Tomogashima Lighthouse

A Small Stone Beacon Above the Kitan Strait

The Kitan Strait is a narrow stretch of water that separates the southern tip of Awaji Island from the Kii Peninsula, marking the eastern gateway between the Seto Inland Sea and the Pacific approaches to Osaka Bay. Halfway across this strait lies a cluster of four small islands known collectively as Tomogashima. On the western edge of the largest, Okinoshima, a white cylindrical stone tower stands fifty-one metres above the sea. This is Tomogashima Lighthouse.

The tower itself is modest: twelve metres tall, with a footprint of fifty-five square metres. What makes it remarkable is its date. The light was first illuminated on 25 June 1872, the fifth year of the Meiji era, making this the eighth Western-style lighthouse ever completed in Japan. Its designer was Richard Henry Brunton, a Scottish engineer hired by the new Meiji government to bring Japan's coastal infrastructure into the age of steam. Construction was originally authorised under a treaty signed in 1867 between the outgoing Tokugawa shogunate and Britain, an obligation the Meiji government inherited and fulfilled. In November 2015, the lighthouse was added to Japan's Register of Tangible Cultural Properties.

Twenty minutes by ferry from the mainland port of Kada, Okinoshima today is uninhabited, but it is far from empty. The island spent most of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries as part of a military fortress, its forests hiding red-brick gun emplacements, magazines, and barracks that are slowly being reclaimed by ivy. The lighthouse sits on the same island, on the same paths, still casting its working beam across the strait every night.

The Treaty of Osaka and a Young Scottish Engineer

To open Hyōgo (modern Kobe) as a treaty port, the Tokugawa shogunate signed the Treaty of Osaka in 1867 with Britain, the United States, France and the Netherlands. The agreement committed Japan to building a series of Western-style lighthouses to make the Inland Sea navigable at night. The shogunate fell within a year, but the Meiji government honoured the obligation and pushed the construction programme forward.

The engineer hired to lead the effort was Richard Henry Brunton (1841–1901), a young Scottish railway engineer with no prior lighthouse experience. Before sailing for Japan in 1868, he spent several weeks training under the Stevenson family of Edinburgh, the dynasty of civil engineers responsible for most of Scotland's coastal lights. He was twenty-seven when he arrived. Over the next eight years he supervised the construction of twenty-six lighthouses up and down the Japanese coast, earning him the later epithet "father of Japanese lighthouses."

Work on Tomogashima Lighthouse began on 7 April 1870 and took two years and two months to complete. The original optical apparatus was a third-order fixed lens shipped from Britain, paired with an oil lamp burning three concentric wicks. The masonry is local stone, dressed and laid in a cylindrical shaft; a smaller semicircular service building adjoins the base of the tower as a single integrated mass; and the lantern room is capped with a riveted iron dome. This combination — cylindrical stone tower, hemispherical service annex, iron-domed lantern — is signature Brunton, repeated with variations at Sugashima (Mie), Shionomisaki (Wakayama), and several other early Meiji sites.

A Fortress, a Bombing, and a Single Interruption

Eighteen years after its completion, in 1890, the entire lighthouse was moved roughly twenty-five metres east of its original position. The reason was military. The Imperial Japanese Army was fortifying Okinoshima as part of the Yura Fortress, a coastal defence complex meant to protect Osaka Bay, and the lighthouse stood in the way of planned gun emplacements. Relocating a stone tower of this size was an unusual undertaking by any era's standards; the structure was apparently dismantled and rebuilt at the new site, although the construction records from the move are sparse.

The light burned continuously for the next seventy-three years. In March 1945, in the closing months of the Pacific War, American aircraft attacked the island and damaged the lighthouse, and the Japanese military ordered the beam extinguished for tactical reasons. The light went dark for the first time since 1872. The interruption did not last long. On 16 August 1945 — the day after Japan's surrender — the beam was relit on a provisional basis, and it has not failed since.

A modernisation of the interior equipment was carried out in 1977, but the external masonry and silhouette remain essentially unchanged from the Meiji original. The Japan Coast Guard ranks Tomogashima Lighthouse in Class A of its "preserved lighthouses" register, the highest historical-value category, of which only twenty-three exist nationwide.

What to Look For on the Cliff

The lighthouse is reached on foot from the small pier at Nonoura, roughly an hour's walk along ridge paths and stone steps. Visitors view the tower from outside; interior access is normally closed. The Coast Guard occasionally opens the lantern room to the public around Marine Day (Umi-no-Hi, the third Monday of July), but this depends on the year and is not announced far in advance.

Three details reward a closer look. The first is the plan. Most lighthouses stand as freestanding cylinders, with service rooms in separate buildings nearby. Brunton's early designs instead fused the cylindrical tower and a semicircular service annex into one continuous mass, a hallmark of his Japanese work. Walking around the base, the way the two volumes flow together becomes obvious.

The second is the iron dome over the lantern room. Decades of repainting have softened its surface, but the rhythm of rivets and seam plates is still readable. This is hand-shaped Meiji-era ironwork, made when Japan had only just begun rolling its own structural steel.

The third, and most striking, is the view. To the northwest lies the southern shore of Awaji Island and the Yura Strait; due south, the small island of Nushima; on clear days, the mountains of Shikoku rise on the horizon. Container ships and ferries pass within a few hundred metres of the cliff edge below, still using this light to navigate the strait at night. Standing on the headland it becomes clear in a single glance why a nineteenth-century engineer chose this exact spot.

The Rest of the Island: Batteries, Tunnels, and a "Laputa" Atmosphere

The lighthouse is best seen as one stop on a longer walk. Okinoshima is dotted with the remains of the Yura Fortress: numbered artillery batteries (First through Fifth), a former Imperial Navy hydrophone station, ammunition magazines, and a meridian plaza marking the 135° east line of longitude that defines Japan Standard Time. The Third Battery is the most photographed of these. Its brick-arched underground passages and circular gun pits, half consumed by moss and ivy, have a quality that visitors often compare to Hayao Miyazaki's animated film Castle in the Sky (Laputa). The comparison is so widespread that Okinoshima is sometimes simply called "the Laputa island."

A full circuit of the marked trails takes between two and a half and three and a half hours. The paths are unpaved in places, with stone steps and steep sections; the battery interiors are pitch dark and require a torch. There are no shops, vending machines or restaurants on the island, and no overnight accommodation other than designated camping areas. Drinking water and lunch must be brought from the mainland.

Getting There and Around

The launching point is the small fishing town of Kada at the northwestern tip of Wakayama City. From central Osaka, take the Nankai main line to Wakayama-shi station, change to the Nankai Kada line, and ride to its terminus (about twenty-five minutes). Kada port is a twenty-minute walk from the station. Tomogashima Kisen ferries depart for Nonoura pier on Okinoshima four times a day during the main season, taking around twenty minutes each way.

From March to November the ferries run daily except Wednesdays (unless Wednesday is a national holiday). From December to February, sailings are restricted to weekends and holidays only. The boats carry up to one hundred passengers; advance booking is not accepted, and second sailings onward are filled by numbered tickets distributed at the dock on the day. The ferry will not run in high winds, and decisions are made on the morning of departure. Check the operator's website before travelling, especially in winter.

Kada itself rewards an extra hour or two. Awashima Shrine, a short walk from the port, is renowned for its enormous collection of donated dolls and an annual ritual on 3 March in which dolls are sent out to sea on small boats. Local restaurants serve hand-line caught sea bream (kada-dai), best eaten as sashimi or in a hot-pot of thinly sliced fish (tai-shabu).