Goto Islands

A chain of about 140 islands off the west coast of Kyushu, five of them large, and a landscape of terraced fields, cliffs and very clear water. What sets them apart is the churches, and the reason they are here is grim.

Christianity was banned in Japan in 1614 and believers who kept the faith did so in secret for 250 years. In the 1790s, families from Sotome on the mainland were encouraged to migrate to the Goto islands to farm marginal land nobody else wanted, and they brought their hidden practice with them. When the ban was finally lifted in 1873, those communities built churches, often on the poorest and most remote ground because that is where they had been living.

Several were designed and built by Tetsukawa Yosuke, a local carpenter who taught himself Western church architecture and put up more than fifty of them across Nagasaki. Egami Church on Naru island, a small wooden building from 1918 painted cream with blue trim, is his best, and it is part of the UNESCO listing made in 2018.

Visiting the churches needs planning. Most are active parish churches and several require advance notice through the Nagasaki church information centre, partly to protect services and partly because the smallest ones are unstaffed. Do not turn up unannounced.

The rest of the islands are worth the trip on their own: Takahama beach on Fukue is among the best in Japan, the water is turquoise and empty, and Goto udon, made with camellia oil, is boiled at the table and eaten with a broth of flying fish.

Ferries and jetfoils run from Nagasaki in one and a half to three hours, and there are flights to Fukue.