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Saikai NPKujukushima, Nagasaki
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Local birders identified Osezaki as a key hawk-watching point in 1989; counters recorded 30,120 honey buzzards in 2025, the highest season total in their published 2011–2025 series.
For Tang envoys sailing in the 7th and 8th centuries, this cape was said to be the last Japanese land in sight before they crossed the East China Sea toward China—centuries before its lighthouse appeared.
Just 10 cm tall, Osezaki’s wind-battered shima-shajin hides among seaside grass, opening tiny lavender bells. This rare plant is known in Japan on Fukue and Hirado, and elsewhere on Korea’s Jeju Island.
The slanting cliff layers preserve a landscape from 22–17 million years ago: the Goto Group began as sand and mud deposited in continental rivers and lakes. Dark basalt dikes later cut through the rock.
Osezaki’s first lighthouse, an iron tower with a first-order lens, began shining on December 15, 1879. Its aging structure was replaced by the present concrete lighthouse in the early 1970s.
The overlook’s Prayer Goddess statue was unveiled in 1978 to honor soldiers killed in the southern campaigns. Its sculptor, Kitamura Seibo—the artist behind Nagasaki’s Peace Statue—was 95 when he made it.
Since 2009, Osezaki Lighthouse has used solar power and remote operation. Its light is visible to vessels as far as 22 km offshore, still guiding ships from this remote headland.
When the original iron lighthouse was replaced, part of it was preserved at Tokyo’s Museum of Maritime Science. A fragment of Osezaki’s 19th-century sea marker thus outlived its remote cliff-top home.
At Osezaki, hachikuma (honey buzzards) ride rising air in circles, sometimes stacking into a tall “taka-bashira,” or hawk pillar, before crossing the sea. Their name refers to eating bee larvae and resembling a kumataka.
