Aoshima (Cat Island, Ehime)

Lia found Aoshima the way she finds most of our strangest detours, deep in some forum thread about cat islands, and once she’d said the words “more cats than people” out loud there was no talking her out of it. We took a small ferry out from the Ehime coast into the Uwa Sea, a crossing short enough that we barely finished our coffee before the island’s low green hills appeared. There’s no dock full of hawkers or gift shops waiting on the other side, because there’s almost nothing on Aoshima at all — a scatter of houses, most empty, a handful of elderly residents, and cats. So many cats. They watched our boat come in from the seawall like a welcoming committee that had done this a thousand times before and couldn’t quite be bothered to be impressed.

An island run by its cats

The story goes that fishermen once kept cats aboard their boats to keep mice away from stored grain and nets, and over generations the population here simply outgrew the fishing itself. Now the cats are the island’s whole identity, sprawled across boat hulls, curled in the doorways of houses nobody lives in anymore, threading between the legs of the few residents old enough to remember when Aoshima had a school. Lia sat cross-legged on a low wall for the better part of an hour, cats drifting in and out of her lap like she was furniture, while I wandered the single lane trying to count them and lost track somewhere past fifty. Nobody feeds them on a schedule exactly, though visitors do bring food, and the island seems to run on an economy of patience rather than commerce.

Empty houses and a shrinking village

Walking the lanes away from the harbor, you notice the island’s other truth: most of the houses are shuttered, their wood gone silver-grey, gardens gone to weeds that the cats have claimed as their own private jungle. It’s not a sad place exactly, but it is a quiet one, a village visibly outliving its own population, and there’s something honest about how plainly it shows its age rather than dressing itself up for the ferry crowd. We passed one elderly woman sweeping her step who nodded at us without much interest and went back to her broom, entirely unbothered by two more tourists come to look at her cats.

No shops, no schedule, just the water

There’s genuinely nothing to buy on Aoshima — no vending machine, no convenience store, no café to wait out the hours in — so you plan your visit entirely around the ferry timetable and bring your own food and water. We sat on the breakwater eating rice balls we’d packed that morning, cats materializing hopefully at the smell, and watched small fishing boats work the calm water of the Uwa Sea beyond the harbor mouth. It’s a strange, stripped-down kind of tourism, an island with no infrastructure built for you at all, and that absence is exactly what makes an hour or two here feel so different from anywhere else in Ehime.

Getting There

Aoshima is reached by a small passenger ferry from Nagahama Port, itself reachable by local train and bus from Ozu or from Yawatahama further south. Ferries run only a few times a day, so check the timetable before you go and plan your return crossing first — there’s nowhere to buy supplies once you’re on the island, so bring your own food, water, and cash. Most visitors make it a half-day trip: one ferry over, a couple of unhurried hours wandering the lanes and harbor, and the next available boat back.