Izu Oshima Travel Report – Part 1

I have a weakness for lonely islands, especially those in the Pacific, and after having been to Hawaii, Palau, Saipan and Guam I started to explore islands closer to home.

In my student times I have been also to Okinawa by the way.

So, in 2011 I started with my exploration of the islands that belong to the municipality of Tokyo. I went to the one in the middle of the island chain straight south of Tokyo, Hachijojima, first – here is the report on that one. Last year I went to the furthest away islands (there are more further south, but uninhabited), the Ogasawara or Bonin islands – here are some of those reports.

Now, having been to the one furthest away I found it a bit odd to not having been on the closest island: Izu Oshima. There are seven Izu islands that lie close to the Izu peninsula and Oshima is the biggest one of them and the one closest to Tokyo. Oshima simply means Big Island and lies only 120 km south of Tokyo. There are about 9000 people living on the island.

The active volcano Mt. Mihara is responsible for the island’s existence.

There are three ways to get to Oshima: by plane from Tokyo’s Haneda airport which takes 30 min, by jet ferry and by ship. Since I love the sea I am of course choosing the ship method. Getting to Oshima with a “normal” ship is a bit awkward, since the ship sails at night and arrives at 5 in the morning or so in Oshima. That’s way too early for my taste and I decided to take the jet ferry on the way to the island and planned to take the normal boat on the way back during the day.

The jet ferry has the disadvantage that you cannot go on deck, since there is no deck.

The ride to the island was very smooth thanks to awesome weather and also I suppose thanks to the manner of motion of the jet ferry. The thing sort of flies over the water at 80 kilometers per hour or 44 knots, powered by two jet engines that make the same amount of noise as an airplane.

Arrived at the island after a mere 1 hour and 45 minutes, my hotel was kind enough to pick me up from the harbor. The inquisitive lady from the hotel talked me up immediately and it turned out she is Chinese, living in Japan for over twenty years and since five years ago on Oshima. Funny that two foreigners are communicating in Japanese. Her Japanese was better than her English she said and I don’t mind much which anyway.

There are three main villages on the island, Okata, Motomachi and Habuminato. Okata and Motomachi are the two ports and Motomachi is the biggest of the villages and also housed my hotel. After checking in at around 15:00 the hotel lady very kindly explained to me what to do and where to go. Since there was not much time for anything else on the arrival day, I went to explore Motomachi and the harbor and to do some food shopping. There is no convenience store on the island and the only bigger supermarket of Motomachi closes at 19:00 but at least it was open also on the arrival holiday. Down at the harbor you can see the Izu peninsula in the haze and if the weather is really nice you can even see Mt. Fuji, but not on the 29th. The famous mountain did not show itself during the rest of my stay on the island either.

Further south I could see the next two islands in the haze as well, Toshima and Niijima. Maybe one of them will be my next target

At the wall of the arrival hall building of the pier is a hilarious mural with scary kraken and deep sea fish, which I found to be quite amazing. See pics on flickr.

They have a nice park-like area for several kilometers up the coast with BBQ places and resting houses and on the way there is a public onsen with outside baths (routenburo) from where you can see Mt. Fuji if you are lucky. In the park next to the onsen the next awesome surprise awaited apart from that hilarious mural: a man-height statue of Godzilla or Gojira as his Japanese name is. See pics! On the little panel next to Gojira was an explanation saying that in the first Godzilla movie it says that Gojira is reawakened by hydrogen bomb testing and his resting place is inside the volcano of Mt. Mihara and we shall all be nice and well-behaved so that he does not rise again.

Even during the short walk up the coast there was some nice stuff to see – lava fields that look like a moon landscape and rough terrain. Yes, this is very much a volcanic island. Mt. Mihara broke out last time only in 1986. There seems to be ash around all the time, since in the hotel there was a fine black film on some not so often cleaned surfaces. But maybe that was because of the general cleanliness problem of that hotel…

Man, the hotel was close to nature. I killed three mosquitoes in my room, one fly, prevented a giant crane fly from entering and when I returned from the bath a big fat spider sat at the wall and an even bigger one hovered on the carpet in the corridor and I was scared shitless! I have a size limit with spiders, small ones I can ignore, mid-sized ones I can kill but big ones I am unable to kill by for example hitting it with a shoe or so and the spider in my room was too large to kill indeed. Oshima = monster island…

Day 2:

I had a restless night due to the spider attack and didn’t dare to turn the lights out, since I wanted to see where the monster was. What scares me most about them is the thought to have them crawling over me (and biting me). Until three in the morning she did not stray too much for her original resting place, at least not that I noticed when I woke up from time to time and checked on her. Between 3 and 5 in the morning she decided to wander around and parts of that right over my head, hanging below the ceiling. Shudder! I wasn’t awake the whole time but for quite a bit. Then at five she settled on the sliding door to the wash basin compartment and I managed to open the sliding thing and she indeed crawled to the other side and I slammed the door shut, meaning, I banned her to the washbasin compartment. I finally turned the lights out with it getting bright already and slept for another two hours. At seven thirty, when I woke up I looked at a tiny jump spider that sat half a meter from my face on the tatami mats. Well, I left that bugger alone and got up. The big spider still hung on the other side of the sliding door and I slammed its over half into it and thus trapped her between the two sliding doors.

During breakfast the Chinese lady talked to me and we had quite a nice chat about living in Japan as foreigners and about North Korea and China during Mao’s times. I also complained about the spider stuff but she just shrugged, that’s what you get for living “close to nature” was her comment.

Since the weather wasn’t too great, extremely windy and threat of rain, I decided to go to the southernmost village named Habuminato by bus instead of challenging Mt. Mihara. After a forty minute bus ride, I arrived there and set out on foot. Habuminato is the oldest settlement on Oshima. Actually, a shogun or some of his helpers were banned there from Edo (Tokyo’s old name) for not having obeyed whatever orders. There are some of the old houses left with the biggest one of them being a mini (free) museum. There is nobody on duty there, you can just walk in. Somebody opens the door at 9:00 in the morning and closes it at 16:00. You can write something into a guest book and I had to grin at the request on a panel next to the guest book which, if a little politer, asked for not writing crap into the guest book. Another thing that made me grin was a museum worthy old telephone for emergencies inside the house.

Next I made my way to a lookout which also served as WW2 fortification with old bunkers boring into the hill. The wind was so strong that it blew an old lady over who went up there with her apparently son or daughter plus wife or husband and a small child and they quickly fled the place again. Next I wandered around in search of some place where to get lunch but there was not much around and the weather was getting ever worse. So I decided to take the bus back to Motomachi and since the buses run only once per hour in this place you better don’t miss one. Habuminato, as well as the rest of the island is very sleepy, lonely and old. Only two,three people ride with the buses and their average age is 60+. Despite it having been golden week, there were only very few tourists on the island.

Back in Motomachi all hell broke loose with heavy rain and I fled into the harbor’s arrival hall building that sports the mural on its outer wall where luckily a lunch place had still open and I got the last lunch that they served and slurped my ramen soup looking out onto the sea swept pier which I had leisurely walked the day before. I waited until the rain stopped for a moment, took a look at the pier which had “off limits” signs at its entrance and made my way back to the hotel, getting hit by yet another heavy rain shower.

The Chinese lady from the hotel allowed me to change rooms for two nights with ocean view, I hoped for less bugs but was disappointed in that. More on the bugs, other wild and tame animals and Mt. Mihara in this report’s part 2 next weekend