Mutsurejima Lighthouse

A Working Light from Japan's First Decade of Modern Navigation

Mutsurejima Lighthouse (六連島灯台, also romanised Mutsure-shima Tōdai) stands on the northeastern cliff of Mutsurejima, an island belonging to the city of Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture, and the stone tower, completed in 1871, was designated an Important Cultural Property on 23 December 2020.

It is not a tall lighthouse. The tower rises about 10.2 metres, and since the cliff already lifts it some twenty metres above the water, the builders had no reason to go higher. From the footpath you see a squat white cylinder of dressed stone with a metal lantern room set on top, a fan-shaped keeper's annex pressed against its eastern flank, and a low stone enclosure holding the whole group together. The registered building area comes to 57.71 square metres.

That so modest a structure carries national designation has everything to do with a treaty. In 1867, with the port of Hyōgo about to open to foreign trade, the Tokugawa government agreed with Britain to build five lighthouses along the Inland Sea approaches. The shogunate fell within months. The new Meiji government inherited the obligation, and the work passed to Richard Henry Brunton, a Scottish civil engineer recruited from Britain, who built to specifications drawn up by the Stevenson engineering firm of Edinburgh.

Construction began in October 1870. Yamaguchi Prefecture's cultural property record gives completion as the twenty-eighth day of the eleventh lunar month of Meiji 4; other accounts date the first lighting to the twenty-first day of that same month, equivalent to 1 January 1872 in the Gregorian calendar. Either way the light was burning as that year turned, the third to be established west of Kobe.

The original apparatus paired a twin-wick burner with a fourth-order lens. Look closely at the lantern room and you will find iron diamond-lattice frames, glazed where they face the sea and plated with iron sheet on the landward side, a small piece of pragmatism against the winter gales of the Hibiki Sea. An LED unit does the work now.

What the Designation Covers, and Why It Is Unusual

The Agency for Cultural Affairs listed the lighthouse under the criterion of high historical value. Three further items were registered as tsuketari, subsidiary elements protected alongside the main structure: an old sundial, the stone retaining wall, and a beacon called the Kyū-Manaita Shōhyō (旧俎礁標).

That last item is not on the island.

It began as a marker post planted on a rock in the Kanmon Strait to warn shipping of a shoal, contemporary with the lighthouse itself and regarded as the oldest surviving beacon of its kind in Japan. Later alterations and a relocation turned it into an aid to navigation in its own right, and it served as Kanenotsurumisaki Lighthouse from the Taishō era until its decommissioning in recent years. Shimonoseki's municipal government describes it as indispensable to understanding the history of the Mutsurejima light, which is why a structure standing kilometres away shares the designation.

Mutsurejima was designated on the same day as Tsunoshima Lighthouse, also in Shimonoseki and also a Brunton project, and Hesaki Lighthouse across the water in Kitakyushu. These were the first lighthouses still in active service anywhere in Japan to be raised to Important Cultural Property status, which is a slightly odd category to occupy: the Japan Coast Guard maintains them as navigational equipment while the Agency for Cultural Affairs protects them as historic architecture.

One more detail belongs to the island's memory rather than the official record. Local accounts hold that the Meiji Emperor came to inspect the light after its completion, and a stone marker on Mutsurejima commemorates the visit.

Getting There, and What Else Is on the Island

Mutsurejima lies roughly five kilometres northwest of Hikoshima, off the western entrance to the Kanmon Strait, and the only way across is the municipal ferry from Takesaki-chō, a short walk from Shimonoseki Station. The crossing takes about twenty minutes. Fares are 370 yen one way and 710 yen return for adults.

Timetables matter more here than at most heritage sites. Outside peak periods the boat runs four round trips a day, and only one pairing gives a visitor daylight on the island without an overnight stay: the 10:00 sailing from Takesaki with the 12:30 return from Mutsurejima, about two and a half hours ashore. Peak seasons around New Year, the spring equinox and mid-August add a fifth round trip. Check current times with the Shimonoseki city port office before setting out, since weather alters the schedule.

The lighthouse compound sits at the northeastern point, reached on foot from the harbour across a lava plateau given over largely to greenhouses. The tower is a functioning aid to navigation and its interior is not open to the public; you view it from outside the enclosure, which is where the sundial and the stone walling are also visible. Photographing the exterior is unrestricted.

Fewer than a hundred people live on Mutsurejima. They grow chrysanthemums, carnations and gerberas under glass, which has earned the place the nickname of the flower island, and the surrounding waters yield sea urchin, turban shell and abalone. The island is also where bottled sea urchin preserved in alcohol is said to have been invented, by accident, at the temple of Saikyōji during a drinking party between the resident priest and foreign sailors. An outcrop of mica basalt on the shoreline draws geologists. Two hours is enough to walk the perimeter and still stand a while below the light.