Nozaki Island

Nozaki is an island of grass and forest just east of Ojika, and almost nobody lives on it. In the 1950s more than 650 people lived in three villages here. Funamori was abandoned in 1966 and Nokubi in 1971, when the remaining families moved away together; the people of Nozaki village left in the 1990s, and the last resident, the priest of Okinokojima Shrine, moved to Nagasaki in 2001. The caretaker of the Nature Village, a lodge in the old school that closed in 1985, is the one person still stationed here. The island was a Shinto holy place, and the Hidden Christians who came from Sotome in the 19th century lived as shrine parishioners while keeping their faith in secret. In 1908 the 17 Catholic households of Nokubi finished a brick church, the first brick church by Tetsukawa Yosuke. A three-year repair ended in November 2025, and the church reopened on December 1, 2025. The village sites are a component of the UNESCO Hidden Christian Sites. What you see now: collapsed house walls, terraced fields gone to grass, and deer everywhere. There is no shop, no vending machine outside the Nature Village, and the mobile signal comes and goes, so bring all your food and water. The trails north to the Oeishi rock and south to Funamori have overgrown in places, and the tourism association asks you to walk them only with a guide.