Iwaishima

Iwaishima came up almost as a footnote when we were asking around Kaminoseki about the nuclear plant dispute, and once we heard the word “documentary” attached to it, Lia was already checking ferry times. It’s a tiny island, the kind where the harbor and the village are basically the same few hundred meters, and reaching it took a short, rolling ferry ride across water that felt noticeably more open and exposed than the sheltered straits we’d been driving past for days. What we found there was one of the more moving things I’ve come across on this whole trip — a community that used an ancient ritual as a form of protest, almost without meaning to.

The Dance That Almost Disappeared

The Kanmai is a sacred dance performance, over a thousand years old, traditionally held only once every four years on Iwaishima, and by the 1980s it had been canceled and nearly lost, the kind of quiet cultural erosion that happens to small island traditions everywhere as populations age and thin out. Talking to an older fisherman near the harbor, through a mix of his patient simple Japanese and my clumsier attempts, I understood that reviving it wasn’t purely a cultural decision — it became entangled with the fight against a nuclear plant proposed on the mainland shore facing the island, a way of insisting the community and its identity were still here, still worth protecting. Lia found that connection almost unbearably moving, this idea of dancing not for tourists or nostalgia but as an act of resistance disguised as tradition.

A Village Facing the Plant

Walking the island’s single coastal road, you eventually reach a point where you can see directly across the water toward Nagashima, where the disputed nuclear plant has been proposed for decades without ever being finished. It’s a strange, quiet thing to stand on a small fishing island and look at the exact site your neighbors have spent so much of their lives fighting, banners and hand-painted signs still visible on a few of Iwaishima’s own buildings even now. Nobody we spoke with was dramatic about it — mostly tired, mostly resigned to a fight that has outlasted entire fishing careers — but the resolve underneath that tiredness was unmistakable.

Small Harbor, Big Story

Away from all of that, Iwaishima is simply a beautiful, sleepy fishing island, its handful of streets climbing steeply from a harbor crowded with small wooden boats, laundry drying between houses, cats sunning themselves on stone steps. We ate lunch at a tiny place that seemed to double as someone’s actual kitchen, a simple grilled-fish set that the owner clearly took real pride in, and spent the rest of the afternoon just walking the coastal path, watching the light change over water that had somehow become, in a few hours, much more meaningful to look at.

Getting There

Iwaishima is reached by ferry from Yanai, with a limited number of sailings each day, so it’s worth checking the schedule before you go and planning around it rather than trying to improvise once you’re there. The island itself is small enough to explore entirely on foot, with no need for a car. Because ferries are infrequent, most visits work best as a deliberate day trip rather than a spontaneous add-on, ideally combined with time in nearby Kaminoseki if you’re already exploring this stretch of coast.