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Ogasawara NP, Tokyo
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When the Ogasawara Maru leaves Futami, islanders don’t just wave from the pier: Ogasawara taiko plays, boats escort the ferry out, and the send-off is “Itterasshai”—“go, and come back”—rather than sayonara.
Island sushi served near Futami turns island ingenuity into a bite: local fish such as sawara is soy-marinated for keeping, mustard replaces wasabi, which doesn’t grow here, and sugarcane sweetens the rice.
On Futami’s inner-harbor mudflats lives the Ogasawara red fiddler crab, once mistaken for a widespread cousin until DNA and anatomy revealed it was a distinct species. Males wave one oversized claw.
Futami was the landing place for Chichijima’s first permanent settlement: in 1830, five Westerners and more than 20 people from Hawaiʻi and other Pacific islands arrived and made homes at nearby Okumura.
In 1853, before sailing on to Japan, Commodore Matthew Perry stopped at Futami Port, supplied residents with cattle, sheep, goats and vegetable seeds, and bought a site for a proposed U.S. coaling station.
Kiyose River flows into Futami’s inner harbor, passing through sea, tidal, brackish and freshwater zones. A local student survey even found a snail then listed as extinct in Tokyo’s Red Data Book.
Old British charts called Futami Port “Port Lloyd,” named by Captain Beechey in 1827 for the Bishop of Oxford. Shogunal surveyors later chose Futami for rocks resembling Ise’s famous paired Meoto-Iwa.
When the islands returned to Japanese administration in 1968, Futami had only small prewar harbor structures left—and no proper fishing-port facilities. Rebuilding the port was an early step in restoring island life.
