Islands #5 - Mageshima

Mage Island is a tiny, almost uninhabited islet that lies about 12 kilometers west of the port of Nishinoomote on Tanegashima Island; but there is no ferry from there to Mageshima, and no ships from any other port at all. The name “Mageshima” means “horsehair island” because “ma” is the reading of the character for “horse” and “ge” means “hair”.

Although the island has a good port with a large concrete pier for any boat, you will have to get there by your own or a hired boat. Mageshima is privately owned, so there are no courses to it. There are a few families living on the island - they grow sugar cane, but they are generally reclusive and closed to communication. Almost nothing is grown on the island (except for the aforementioned cane), so it is covered with shrubbery.

Mageshima is triangular in shape, 5 km long (from north to south) and 1.5 km wide (from west to east) in its middle part. From there, the island gradually narrows to the north. There used to be an airport, or rather an airstrip, but it has long been abandoned and is no longer in operation. Recent press reports have indicated that the Japanese government is in talks with U.S. forces in Japan to turn the island into an air base instead of the current, widely discussed Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) at Futenma on Okinawa. If this happens, the abandoned airport will likely be restored and improved. The topography of Mageshima is generally flat, so it would be easy to convert the island into an air base. Whether thousands of young and single marines will want to live on this isolated, wild, remote from civilization island is another matter. In addition, it seems that the issue of relocating the base has been put on the back burner and forgotten by the governments of both countries.