The nation of Japan, known in Japanese as Nihon or Nippon (日本), occupies an archipelago off the east coast of Asia. The four main islands are Hokkaidō in the north, Honshū (the largest), Shikoku in the south, and Kyūshū in the southwest. The country includes thousands of other islands of all sizes; among them the Ryūkyū (Nansei) Islands are a long chain extending to the southwest and including the large island of Okinawa, and the Nanpō Islands are another long chain extending south into the Pacific Ocean. Much of Japan is mountainous but the coastal regions are densely populated and urbanized; the country's population is about 126 million. The Ōsumi and Tokara Islands, together with neighboring groups of smaller islands, form the northernmost quarter of the Nansei Islands (Nansei-shotō or "southwest islands" in Japanese). Unlike the rest of the archipelago the Ōsumi Islands were never part of the Ryukyu Kingdom; they have always been governed as part of Japan proper. Administratively the Ōsumi and Tokara Islands are part of Kagoshima Prefecture, the southernmost prefecture of Kyūshū. At the end of World War II in 1945 the Ōsumi Islands remained under Japanese control while the Tokara Islands and the Ryūkyū Islands from the Tokara group southward came under U.S. military control. The U.S. returned control of the Tokaras to Japan in 1952. In Japanese the word for a lighthouse is tōdai or toudai (灯台). The words saki and misaki are for capes and headlands, hana ("nose") is a promontory, hantō is a peninsula, shima (also spelled sima or jima) is an island, bae is a reef, iwa or shi is a rocky reef, amase or se is a shoal, wan is a bay, nada is a sound or basin, kaikyō is a strait, kawa is a river, and kō or minato is a harbor. Lighthouses in Japan are operated and maintained by the Japanese Coast Guard's Maritime Safety Agency. Lighthouses in the Ōsumi islands are maintained by the Coast Guard office at Kagoshima City, Kyūshū. ARLHS numbers are from the ARLHS World List of Lights. JCG numbers are the Japanese Coast Guard's light list numbers. Admiralty numbers are from volume M of the Admiralty List of Lights & Fog Signals. U.S. NGA List numbers are from Publication 112.
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Kusagaki Shima Light, Mishima Islands Japanese Coast Guard photo (no longer online) |
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Information available on lost lighthouses: Notable faux lighthouses: |
Adjoining pages: North: Kagoshima Area | South: Amami Islands
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Posted August 27, 2007. Checked and revised June 29, 2024. Lighthouses: 32. Site copyright 2024 Russ Rowlett and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.