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Saikai NPKujukushima, Nagasaki
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Onidake hosts Goto’s Baramon kite festival each May. The hand-built kites have a vibrating strip that buzzes in the wind; traditionally, families give one to a boy for his first May 5, wishing him health and courage.
In 2024, more than 150 fire-brigade members lit about 71 hectares of Onidake. The controlled burn, repeated roughly every 3 years, briefly turns the slopes black before fresh spring green returns.
Onidake is the youngest of 11 basaltic cones in its volcanic group. Each is a one-eruption volcano, and Japan has only 3 areas with this type of volcanic group; Onidake itself last erupted about 18,000 years ago.
Some of Onidake’s volcanic fragments look like tiny tears: droplets of runny basalt were flung into the air and solidified. Nagasaki Prefecture designated the volcanic-tear locality a natural monument in 1954.
Lava from the Onidake volcanic group helped form the flatland beneath much of Goto City, Fukue Port and Fukue Airport. Farther south, volcanic flows also formed the rugged, 7-km Abunze coast.
Onidake’s cone last erupted about 18,000 years ago—but that is not the latest activity in the wider Fukue volcanic group. The Japan Meteorological Agency reports ash from an eruption about 2,300–2,400 years ago; its source is unknown.
Onidake’s slopes once had pine forest. The trees were cut in the mid-19th century to help build Fukue Castle: resin-rich pine resisted rot in the castle site’s wet, waterlogged ground.
