The ferry from Shichirui takes about three hours, and for the last one of them the phone signal gives up entirely. This turns out to be the correct way to arrive. Nishinoshima, one of the Oki Islands off the Shimane coast, has never bothered to become famous, and after a few days you begin to suspect this is not an accident but a policy.<\/p>\n
The cliffs at Kuniga would be on postcards in any other prefecture. Here they are mostly enjoyed by horses, who graze on the clifftop meadows and regard visitors with the mild interest of landlords. The island’s one taxi driver, Fujita-san, doubles as its unofficial historian. He will tell you which emperor was exiled here, in what year, and what the emperor reportedly thought of the fishing. The emperor thought highly of the fishing.<\/p>\n
We ate at the same harbor izakaya four nights running because there was no reason to eat anywhere else. Turban shells grilled in their own liquor, squid that had been swimming that afternoon, and a running commentary from the owner about the ferry schedule, which functions here the way weather does elsewhere, as the single topic everyone is qualified to discuss.<\/p>\n
Nobody asked us to write about Nishinoshima, and we half suspect the island would prefer we had not. But some places make a better argument for Japan’s countryside than any campaign ever has: they simply carry on, beautifully, whether or not anyone is watching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nishinoshima has sea cliffs that would headline any other country, one taxi, and a noticeboard that still announces whose cow got loose. We stayed a week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journeys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unfamiliarjapan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}