass-covered volcanoes.

   This is the heart of the route and the stop most at the mercy of the sea. From Nagasaki port the jetfoil reaches Fukue in an hour and twenty-five, the ferry in a little over three, and there are flights of about half an hour as well. What there is no comfortable second chance for is the plan: three days is the stated minimum, and one rough day at sea takes half of it away. You come for some fifty churches built beside the water by people who had spent two and a half centuries hiding their faith, and on these islands a rental car is all but obligatory.

   Day one is Fukue and needs no boats: the brick church of Dozaki, now mostly a museum of the persecution, the Onidake volcano, half an hour up on foot, the cliffs and lighthouse at Osezaki with the latest sunset in Kyushu, and the izakaya by the port, the only nightlife in the archipelago. Day two is the one you prepare from home: the old church at Gorin, on Hisaka, a Japanese house outside and a wooden gothic nave within, and Egami, on Naru, white and blue among the trees. You go by sea taxi or tour boat because no road reaches Gorin's door, you call the information centre beforehand, and you do not photograph the interiors.

   Day three crosses to Nakadori, half an hour by jetfoil from Fukue, for the sandstone church at Kashiragashima that the fishermen themselves took nearly ten years to build, and for Nakanoura and Aosagaura, the latter open to visitors only from Friday to Sunday. It is also the home of goto udon, eaten straight out of the boiling pot. Understand what these buildings are: many are still working parishes with mass, and several of the ones that are not sit on islands with no shop and no toilets. You phone ahead, you come in quietly and you do not visit during a service. If the sea closes, plan B stays on Fukue: more churches, Takahama beach, and the Onidake observatory, open April to September with a booking made the day before.

   What puts it in this route: Dozaki Church and Hidden Christian museum · Former Gorin Church (Hisaka) and Egami Church (Naru), World Heritage

7. Yakushima3 days

   A granite island where, as the local line goes, it rains thirty-five days a month, and the rain is the point: it is what keeps the moss. Reaching the Jomon Sugi cedar means a twenty-two-kilometre walk of nearly ten hours, much of it along the rails of an old forestry railway. Felling yakusugi is banned, so the woodwork sold here comes from stumps left behind by the old logging, and the Hirauchi bath, cut into the coastal rock, only exists at low tide.

   The ending is the longest leg of the trip: out of the archipelago, back to the mainland and all the way down to Kagoshima for the ferry or the plane. It is worth it, because Yakushima resembles nothing that came before. It is subtropical, it is mountainous, Miyanoura-dake is the roof of Kyushu, and the line that sums it up is the local one: it rains thirty-five days a month. It is also the only stop where the visitor is plainly the foreign element. You have not come to see what somebody built, but cedars that had been growing for centuries before the first logger turned up.

   The big day is the trail to the Jomon Sugi: nine to ten hours, twenty-two kilometres, much of it along the tracks of an old forestry railway. From March to the end of November private cars cannot drive up the Arakawa forest road, so you take the five in the morning bus, no reservation, first come first served, cash. The timetable of the last bus back is the real turnaround limit, the mountain registration form is compulsory, and the two-piece rain gear, the warm layer and the portable toilet kit are not optional: all your waste comes down the mountain with you. In heavy rain the road closes and the walk simply does not happen.

   The other two days are the cushion. One for Shiratani Unsuikyo, the mossy forest, with a three-hour short route and a six-hour one up to the Taiko Rock viewpoint. Worth knowing: Miyazaki and his team visited it while researching Princess Mononoke, but the film is not set here, and calling it the Mononoke forest is local marketing. The other day depends on the sky: the yakusugi museum, which pays off better before you walk than after, the communal baths along the coast, the Hirauchi onsen that only appears at low tide. In May you can ask for a place on the conservation committee's turtle tour at Nagata Inakahama, the only legal way to watch them nest.

   What puts it in this route: Trail to the Jomon Sugi cedar · Shiratani Unsuikyo Forest