保戸島

The ferry leaves Tsukumi port and turns toward open water, and within half an hour the shape of Hotojima rises from the Bungo Channel — a single hill of houses pressed against a slope, with almost no flat ground between the sea and the ridge. Buildings climb over one another. Narrow lanes thread between them, including a prefectural road said to be among the narrowest of its kind, more a passage between walls than a road in any usual sense.

The island lives by tuna. Boats from Hotojima go out into distant waters, and the rhythms of the village — the comings and goings at the harbor, the quiet of weekday afternoons — still follow that long-distance fishing calendar. The settlement itself has been listed among the historic fishing villages worth preserving, and walking through it one understands why: the density is not picturesque but functional, shaped by the steep ground of Tomiyama behind and the sea immediately below. Part of the island falls within the Nippō Kaigan national park, though the designation feels almost beside the point when you are standing on a stone step looking down at someone's laundry and a docked boat in the same frame.

Tsukumi city lies across the water, close enough that the mainland is always visible, yet the island keeps its own weather of attention. Yanagita Kunio passed through here and wrote about it in *Kaina Shōki*; the island also carries the memory of the wartime air raid. These are not displayed. They sit inside the place, the way the slope sits inside the houses, available to anyone who stays long enough to notice.