Sotobanari

Sotobanari Island (外離島, Sotobanari-jima, Yaeyama: Fukabanari; Okinawan: Fukabanari) is one of the Yaeyama Islands, within the Sakishima Islands, at the southern end of the Ryukyu Islands. It is to the west of Iriomote Island, its nearest large neighbour. It is administered as part of the town of Taketomi, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan.

Sotobanari (Image courtesy of National Land Image Information (Color Aerial Photographs), Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism)

The small island (about 1 km in diameter), whose name means outer distant island, is vegetated, but has no running water. Sotobanari had one human inhabitant, an eighty-two-year-old man named Masafumi Nagasaki, who had lived there in semi-isolation for three decades (1989 - 2018), nude, and bought food and water from a settlement an hour away by boat weekly with ¥10,000 sent by family, fully clothed. He was featured on the Vice News segment "Japan's Naked Island Hermit".[1][2] Recently (April 2018) he left the island because of illness (suspected influenza). He was too weak to resist the police. He always had said he wished to die on the island. Now, the Japanese government won't let him go back to the island.