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Saikai NPKujukushima, Nagasaki
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About 30,000 honey-buzzards left Japan via Osezaki in autumn 2025, sometimes spiraling upward in “hawk pillars.” Their Japanese name, hachikuma, nods to bee-larvae meals and their resemblance to mountain hawk-eagles.
For 7th- and 8th-century Japanese envoys sailing to China, Osezaki was the last of their homeland visible before they crossed the East China Sea—a farewell view more than a millennium before the lighthouse.
The lighthouse hut in the climax of Akunin wasn’t filmed at the lighthouse: the crew built its set in the gym of former Take Elementary School. Other key scenes were filmed on Osezaki’s real cliffs.
In autumn, look down for 2-cm pale-purple shimashajin bells. This rare flower grows in Japan only on Fukue and Hirado, plus South Korea’s Jeju, and it is protected as a designated plant of Saikai National Park.
Osezaki’s striped cliffs preserve 22–17-million-year-old Goto Group sediments, laid down as Asian sand and mud in rivers and lakes. Parallel basalt dikes later cut the layers; this dike group is a Goto City natural monument.
First lit on 15 December 1879, Osezaki began with a first-order lens atop a Western-style iron tower. After wartime damage, the iron beacon gave way to the concrete lighthouse standing today.
In 2009, Osezaki’s light switched to solar power and remote operation. It still reaches ships about 22 km away—an isolated cliff-top beacon with a surprisingly modern power supply.
Local guides call Osezaki the place where sunset comes latest relative to Kyushu’s main island: Fukue lies farther west, with the sun dropping into the East China Sea.
